Ok Ok, I was all emotional and all sold to the flick... And then I read this piece and, while I do agree it is mostly a nail-scratching melodrama of a flick, milking stereotypes and the o so ever pure childhood naivite, along with the blackest of black historical events of Humankind in a somewhat unscrupulous mannner, I disagree that it is vulgar and narrowminded... To me, it just... works... Might be because yours truly does have a weak spot for holocaust and WWII stories, and their emphasis on the importance of memory and remembrance, never forgetting those horrors (goosebumps just writing that, actually :P)... And for that matter, the last shot of BitSP is AWESOME. Just A-W-E-S-O-M-E. The lockerroom where Jews stripped down just before getting in the showers, with all those "striped pajamas" hanging all around the empty room, the camera ever so slowly zooming out from the door, almost still echoing with the shouts and the cries of the doomed men, women and children, and finally stopping with the door right in the middle of the frame, to proceed with the proverbial fade to black, but ever so slowly, making sure to leave that indelible mark both in our consciousness AND our collective psyche...
Sure, the flick does require a suspension of disbelief based on cinematic conventions, mostly because it IS a british studio film, and its Oscar contender most assuredly. Thus, everyone does speak with that brit actors accent bordering on pedantry... Sure, a couple of those money shots are cliches (the black smoke rising from the ovens... If I haven't seen this image a zillion times, I have NEVER seen it), but it still does work, especially because of that children's point of view... And the pacing of the whole thing is near pitch perfect, gambling on coming in hard and leaving us high'n dry very very quickly. All in all, I am not even sure the flick would not fall into a pathetic boredom fest of pathos were it not for that editing feat, actually...
It is still a very nice movie to catch...
Note (à la mediafilm 1 to 7, 1 being masterpiece, 7 being a bomb): ~4.3
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