THE READER
or
I WAS A TEENAGE NAZI-FUCKER (spoilers)

THE READER is the story of Michael Berg, a rich and successful German lawyer who is tormented that he cannot be emotionally open with the beautiful women he has sex with because when he was a kid he got sick and puked and a lady took him home and later he went to thank her but he accidentally saw her bush so he started to spy on her and then he helped her shovel coal and she gave him a bath but he got a boner so she got naked and they started to have sex every day and she liked him to read books to her but then she abandoned him and later when he was a law student he saw her in a war crimes trial and it turned out she had been a Nazi concentration camp guard who locked 300 people in a church and let them burn to death because she didn’t want them to escape and she took the blame for writing the report on it but he realized she didn’t know how to read but he was too afraid to speak up about it and she got a life sentence which made him feel guilty so decades later he started to send her tapes of himself reading books and she used those to learn how to read and then they were gonna let her out early anyway and he was gonna help her get a job but she hung herself so he took his daughter to her grave and started to tell her about it. the end. Best picture nominee, too.

This movie has many things to signal that it is important: the Holocaust, based on a book, multiple time periods, a trial, Kate Winslet, Ralph Fiennes, the Weinstein Company logo, male nudity, female armpit hair, and about 45 minutes worth of tedious and gloomily shot scenes of an adult woman laying around naked with an actor portraying a 15 year old boy (David Kross – the German David Cross, I guess). But I have to admit, I could not figure out on my own what the movie was supposed to be saying or why somebody thought it was a story worth telling or watching. (more…)

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