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Neill Blomkamp is going back to Planet P—back to Bug City—to hunt for something no one’s ever seen before: a faithful adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Don’t get me wrong, I love Paul Verhoeven’s 1997 cut, not least because Verhoeven tried and failed to satirize the subject matter. He denounced Heinlein’s novel as a “very right-wing book,” and claims to only have read two chapters “because it was so boring.” The result was something perhaps even more Heinleinian than a sober adaptation and a spectacular piece of propaganda for the author, with one of the most memorable movie...

The director of Basic Instinct is speaking out after Sharon Stone, who played Catherine Tramell in the 1992 thriller, said she was tricked into taking her underwear off for the infamous crossed-legs scene. In her recently published memoir The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone, 63, alleged that a member of the movie's production told her to take her underwear off during the scene under the pretense that her private area wouldn't be visible on film. Speaking with Variety in an interview published Wednesday, director Paul Verhoeven said his "memory is radically different" from that of the actress. "That does not...

<p>In his upcoming biography of Jesus, "Basic Instinct" director Paul Verhoeven will say that Jesus was probably the son of Mary and a Roman soldier who raped her during the Jewish uprising in Galilee, according to the Hollywood Reporter.</p> <p>Verhoeven also claims that Christ was not betrayed by Judas Iscariot.</p>

Leading film-makers are courting controversy with plans for adaptations of provocative books about Jesus Christ that are likely to generate a backlash from traditional Christians. British producer David Heyman is developing a film based on Reza Aslan’s bestselling book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, while Paul Verhoeven, the Dutch director, has been working on an adaptation of his own book, Jesus of Nazareth, for five years. Aslan, a member of the American Academy of Religion, made headlines last year when a Fox News interviewer challenged his credentials, as a Muslim, to write an account of Jesus’s...

Paul Verhoeven is known for such films as “Basic Instinct,” in which a character portrayed by actress Sharon Stone uncrosses her legs and shockingly reveals her female privates, and “Showgirls,” about a stripper who aspires to be a Vegas showgirl. Given not only those films, but his entire body of work – “(e)xplicitly violent and/or sexual content ”are his trademarks, according to Wikipedia – there is hardly any filmmaker less worthy of making a picture about Jesus Christ. But that’s precisely what Verhoeven intends to do. In fact, the Hollywood trades reported this week that the Dutch filmmaker has managed...