comment #1

Gordon27 says ...

"suggests that the Slumdog Millionaire team needn't worry too much."

Was anybody really worried that 'The Reader' had a single solitary chance at winning any Oscar beyond Best Actress?

If 'Slumdog' has anything to worry about, it would seem to be 'Milk'.

comment #2

Gordon27 says ...

That Slate article is pretty specious, especially this:

"And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer"

I would certainly argue that we're not meant to empathize with her, given that the movie goes out of its way to emphasize how unrepentant she is. I would say, though, that the movie attempts to humanize her, to the extent that every person, no matter how bad what they've done, is a human being. I don't think it fully succeeds in this, but the whole point seems to be that she genuinely *can't* understand her own crime.

"and intimates that "ordinary Germans" were ignorant of the extermination until after the war"

Whatever the author of that piece chooses to infer from the film is his own business; the film explicitly makes the point that Germans pretend that they were ignorant when everybody knew about the camps, and that these specific guards are only being singled out because somebody else wrote a book and got rich off of it. I mean, that's right there in the text of the movie.

I didn't even like "The Reader" a whole bunch (though it's much better than 'Button' and probably a little better than 'Frost/Nixon', though ultimately less satisfying), but that guy who wrote that seems to have pre-decided that it was going to be something before he watched it, and ignored the movie itself while formulating his opinion.

comment #3

Gordon27 says ...

He also criticizes the film based on his own flawed interpretation of a statement on Barnes and Noble dotcom regarding the book -- I would say it's an accurate description to say that Winslet's character is more ashamed of her illiteracy than her mass murder, inasmuch as she admits to more culpability for the murder than she herself has in order to hide the illiteracy. That doesn't actually translate to her being correct to be more ashamed; that's one of the many things that make her inhuman.

comment #4

Josh Massey says ...

I put $20 on The Reader to win - not that I expect it to, but it pays $800 if there's a shocker. And if there's a shocker, that will be it.

comment #5

Gordon27 says ...

I have no doubt it won't win, and even I'd be tempted at those odds.

comment #6

Phatang! says ...

Gordon: you're absolutely right. Not sure what movie Rosenbaum and his friend were watching, but he had an odd reaction. Who found that character at all redeeming? For me, the point is we WANT her to be sympathetic, but in fact she's horrid. She is, however, HUMANIZED, which I really think is the writer's objection. Rosenbaum apparently wants his Nazis with fangs, so they're easy to spot. Not actual people with actual bodies and actual desires and feelings.