Something to watch tonight: Monday 22 April

The Reader (Daldry, 2009)

This week back in 2009, I reviewed The Reader for the Capital Times newspaper:

If you are on the look out for an intel­li­gent, ser­i­ous and impress­ively well-made drama that will stim­u­late and move you (and of course you are, or you wouldn’t be read­ing this) then The Reader will fit your bill per­fectly. The last of the big Oscar con­tenders to hit our shores, this is a ver­sion of the best-selling nov­el which put the German struggle to come to terms with the crimes of the Nazis centre stage. The adapt­a­tion (by British play­wright and screen­writer David Hare) also does this but some­thing else as well – it becomes a med­it­a­tion on all kinds of guilt and shame as well as the com­plex inter­ac­tion between the two.

In 1958, school­boy Michael Berg falls ill and is helped by a stranger (the extraordin­ary Kate Winslet). After his recov­ery, three months later, he returns to thank her and they begin an affair that lasts the final sum­mer of his child­hood. Between bouts of love­mak­ing she demands he read to her, telling her the stor­ies and plays he is study­ing at school. Several months later she dis­ap­pears, break­ing poor Michael’s heart, only to return to his life eight years later in a Berlin courtroom, on tri­al for war crimes.

Flawlessly acted (by Winslet, Ralph Fiennes as the adult Berg and new­comer David Kross as the cal­low youth) and dir­ec­ted with care­ful pre­ci­sion by Stephen Daldry, The Reader car­ries with it an intel­lec­tu­al weight that acts like a kind of amp­li­fi­er for the mater­i­al, rather than simply adding lay­ers of emo­tion. Terribly good.

Also fea­tured in that April 2009 review for Capital Times, the pir­ate radio com­edy The Boat That Rocked (“I loved it, des­pite its sloppy sen­ti­ment­al­ity and many flat patches”), live action animé reboot Dragonball Evolution (“balder­dash”) and The Rock in the Disney remake Race to Witch Mountain (“It rips along with good humour (and some sur­pris­ingly effect­ive schmaltz)”.

Where to watch The Reader

Aotearoa: Digital rent­al from Apple or Neon

Australia: Streaming on Stan or Starz

Canada & UK: Digital rent­al from Apple or Amazon

Ireland: Digital rent­al from Apple*

USA: Streaming on Britbox, or Kanopy

Further listening

Last Friday night on RNZ Nights with Emile Donovan, Emile did me the great kind­ness of quot­ing my own review back to me when I threatened to get too verb­ose about Origin. A real “I think what you are try­ing to say is …” moment.

Further reading

One of my loc­al cinemas – always very gen­er­ous to me per­son­ally so I won’t call them out by name – only pins up inter­na­tion­al film reviews on their noticeboard.

This is frus­trat­ing as those crit­ics are not auto­mat­ic­ally bet­ter than any­one here in New Zealand and you might think that an inde­pend­ent cinema would help pro­mote those of us who are act­ive in their neighbourhood.

More annoy­ing is their new habit of stick­ing big “Rotten Tomatoes Fresh” labels on movie posters. I over­heard a pat­ron there the oth­er day talk­ing about how they check RT before decid­ing what to watch and my heart sank a little bit.

Then I read this excel­lent (long) memori­al for Bryan VanCampen, film crit­ic for the tiny Ithaca Times in New York. It’s about how loc­al review­ers con­trib­ute to a domest­ic film cul­ture, some­thing I was always con­scious of at the Capital Times but it feels like we are fight­ing a los­ing battle now.

The homo­gen­isa­tion of opin­ion via RT and MetaCritic, the reduc­tion of cri­ti­cism to quot­able sound bites, the huge influ­ence of the glob­al media out­lets, and neg­at­ive domest­ic devel­op­ments like news­room redund­an­cies and web­site redesigns that hide arts con­tent (and no longer even offer a search facil­ity), all mean a reduc­tion in the discourse.

I’m very grate­ful for the out­lets that I still have, of course, and this news­let­ter is a great way to keep my pen­cil sharp, but this slow ‘death by a thou­sand cuts’ doesn’t serve audi­ences wherever they are.

*I’ve just noticed that there are sub­scribers from Ireland so it behooves me to add Irish options for where to find titles so they will feel included.