Director Justin Strawhand uses every known documentary trick in the book (as well as some tricks not in the book) to translate Edwin Black’s The War Against the Weak from 600-page doorstop of exhaustive, collaborative research into a smooth-moving filmed horror show that’s shocking, inventive, and seductive in the most disturbing sense imaginable.

Black’s basic thesis — and slogan on his book’s website — ominously portends that “it began on Long Island and ended at Auschwitz…and yet it never really stopped.” “It” is the scientific study of hereditary genetics, named “eugenics” by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, developed by American academic elitists to serve their inherently racist and discriminatory fear of the other, and eventually adopted by the Adolf Hitler, who, already obsessed with the notion of denerate peoples like Jews and Gypsies as a threat to Aryan supremacy, became obsessed with American eugenics literature whilst in prison in the 1920s, even writing “amateur anthropologist” Madison Grant a fan letter describing Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race as Hitler’s “bible.” Eugenics theory first resulted in questionable U.S. laws governing the civil rights of the blind, the epileptic, the feeble minded, and the generally lowborn, and ultimately the sterilization or euthanasia of the same. “Eventually,” Black writes, these same theories “led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.”

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With Danny Boyle’s DGA win over the weekend, Slumdog Millionaire achieved a near-impossible feat; it became even more favored to win the Oscar for Best Picture. Once thought to be an underdog, Slumdog has been pretty much unstoppable throughout the awards season, even picking up the undeserved top honor at the SAG Awards, and has never fallen from its position of frontrunner since it took the lead months ago. Yet last week, the internet was populated by talk of a Slumdog backlash, and for the first time in weeks, other Best Picture candidates were seriously being discussed as slightly plausible victors. The two titles considered most likely to be a threat to Boyle’s film are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Milk, with little concern for either Frost/Nixon or The Reader. However, while the former candidate is probably a sure thing to lose, the latter film should not yet be dismissed.

Before the Academy Award nominations were announced last month, The Reader wasn’t even thought to be a contender for any major category except Best Supporting Actress. Now, among its five nominations, it’s up for three higher-tiered Oscars, including Best Picture. So, we can’t rightly continue underestimating its potential. This isn’t to say that we are predicting The Reader to win Best Picture; Slumdog is still the safest bet for the top prize. But odds for The Reader do need to be adjusted, as its chances are a lot closer to, if not better than, secondary favorites Benjamin Button and Milk. Of course, as the it stands now, the film should be an appealing choice for any gamblers out there, because a surprise Best Picture win for The Reader would pay out big time. So, our immediate apologies to betters if the following seven factors have any influence on professional oddsmakers out there.
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For years Hollywood’s holiday season has been synonymous with Holocaust-themed films –– see this year’s entries The Reader, Defiance, Valkyrie, etc. – or not. But only after reviewing The New Stage Theatre Company’s titillating “Oh, Those Beautiful Weimar Girls!” did it hit me that revisiting the tragedy of WWII every winter makes no sense. For ‘tis the season to be jolly––not watch a Nazi! So I propose to start a new tradition: to stop equating Germany with SS boots and “Seig heil!” salutes every December, and instead go further back in time to when Deutschland was synonymous with sex, drugs, and decadent fun. Yes, this month let’s raise a toast to the high-spirited sleaze of the Weimar years; let’s celebrate the country that, before it gave the world the most notorious psychopath of the 20th century, birthed the first sexy, pro-dyke flick in 1931(!), Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform. And you can watch it on YouTube!

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David Hare has been writing for the theater since the 1970s, has served as Royal Dramatist to the Royal Court Theater in London, has been the Associate Director for the UK’s National Theater, is an accomplished director of both theater and film, and was knighted in 1998. That’s a pretty impressive resume on its own, but in the past few years he’s also become known for writing successful adaptations of novels.

In the past few years he’s adapted Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for film, and his latest is Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, which pairs him again with director Stephen Daldry. I spoke with Hare in Los Angeles, just after he’d (thankfully) recovered from losing his voice.

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“Who would have guessed that a book only 218 pages long could stir up so many emotions!” That quote, which graces the press notes for Stephen Daldry’s The Reader, is attributed to Oprah Winfrey, who selected the novel on which the film is based for her book club. As always, Oprah means no harm, but her influence makes such off-handed insipidity potentially dangerous. But relax –– in this case, she’s just reflecting the party line of the marketable middlebrow: Art must be Big in order to make you Feel. It’s as an ingrained assumption for one type of cultural arbiter and/or consumer, as knee-jerk suspicion of the tropes of Oscar bait is for another.

In the hands of Daldry, who has to this point never made a film for which he was not nominated for an Oscar, The Reader certainly looks like the kind of Big Art About Feelings worthy of an Oprah seal of approval … and/or a shudder from the cynic’s section. The economy that marked Bernard Schlink’s novel about moral impasses and emotional dysfunction amongst two generations Germans in the decades after the Holocaust goes untranslated. Daldry spoonfeeds feeling through score, he gives us long, indulgent sex scenes with an oft-naked Kate Winslet, years too young for the character she plays, draped in improbably golden light. And yet, within the wrappings of a film clearly, carefully calibrated for Academy favor by a distributor who couldn’t be in greater need of such recognition, The Reader’s unwillingness to clean up the ambiguities that sit at the core of its source surprises. Its classiness gives way to a refreshingly messy, even tawdry honesty about the role of morality in memory.

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Michele Ohayon’s Steal a Pencil For Me, like her previous documentary, Cowboy Del Amor, is a bittersweet paen to love born from startling circumstances. Whereas Cowboy delved into the surprisingly successful relationships arranged for a fee between American men and Mexican women, Pencil tells the story of two Dutch Jews from different social classes whose love blossomed in the most unlikely of places: a concentration camp

The poor, married Jaap meets young diamond heiress Ina at a dinner party; the two chat all night with the assumption that, due to Ina’s elevated social class and Jaap’s ball and chain, they’ll never meet again. Soon after, Jaap and badly matched wife Manja are deported to Westerbork, a detainment camp where Jews lived in relative comfort before being shipped off to the labor/death camps. Ina is sent to the same camp several months later. With his wife living in the same barracks, Jaap begins a tentative relationship with Ina, based on late night walks and furtive “necking.” When Manja finds out about the affair, she forbids it, and Ina and Jaap carry on by writing letters. Ina and Jaap are eventually sent to Bergen Belsen, the concentration camp where Anne Frank died, but are separated before the liberation. When they reunite in June of 1945, Jaap immediately moves to get a divorce so that they can marry. They’ve been together ever since.

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