The Reader(2008)- User Reviews

I hereby demand that the perpetrators of this film donate ALL of their profits to a "Survivors of the Holocaust" fund. This story is an insult to Jews and empathetic non-Jews alike. Here is the premise of this inexplicably Oscar winning piece of garbage: A 36 year old illiterate streetcar ticket puncher comes home one day to find a dorky 15 year old puking in her apartment buildings hallway. What else would she do be take him in, give him a bath, appear suddenly naked while handing him a towel, grab his erection, and proceed to have passionate sex with him for three months? To 'earn' continued sex, the boy has to read books to her ('first you read, then we screw'). Wait--it gets even worse. Much worse. You see the film's heroine used to be an SS Nazi guard in the concentration camps. She personally selected people to die. She refused to open the door of a church that was on fire, condeming 300 people to a horrible death. Although the boy doesn't discover this until 10 years later when he is a law student and she is finally put on trial, he still tries to understand her, and fails to accuse her for her despicable behavior. It's clear he is still quite attracted to her, and we can easily conjecture than had she not been put in prison for life (but her sentence is commuted after 20 years), he would have wanted to resume the, ahem,'love affair.' This film was sold to the viewing public as the 25 year old's conflict of conscience when he realizes what his young lady love had done. Bullcrap! Like her, he has no conscience. He just wants to get laid again. While on that subject, what 15 year old boy who has never been with a woman automatically performs in bed like a porn star? We all know better than that. For some reason the writer wants to make sure you know that this boy-man is quite the stud. Despite his gawky, smirky, thoughtless self satisfaction, the new girl in his high school class is immediately smitten (she just HAPPENS to sit next to him), as is the beautiful (and only) female in his law class ten years later--who we see him one again giving her the sexual time of her life. At film's opening we see the 52 year old creep bedding a twenty-something beauty who chastises him for having so many such non-emotional flings. What a guy. We are supposed to give him a pass because Ms. SS emotionally abused him as a teenager, which made him incapable of ever establishing a successful and truly caring emotional connection again. Poor Mr. Deutchland Hugh Hefner-lite. Meanwhile, the killing woman explains her activities this way. "I don't feel anything. What difference does it make? The dead are still dead." And at her trial she makes it clear: "It was my duty." Didn't anyone on this production take note that this was precisely the excuse the Nuremburg criminals used as their defense. That ridiculous excuse was THOROUGHLY discredited in those trials. It's over fifty years later, folks! Are you trying to resurrect a moral excuse for the killing of 6 million jews? DES-PIC-A-BLE! I'm not Jewish, but this travesty made ME want to puke, and then personally apologize to every survivor of the Holocaust, and the family members of those who perished in the cruelest way. If you have ever visited the camps (as I made a point of doing as one of the most important pilgrimages of my life) you can still film the victims crying out in horror and disbelief. Are we really supposed to believe that this woman guard is forgiven just because she learns to read in prison? Even her suicide the day before she is to be released has nothing to do with her sense of shame and responsibility. It's just that she can't face the world alone. Mixing Desire and Callous Mass Murder into one story is one of the worst things I've ever seen. If it were up to me, I would burn this damn film.