Belated Review: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas

This is a fictional Holocaust film, taking a very real, alarming subject and making a children's story out of it. Considering the sensitive subject matter, I thought it was well done.

It stars David Thewlis (Harry Potter) as a German soldier whose son befriends a boy in a concentration camp. The plot requires you to have to suspend reality, since there are some scenes that just wouldn't make sense otherwise.  Based on a children's book, the writers of both the book and the film called it a "Fable", but in the end this misled the audience and caused some negative reviews.

I cried of course. I always do, but I did think it was a good film so long as you ignored a couple of obvious flaws.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TV Detour - Midsomer Murders: The Decline and Fall of Ben Jones

Growing up watching TV most of my life, I've often noticed and pondered why producers and writers do things to characters that are inconsistant, thinking that audiences won't notice. Many times I've seen shows change the background of a character in such an obvious way that viewers notice.  And yet in this day and age of DVDs, DVRs, computers, and any other technology in which we can rewatch episodes (even reruns that were in place as far back as the 1970's), producers and writers forget this aspect and assume the audience won't notice for the sake of entertainment. News flash:  We do notice.  We notice all the time and we comment and critique it in message boards all over the internet. I want to talk about one such instance that's been becoming more and more obvious recently.  And this involves a regular character named Ben Jones who is in the British murder mystery called Midsomer Murders. For those of you who don't know Midsomer Murders is a show
Read more

Film Review: Tied to a Chair

Tied to a Chair is one of those films that makes me sit back and wonder whether it might have been better served if the writer/director had given one of his roles to someone else.  A low budget film that reveals its inadequacies in its editing and mish mash of a storyline. The film has essentially three plots revolving around one character who is essentially the amalgam of three.  The Naomi we meet from the outset is a ditzy British wife who can't cook nor do anything right.  When her husband asks her what she wants to do with her life, she reveals that she threw her dreams out the window when she married him.  She wanted to be an actress. So she ups and leaves her staid life in Britain and heads off to Cannes, and this is where plot two begins.  She no longer has the British accent and instead she's an American, desperately seeking the role of a lifetime. Her quest eventually leads her to New York, her hometown, where she gets embroiled in some criminal activity.  And th
Read more

Belated Positive Reviews

Here's a list of films I recommend seeing: Girl Rising - documentary about the importance of education for girls in poorer countries and how girls give back to their communities The Iceman - based on the life of mob hitman Richard Kuklinski.  It was a compelling film with some minor plot holes, but still captured my interest. Attack - a film by a Lebanese director about a Palestinian man who is a successful doctor in Israel.  Everything is going great until he finds out that his wife was a suicide bomber. Reluctant Fundamentalist - another terrorist film, only this one is about a man who is accused of being the mastermind of a terror cell, but he insists he's an innocent victim.  Is he telling the truth? Kon Tiki - the true story of a group of men who (in 1947) set out to prove whether a balsa wood raft made it across the pacific in ancient times.  It well done, and I loved how they filmed it in English as well as in Dutch. Disconnect - Some people didn't like
Read more