“The Boy in The Striped Pajamas”- youll love it even if you are not into history or war.
What happens when a country finds itself to be ruled by a fanatic, a sick person? Not only its citizens are afraid to say no to follow the orders of the presidents, but a number of people die, a huge number of people die. 3 million Jews died in concentration camps in the time of Holocaust, 3 million people is a lot of people, just imagine, say, Jamaica to be erased from the map (and the population of Jamaica is 2.7 million- even less than 3 million). These are only Jews that were killed, there were millions of people of other nations destroyed.This war set a huge seal in the history of my country (I am Russian), my country still feels the traces of war in its demographics. There were at least one person taken away from an average Russian family by this war.
I love watching movies about World War the second, movies about concentration camps in particular. There were so many books written and films shot, not all of them are good, but some of them, once seen, will stay in your mind forever, and one of them is “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas”.
This move is about how Nazis son, going for a walk, comes to the wire of the concentration camp where his daddy burns people works. He meets another boy , same age, who (just like this boy) likes to play and is playing next to the wire. The two boys become friends, and the Jewish kid invites him over to play with him in the camp, gives him the striped pajamas so that he was not noticed, after what the kids are taken to one of the gas rooms and both die with hundreds of other people.
The scary part is that for the boys the pajamas is just some weird type of clothes that you have to wear all the time and the wire shows your territory, when for the grown-ups it is an indication of the fact that a person needs to be slaughtered just for being Jewish or Russian or gypsy (or for not having the Aryan blood) and the wire keeps them in their little cell. The boy could easily run away, he came outside the wire to play with his friend, but he sees his life there as something not dangerous at all, his little mind just does not know yet that people can be so cruel and can kill for nothing. The other boy sees this little Jewish boy as any other person to play with, he does not know what Jew means yet, he does not see the difference between them.
This kind of movies (historical drama, holocaust movie) is the most interesting to me. Watching these movies is just like being immersed into the past, sometimes horrible past thus letting all the events go through yourself and understanding the history a little bit more. Another movie, which is one of my favorites, is “The Pianist”. It tells us about a very talented Jewish pianist hiding in Nazi Germany from being taken to the concentration camp. Another movie which is on the list of the movies I have to watch is “The Schindlers List”.
Why hasn’t this become mainstream fashion yet? Photo Credit: Peter Jackson I New Line Cinema
By Sean Creamer
watching a film is a concept that always something that has eluded me. Why would someone sit and watch the adventures of others, when they could easily get up from the couch ridden with potato chip crumbs and soda stains, don a set of leather armor, take up the sword and create an adventure of their own (disclaimer: the writer does in fact do this from time to time).
While I do not watch movies often, I personally subscribe to a love of fantasy. Although this world that we live in is chock full of unexplored land, I feel that delving into a fantasy film such as The Lord of the Rings or the space cowboy television show Firefly grasp my adventurous spirit and will hold me upon the decrepit couch long enough to enjoy a good story and shovel popcorn into my gullet.
I love the idea of a coming of age and fantasy movies rarely fail to deliver what I want to see when someone comes of age. Sure, a protagonist can get the girl of his dreams after some romantic hijinks or someone can have a breakthrough with a disease, but real life sucks. This is stuff that kinda goes on everyday.
And honestly, who wants to see stuff that you can see by just looking through your kitchen window?
No. I require the slaying of beasts or human devils to prove that a character has indeed earned their stripes and has stepped fully into the darkness of the world created for them, whether for good or ill.
I can relate with the characters who find themselves thinking that they are destined for greatness, but the adventure has not yet presented itself to them. It is kind of how I feel about life, that everyone has an adventure waiting for them.
While not all fantasy characters may experience a beginning this humble, it is one that I am drawn to and find that it is one of the purist forms of character development.
Don’t get me wrong: I love to watch Seth Rogan and James Franco battle crooked cops and toke on the Pot Marijuana in Pineapple Express, it is always a trip, but nothing compares to the enchanting scenes and magical scores of The Fellowship of the Ring.
A viewer is simply whisked away to Hobbiton’s rolling pastures and homes under the hill. The splendid acting and effects of this movie create such a fantastic world that I cannot help but take up my grandfather’s old sword and challenge my brother to intense duels to the first blood of the thigh.
The Caucus Blog is a place where everyone can blog about the political news. Bloggers express their own thoughts about the latest events in politics.
Right after the Democratic National Convention, the wall was filled with a number of blog posts about this event. Bloggers were discussing mostly speeches of the ones who were on stage, the president Obama was discussed more than Romney here simply because it was a Democratic National Convention.
A lot of people get involved into reading (or commenting) the Caucus Blog through Facebook, twitter or Google plus. I think that blogging about political events is a very good idea. You already have pictures, text, and someones opinion, not only just a dry coverage of what happened where and when.
Multimedia features.
It is understandable that New York Times is a professional in presenting multimedia features for their stories. The images they are using are bright, some of them dont even need a description (they speak for themselves), and they are done by professionals. The pictures make the blog more vivid and interesting. The photo slideshow depict the brightest moments of the event, sometimes telling us even more of what happened than if they went together with the text.
