Only one acquisition to report this morning: IFC Films’ purchase of U.S. rights to the Swedish Norwegian zombie Nazi flick Dead Snow. It’s typical for many buyers to head home after Wednesday, so yesterday’s single deal may be the last major pickup we hear about for awhile.

But there are a number of films still receiving buzz and interest, so remember to keep checking SpoutBlog’s Sundance Deals chart for any updates that may come in.

When it comes to lazy film clichés, Nazis are one step above slow-motion gunfights and barely underneath “the hero must get the girl and save the day.” It’s fitting that Nazis manage to encompass everything  from being the symbol for the Big, Bad Guy to perversion, occult beliefs and Holocaust Porn. Pop a swastika on someone and it becomes abundantly clear he’s the bad guy, whether it’s Samuel L. Jackson ripping through shoddy green screen in The Spirit or the lit-deviant prison guard Kate Winslet tackles in The Reader.

But sometimes, there are types of films that need to go “Full Nazi.” These select few films embrace the red, black and white because they’d have no other claim to fame otherwise. The eight films below have merit on their own, but it is through their use of the Nazi symbols that they remain on the cultural brain.

Apt Pupil

The effective start of Bryan Singer’s ode to the Reich involves Arthur Denker (Ian McKellen), a Nazi war criminal masquerading next door to Todd Bowen (Brad Renfro), who discovers his neighbor’s previous life. Being an obsessive sociopath in progress, young Todd demands Arthur (neé Kurt Dussander) regale him with tales of World War II and Nazism in general. He goes so far as taking a uniform from the attic and demands Arthur march for him. Pupil embodies the sadomasochistic nature that the fetish community places on the Nazis along with the concept that only scary, evil people ever want to learn about history. The duo develop a creepy grandparent/child vibe, as Arthur threatens to rat out Todd if his grades don’t improve, and both become encouraged to torture small animals and get some small pleasure out of it.

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We’ve known for months that absolutely nothing was wrong with Valkyrie, and now we’re just a few days away from watching this tiny independent feature storm the box office, redeem United Artists as a production entity and make Tom Cruise a respectable household name again.

Of course, there is the slight problem: he’s portraying Nazi Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, who may have disagreed with the party politics, but still rocked the swastika and straight salute.  How exactly did Cruise, one of the great symbols of the “Blockbuster Film” and American culture, wind up so perfectly suited as a crippled, over-zealous Nazi embroiled in conspiracy? We’ve excavated evidence from his filmography to track the transformation.

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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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“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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It seems the Scandinavians know something we don’t: the Nazis are coming back. There are a slew of delicious looking indie features coming out of Northern Europe, three of which share a common antagonist: Nazis. Why this sudden interest in a decades-old threat? What is it about the present day that makes fascism even scarier than usual?

Iron Sky, a Finnish film about Nazis escaping to the moon at the end of WWII and returning to destroy Earth in 2018, is currently in pre-production. The filmmakers did a terrific job promoting their last film, Star Wreck, online. For Iron Sky, they are involving fans in every step of the process, including funding. They’ve already produced a killer trailer (see above).

The English subtitled version of the trailer for Dead Snow hit the web last week (via Twitch). The film, produced in Norway, follows a group of young people in a secluded cabin, fighting for survival against a horde of zombie Nazis. It looks like classic horror based on a fresh and funny premise.

But why Nazis and why now?

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In the Telluride catalog, Slavoj Zizek calls The Great Sacrifice, “the supreme achievement of the Nazi melodrama.” Before the film’s screening at the festival Sunday morning, in Zizek’s inimitable way, he put the work of director Veit Harlan into context. “[Harlan was] one of the Big 3 of Nazi cinema. Number 1 was Leni Reifenstahl, number 2 was Douglas Sirk. These two, I think, they can be redeemed. [With] Leni, the impotence of the analysis starts with, you think she’s a bad girl…but it doesn’t work. Douglas Sirk, I have greater suspicions there. But Harlan, he is the ultimate, he can not be redeemed. But he is a breathtaking visual talent.” For perspective: later Zizek noted that when he “despises” someone or something, he uses words like “brilliant” or “breathtaking”; when he actually respects them, he says “they are not completely an idiot.”

Its maker and its message may have been despicable (and Zizek’s post film lecture, summarized below, left no doubt that Harlan made the film with Nazi ideals in mind), but there’s no question that The Great Sacrifice is a breathtakingly visual film.

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I know it’s quite an obvious choice to feature part of Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia today, but I’m doing it anyway. I’ve personally never had the patience to watch any of the actual Olympic Games, but I have no difficulty watching the few hours of beautifully abridged footage presented in this two part film. I truly wish that every year’s games could have been shot by Riefenstahl — preferably without any propaganda parts, of course. I might now be more familiar with the world’s greatest athletes had Olympia been a tradition in the vein of Apted’s Up series.

Fitting for today’s opening ceremony, I’ve included the prologue. Why can’t they show this every four years prior to the live coverage of the Games? Because of the nudity? Because an alleged Nazi made it? Well, they still employ the torch relay tradition, and that was also devised as part of the Nazi propaganda for the 1936 Berlin games. And the Olympic rings emblem was reintroduced for Nazi purposes, also. So …

As real-life Nazi war criminal Aribert Heim–aka Dr. Death, who allegedly kept relics from his human experiments in his office!–is being “chased” through Chile (as much as you can chase a 94 year old), I’m sure Tom Cruise or Jerry Bruckheimer are watching CNN right now while furiously thumb-typing their lawyers on Blackberries to option the story.

But I couldn’t help reminisce about what could be argued as the genesis of torture porn, Marathon Man (1976). Dustin Hoffman plays marathon runner Babe who, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest, unknowingly has a connection that is too close for comfort with a Nazi war criminal known as–prepare to wince–The Dentist, played by Lawrence Olivier. Of course, Babe has some chronic dental problems that the Nazi dentist exploits in the anus-clenching torture scene. And Babe’s long endurance skills are important to him shedding his pacifist self in the movie’s climax. But this was action before action movies became formulaic, and it has a healthy dose of moral queasiness about the virtue of revenge. And, unfortunately, if there’s a Dr. Death released in 2010, I have a feeling we’ll be much better served by watching Marathon Man.

Although, I hope they cast Dustin Hoffman as Dr. Death to give the finger to those Nazis.