I thought I’d give my ovaries a rest by seeing The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas tonight instead of Quantum of Solace for the third time.
- I saw the full trailer for Valkyrie last night and although everyone in the movie is apparently German, we hear a mixture of British and American (and possibly other) accents and so evidently they’re taking a post-modern approach with this. (I blame this type of thing on The Last Temptation of Christ, naturally.) So it occurred to me that maybe they were doing the same thing where everyone just got to keep their regular accents because as audiences we’re beyond needing bad German accents to set the scene. Wrong. Vera Farmiga, an American, had a British accent in this so evidently everyone was purposely British. WTF. I continue to think this is stupid. I don’t care if it’s a British production; if it was an American production, I’d be just as annoyed if they were speaking with American accents. I could go for bad stereotypical Canadian accents, though, that would have been fun.
- You would never guess, but this is a ninety-minute comedy paired with a three minute horror film.
- The comedy portion takes up the bulk of the film and is a direct result of some really clumsy handling of Bruno’s naivete. Bruno is the eight year-old protagonist whose high-ranking Nazi father moves the family from Berlin to an unnamed concentration camp because he’s gotten a sweet Nazi promotion. Bruno is pretty naive about the “farm” he can see from his window and about the young boy named Schmuel he meets on the other side of the fence at the “farm”. Now, I don’t blame the kid for being naive because I think I was a pretty naive kid and I’m not sure that I would have realised what was going on had I been a sheltered (and lied to) kid living next door to a concentration camp. I can’t blame Bruno for being so thick, especially when the things he does notice as being slightly off about the “farm” get explained away pretty quickly by the adults in his life that he trusts because he obviously trusts the adults in his life to make good decisions.
The problem is that in order to make Bruno seem really naive, they boil everything down to really flat stereotypes that are absolutely laughable. There’s no reason this movie should be funny and yet they do a pretty good job of making it pretty hilarious in parts. This is very, very wrong.
- Naturally, the horror movie part comes in the last three minutes when Bruno eventually gets himself killed. Schmuel’s father has gone “missing” from the camp and Bruno agrees to help him locate dear old dad, so he digs a trench under the camp fence and crawls inside. This is probably the only instance (fictional or otherwise) of a someone breaking into a concentration camp. Bruno and Schmuel run around looking for Schmuel’s dad and — surprise! — they can’t find him. Suddenly, a bunch of guards bust into the cabin the kids are in and start ushering everyone out to go on a fatal march to the local gas chamber. They’re forced to strip and are crammed into the chamber and you can guess the rest. I feel like I’ve seen a lot of Holocaust films that never actually show this part and so it was clearly very disturbing for the camera to be on the inside in those final moments. There are a couple of shots of guards pouring Zyklon B into the chamber and that was pretty fucking awful to watch.
Through this whole thing, of course, Bruno’s family is searching for him because they’re supposed to be moving to his aunt’s home in another town because a concentration camp is no place to raise children. Plus it starts to rain the second Bruno gets under the fence because, naturally, the sunny skies up until this point mirror Bruno’s disposition.
- Evidently this concentration camp is meant to be Auschwitz except it seems like the world’s tiniest camp ever, like some weekend Nazi hobbyist wanted to build his own camp in his backyard. Um, no.
- The only thing that wasn’t predictable about this movie was that Bruno’s twelve year-old sister, Gretel, didn’t make any trumped up rape charges against Kurt, the hot Nazi lieutenant she clearly wanted to do, like I thought she would after he was to predictably rebuff her advances because, clearly, she’s twelve.
- Why do they always put at least one hot Nazi in these movies? Why? It is so, so wrong. I feel like it’s a cheap way to make the audience understand an attraction to the Nazis by those in the party and those who surround them, but come on. Obviously in this movie Gretel’s adoration of Kurt played a huge part in her quick adoption of Nazi ideology and her plastering her bedroom walls with Nazi propaganda and Hitler fan posters, but still. Blargh.
- There’s precious little character development with the exception of Vera Farmiga’s character, who undergoes a traumatic transformation as she finally clues in about what’s going on at the camp, her husband’s involvement in that “history making”, and the effect Hitler-sponsored education is having on her children.
- The sandwich Bruno made at the end of the movie looked pretty tasty. It’s too bad he dropped it on the ground.
- We had a bit of an attack when Bruno went down to the cellar to look for his football and instead found piles of dolls. It didn’t occur to us that they belonged to Gretel — who was in the midst of making herself over from little girl to comely young Hitler Youth to better appeal to her S.S. crush — because whenever we see piles of belongings in Holocaust films, we obviously assume that they belonged to the camp inhabitants. We naturally expected Bruno to stumble into piles of suitcases, eyeglasses, and gold teeth next but that didn’t happen.
- Now that I think about it, there wasn’t a lot of Holocaust visual short hand in this.
- I love the IMDB forums and their members who never use the words they mean to:
Subject: This would never have taken place ( Spolior)
When Shmuel arrived at the concentration camp he would have gone straight to the gas chamber, hence never been able to meet Bruno. Any child under the age of 14 was too young to do hard labour so they were atomically sent to the gas chamber.How does one get “atomically” sent to a gas chamber, exactly?