It's that time of year again when Hollywood trots out new holocast films. Seems this year they went with lite. Neither of these films is worth a lot of ink, so I'll do them together.
"Defiance"-is the true story of a group of wartime jews who choose to live in the forest rather than live and die in the ghettos. Daniel Craig is the brother who leads the forest tribe of civilians who just want to surive. He has a spilt with his brother(Liev Schrieber) who leads the warrior tribe and goes to fight with the russian underground.
It's not a bad film but not a good one. The beginning is very good, revenge fare, and the ending with the brothers reuniting is terrific, moving stuff. But all the forest, built- a-camp, survive the winter, is pretty long and trying to watch. it's also over an hour of boredom. There are sparks when Craig and Schriber are on screen together and one just wishes there was more of it.
Character: 28 main good, minor not developed.
Plot: 20 weak middle
Presentation: 26 Pretty forest, but one dimesional
Next up is The Reader, a film that deserves none of the notarity it's received. It's enough to make me question if Oscar buzz is a requirement for any film that remotely touches on the Holocast. That's a disservice to the great films that have mercilessly drilled down into the horror. And a disservice to the event itself by making it something territary to people's lives instead of central.
So, The Reader stars Kate Winslett as Hanna, a middle-aged nobody who seduces a fifteen year old boy and has a summer affair with him. The affair ends and they return to their other lives, until several years later when the boy is studying to be a lawyer. His professor takes his class to a war criminals trial where it comes out that Hanna was involved in an extermination camp and directly killed 300 souls.
The movie is a strutural mess, the first half of which would hold no one's attention if Winslett wasn't naked most of the time. Then there's the trial, then we skip forward twenty years when the boy is a man and Hanna's getting out of prison.
For all of the loaded material here, the movie never carries much of a punch. The diverse elements never really mix well enough. There's no real love story either. Winslett's performance, the only good thing in the film, is okay, I suppose, but never comes close to the powder keg she plays in "Revolutionary Road".
If these are the kind of "Holocast" films we're going to be subjected to, gutless, fragmented, beautiful made and acted, yet everything handled with glass hands, forget it.
Rating
Character : 27 Winslett is naked.
Plot : 16 Too all over the place
Presentation: 27 Europe is pretty and bleak at the same time.
