Just bought this movie and watched it last night... eesh! its kind of a tough one to sit through and watch.
anyone else watched it, or read the book?

http://www.boyinthestripedpajamas.com/#/home


and yes i know it is a work of fiction.

I don't watch sad movies. The synopsis on that site is more like the entire bloody script though.

I like when a movie manages to bring me to tears, even better if it challenges me to think, question things, or offers a perspective that I never considered before.

I loved the book. Read it in about 2 hours flat.

I could talk about it here, but there's no way to do so without spoiling it. So I won't.

once i take a moment to get past the british actors with british accents playing germans it's a good movie

but i do get tired of seeing a german uniform and hearing a british accent

Yeah.. kind of like the Russian soldiers in Enemy at the Gates. That annoyed the ****ing hell out of me.

I haven't read the book, but I saw the movie back when it was in theatres.


But I hated it. They make a tragedy out of one little boy getting killed by accident while the atrocities of the Holocaust are happening around him. Maybe it's just me but it seemed like misplaced priorities. If you're crying at the end of the movie it's probably about the story of the imaginative little boy dying, while the millions of other people dying simultaneously are like an emotional afterthought. I was honestly disturbed after seeing this.


It also bugged me that this movie came out so closely before The Reader, another "Holocaust Movie," effectively stealing box office sales that in my opinion belonged to the much more thought-provoking Kate Winslet movie.

im reading war and peace, a much more manly book

There's a bit near the end as the boy is about to be gassed where they really turn up the angry dissonant violin sounds kinda like "Threnody for the victims of Hiroshima" which made most of the girls in the theatre start to cry. When the soldier with a gas mask poured in the granules there were shrieks around the theatre and pretty much everyone was bawling.

I haven't seen the film, but in the book I there's plenty of ways of looking at it - (1) Is this punishment for Hess? (2) Is it actually a kindness for Bruno to die happily alongside his friend? Do you think he would have been persecuted for the things his father did had he lived? Would people have seen that as fair? (3) Is the ending supposed to show how awful the holocaust was EVEN to those participating in it? Doesn't that show how much WORSE it would be for the innocent? I sort of think that does the opposite of trivialise it.


Maybe the film picks one and runs with it as an agenda, but the book is pretty open on laying out what happens and letting you ponder on it yourself.

i think it actually humanizes the people of nazi germany, but probably not in the way that you are thinking.

i have not read the book, but the movie at least puts you in the unusual and really quite uncomfortable position of having to accept that the nazis are in fact human beings too, with lives and families of their own. i have never seen a movie before that depicts nazi germany as anything other that a drab terrifying place full of soulless SS soldiers.

i have seen a lot of criticism that this trivializes the atrocities of the holocaust, but i dont think it does. it forces you to deal with the fact that it was not "soulless monsters" who perpetrated these horrible acts. it was actually real living breathing human beings who inflicted so much pain and suffering and senseless death on other human beings. and this server to make those atrocities just that much worse.... i dont know if i actually needed spoiler tags for this but oh well.