Posted on 03/09/2009 11:58:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We just got around to seeing "The Reader" this weekend (warning: plot spoilers below). I don't think I've ever seen a movie that I felt ruined my weekend. This was a first for me.
If only there were an Oscar for worst excuse for sex in a film, "The Reader" could have garnered the Oscar it deserved. As it was, Kate Winslet won the best actress award for her sympathetic potrayal of an Auschwitz camp guard in the film.
The first hour of the film is devoted to a graphic portrayal of the postwar affair between Winslet's character Hanna Schmitz and the teenage high school boy whom she makes her lover. Why the need to see Kate Winslet naked and simulating sex? I think it has something to do with the filmmakers' desire to create an irresistible box-office combination of pornography yoked with a high-minded view of the Holocaust.
Ron Rosenbaum dispenses justice of a sort in his condemnation of "The Reader." Rosenbaum rightly objects to the portrayal of an Auschwitz camp guard as an innocent victim of the Holocaust. Any decent person who understands what is going on would be disgusted by the film several times over.
One cause for disgust not mentioned by Rosenbaum is the contrast drawn between Hanna Schmitz and a surviving victim of her mass murder (leaving 300 Jews locked in a burning church). At the end of the film, Schmitz has served 20 years in a West German prison for her crime. She is about to be released, but chooses this moment to hang herself in her cell.
The filmmakers exercise great tact regarding the scene of Schmitz's death. They only show Winslet stacking up her books on the floor in order to hang herself. When it comes to depicting Winselt dying the filmmakers are far more reserved than when depicting Winslet naked. Such taste! This is art.
The scene cuts from Schmitz's shabby cell to a luxury apartment in the United States. Schmitz's now adult ex-lover delivers the money saved by Schmitz in prison to the survivor who testified against her at her trial. The stark contrast drawn by the film between the survivor living in luxury and the former Auschwitz guard living modestly in prison (teaching herself to read) represents a vicious fantasy that by itself captures the revolting animus of the film.
Hey, she wanted an Oscar.
That wasn't how it went.
She readily admitted she was one of six, and everything they did. She falsely accepted blame for the memo (and thus got life rather than 5 years) to conceal her illiteracy.
I need more visual evidence to determine how offended I should be.
How long before this gets to the dollar movie?
In real life there is no “bad” excuse for sex.
“The Oscar for worst excuse for sex in a film...”
My nomination goes to the gratutiuous and completely out of place bedroom scene in “Kindergarden Cop”
As with most of what Hollyweird sells -- junk that is too juvenile for adults and too graphic for children.
Ah, my wife at 19! God Bless Woman!
"I mean, I don't think we need another film about the Holocaust, do we? It's like, how many have there been? No, we get it, it was grim, move on. No, I'm doing this because I've noticed that if you do a film about the Holocaust, guaranteed an Oscar. I've been nominated four times. Never won. The whole world is going, 'Why hasn't Winslet won one?'... That's it. That's why I'm doing it. Schindler's bloody List. The Pianist. Oscars coming out of their arse."
--Kate Winslet, Extras
Yeah, the Best Actress Award goes to portayal of a pedophile and the Best Actor to the portrayal of a homosexual. Go figure.
It’s very simple, really. I think we all agree that between seeing Kate Winslet naked and seeing Kate Winslet dead...live naked Kate wins every time.
Kate has been doing naked on screen for a long, long time.
Kate was a heavy teenager and had trouble later on living up to the film industry's weight standards.
That she had an uphill battle and has been upfront about it makes her perhaps more admirable than other stars and starlets.
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