Posted on 02/15/2009 12:40:40 PM PST by EveningStar
Kate Winslet's chances of Oscar glory are being hit by an orchestrated campaign to dismiss her film The Reader as an apologia for Nazi Germany.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
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That movie sucked. Shoulda called it The Breader.
And the winner of Best Picture . . . MILK!
Take it to the bank.
Or, The Pedophile. If the roles were reversed, every woman's group in the world would be calling for the banning of the movie. The first hour of the movie is nothing but soft-core pedophilia pornography.
My wife and I went to see knowing absolutely nothing about it other than it's an Oscar contender. We were both shocked - and we are by no means prudes. It's very, very racy.
Especially when you just made a terrible film, and haven't done much since Titannic.
Maybe she just wants to be a little bit “controversial.”
Film critics had previously suggested that the film was an example of "Nazi porn" for its sympathetic treatment of Ms Winslet's character, an illiterate war criminal who locks 300 Jewish women in a burning church, becomes an Auschwitz guard and then seeks redemption by learning to read while on trial after the war.
Whether there is a deity that dispenses redemption in an afterlife, I don't know (and don't find likely), but it is quite certain that there are some things that people do that places them beyond redemption in this life. Kill 300 Jewish women and find redemption in learning to read? Complete and utter rubbish.
It’s a secular attempt to equate literacy with morality.
I haven’t seen it or read whatever book it was based on. However, I happened to read a truly awful but very popular (among the critics) book called the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. It was a stupid book that implied that learning to like “great literature” (thanks to a local leftist bluestocking) converted Guernsey farmers into members of the Resistance in WWII.
Of course, nothing of the sort took place. Either you had moral standards at the beginning - and suffered the penalties - or you didn’t have them and just went along with Hitler, regardless of whether you just knew how to read or were among the most cultivated people in Germany, which described many of Hitler’s followers.
Our “intellectuals” are out there right now, fawning over our own Hitler, President Bambi, and years hence people will be asking what made them do this. But literacy has nothing to do with morality.
Loved the novel. Have no intention of seeing the movie. The novel was NOT ‘racy’ at all. I loved the twist ending. Didn’t even see it coming.
Now THAT, IMHO is a good tale told.
“The Reader (Der Vorleser) is an award-winning novel by German law professor and judge Bernhard Schlink. It was published in Germany in 1995 and in the United States (translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway) in 1997. It deals with the difficulties of subsequent generations to comprehend the Holocaust; specifically, whether a sense of its origins and magnitude can be adequately conveyed solely through written and oral media. This question is increasingly at the center of Holocaust literature in the late 20th and early 21st century, as the victims and witnesses of the Holocaust die and its living memory begins to fade.
Schlink’s book was well received in his native country, and also in the United States, winning several awards. The novel was a departure from Schlink’s usual detective novels. It became the first German novel to top the New York Times bestseller list, and US television presenter Oprah Winfrey made it a selection of her book club. It has been translated into 37 languages and been included in the curricula of college-level courses in Holocaust literature.”
P.S. P*ss on Oprah. Many people ‘found’ this book before she did. *Rolleyes*
Were you really? This is Hollywood we're talking about.
What does that even MEAN? Is the breader the person who puts the secret-recipe herbs and spices on the chicken before its fried?
I know. I don’t know why we keep wasting our money on movies. I feel like the kid who keeps putting his wet finger in the outlet.
It’s the same double standard that allows for all those “Guilty/Not Guilty” threads here about female teachers having sex with male underage pupils.
Even though it was co-financed by the Weinstien Co. it was more of a European film in tone and content. It’s also pretty bad.
Living with people who may have done or supported unforgiveable things certainly describes the situation of a lot of Germans of Schlink's generation were with respect to their parents and relatives.
I can't say whether the novel was was bad or good or laudable or contemptible, but it did work purely as a story.
You are spot on, 100 percent. A former lib friend of mine (an educated person - a veterinarian) gave it to me because her book discussion was reading it. After I finished she asked what I thought.
I said it was about the banality of evil. That the characters were too lazy, to full of ennui to make a choice to turn from evil.
She gave me a cow-new fence look and said “I thought it was about what happens when people don’t read”.
AS IF NAZI GERMANY WAS FULL OF ILLITERATES!!!
My respect for her nosedived at that minute.
Bet Angelina Jolie is behind this. :)
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