Has the use of Nazis in movies reached the point of being pornographic? While some observers might say that line was crossed long ago, others may find that conclusive proof arrives in Brian Percival s The Book Thief, based on an international bestseller that
The New York Times jibed as Harry Potter and the Holocaust. Here, of course, the kind of pornography that s meant isn t erotic (there are only coy glimmers of that) but sentimental – historic horror enlisted in the cause of facile fantasy.
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If you go to a bookstore looking for Markus Zusak s novel, the movie s source, you re likely be directed to the Young Adult or Teen Fiction sections, which explains a lot about the movie s appeal, and lack thereof. Like a kid-friendly mulch of elements cribbed from The Diary of Anne Frank and Slaughterhouse-Five, the film conceivably could play well to an audience of 12-year-olds and their grandparents. Other adults, though, are more apt to find the proceedings an o