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When it comes to Oscar bait All quiet on the western front It has everything: sparkling, cacophonous effects! Serious sepia-and-blue color correction! The amazing Daniel Bruhl! Two hours and 27 minutes of endless grief! And it worked! Of course it worked. American media not only adapted director Edward Berger’s (his third to date) adaptation of Eric Maria Remarque’s influential 1929 novel; All silence It has now received nine Oscar nominations, including a best picture nod for a German-language film.

So with all this international uproar, you might think that the Germans would finally be surprised by something visible, which was originally called the first German film production in history. Im Westen nichts Neues. To quote a movie that probably should have gotten nine Oscar nominations instead: Nope. Instead, in all the culture pages of the respected German press, Burger instead of free wheel translation of every German book Shulkind He knows that it is not only in the heart He was shocked. To name a few random examples – machine-gunned, gassed, grenaded, beaten, shot, tank-crushed, burned, suspended from a tree like a headless, legless furnace – and finally stabbed right into a forgotten hole and left to drag itself for minutes into a self-inflicted carnage.

do you know? I’m Team Deutschland on this one. They are correct. They are right to raise the issue of distorting Remarque’s timeless narrative into an essentially brutal picaresque, high-budget affair. The Black Forest Chainsaw Massacre. The usual thrills without any of the horror genre. And yes, I get it: the movie is invisibly horrible, you see, because otherwise we might think that trench warfare was dope as hell.. Thank you for putting me through this mindset that no one has had since 1916! I need my two hours and siebenundzwanzig minute go back.

But perhaps it’s absurd for us as Americans to reject it. All silence As anything but a very important sad cinema experience that should be mixed Schindler’s List And Apocalypse now A morally inexorable anti-war pantheon. So, I say we’ll just let the Germans deal with us the way they can.

It wasn’t just He was shocked. He’s been machine-gunned, gassed, hand-grenadeed, bayoneted, shelled, tanked, blown up and blocked like a headless, legless furnace. a tree

Take it SchlammschlachtFor example, ie mud blasting Or Mud fightAnd it ends with a German word War which one as well Provocatively becomes the root word. Slaughter. Schlammschlacht, itself, is the title of Hubert Wetzel’s satirical review in the venerable Süddeutsche Zeitung , which describes the climate in which much of the film’s carnage takes place, and perhaps the filmmakers’ literary treasure trove. Indeed, Wetzel takes a wonderful swipe at the film’s Grand Guinol style—“He who does not yet know, but wants to, may learn from seeing. All quiet on the western front As there were many, lot of Different Ways to Kill and Die in the First World War” – the main focus of the ire is Berger’s disregard for source material. And while the most sympathetic one-liner is appreciated in The Guardian – “There’s no book so good you can’t make a bad movie out of it” – Berger read the novel. Süddeutsche pages out. He argued that the film had little in common with the source material, “if the characters didn’t have the same names as the names in the book… Indeed, if an American director had cut Remarque’s book in this way to present it, especially in German culture, A shriek of a sector would have been powerful. KriegskitschOr War shock.

“There are no anti-war films,” wrote Andreas Kilb in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Instead, he says, “There are war movies that work at the height of their craft and others that don’t. If you think for a second All silence He was in a group Ins, Kilb introduces us to another fascinating compound to describe the depths of hatred. The issue, in fact, is the right kind of didactic pandering that American audiences slurp like a perfectly crisp pilsner. “Every viewer understands that I. Weston …It’s not just a feature film, it’s a piece of history,” Kilb explains. “Berger clocked in at half an hour. Schulfernsehen between action sequences, and adjusted the time frame of Remarque’s novel accordingly. I left the bite Schulfernsehen Since it has no English equivalent that is not translated here; It translates directly to “school television,” ie, the old-fashioned tube TV your history teacher turns on when you’re too hungry to give pop quizzes.

The “television” in question is what Berger calls Kilb, if not something he shoehorned into the film. DauerbeschussOr Constant gunfire, unimaginably gruesome ways to injure and/or kill. Choosing A is difficult. lovable, But I guess, the pretend protagonist, Paul Baumer (newcomer Felix Kammer, doing a wonderful job in a script that calls for mostly screams and death screams) watches one of his schoolmates try to surrender to the French. – only to be engulfed in flames at close range before finally firing. After all, why not give the audience a break from the blood and guts by going out? in The famous sites where Baumer goes on vacation and struggles to live in decent society again after what he’s seen and done? Instead, why introduce a whole new cast of characters, including beautiful, wine-drinking, elegant train-riding, bloodthirsty generals who spend the film sitting in his house twirling his beard? Even on the big screen, Kilb concludes. All silence It has the effect of “The Rescued Minions,” which is lucky to live as a footnote in war-film history.

Of course, it’s not much of a surprise that Germans are critical of something. They are their favorite country pastime. But the exorcism of All silence It’s in a class of its own. why? One reason is that Remarque’s novel is sacred literary ground. It remains to this day of German world war fiction – or, as Kilb points out, even of European.

This is not only because of the obscenity and futility of sending an entire younger generation to die on behalf of a crumbling empire. It is also a reason All silenceA special place in the German consciousness is a relationship with the First World War that is better than anyone else’s. ASilence It was a different story. no i don’t Written by the victors, it was banned when the Nazis came to power to alleviate and capitalize on the complex pain experienced by the losers of the Great War. The flat result of that, led to another world war, and a great atrocity that Germany would never forget, no matter how much good she did in the intervening centuries.

The war to end all wars is a minefield for the Germans, and the tabloid Bild has rightly called it out for hijacking its most sacred text. Oscar-Gilhet (or “Stress for the Oscars”) It’s just unsatisfactory in the way that Germans find most things unsatisfactory. It’s so bad, even they don’t always have words for how bad it is it is.



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