Ben Crair at Slate writes that "One way to measure the approach of the new year is to count the Holocaust films at your local multiplex. The holidays arrive just as studios begin wooing academy members with serious dramas, and there's nothing more serious than genocide." This year has certainly filled theaters with a bumper crop of Nazi slash Holocaust movies, including Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, Stephen Daldry's The Reader, Edward Zwick's Defiance, Paul Schrader's Adam Resurrected, Good, which is based on C. P. Taylor's play and which opens in select cities today, and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was sent from Hell by the devil in lieu of a new STD. Crair breaks these kinds of films down into various categories, such as the ones hailing the courage of "Good Germans", such as Valkyrie (as well as earlier films such as The Desert Fox, starring James Mason as Rommel, Marlon Brando's Nazi of conscience in The Young Lions, and, of course, Schindler's List; tributes to the bravery of "Resistant Jews", such as the ones in Defiance, who have the good fortune to be led by someone played by the actor currently employed as James Bond, Daniel Craig; "Redemption Stories" about survivors trying to find their way back to normal life and human feeling, such as Adam Resurrected or the Sidney Lumet film The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, which yesterday was inducted into the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Crair also has a category called "The Fable", which may be just because he had to come up with something to call Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful, and Slate he couldn't have called it what I would have called it because Slate does not carry an "Adults Only" advisory.

The peculiar place that movies with this kind of subject matter occupy in our culture was thrown into sharp relief a few weeks ago when Los Angeles Times blogger Patrick Goldstein wrote a five-star stupid piece using New York Times critic Manohla Dargis's dismissive review of The Reader to complain that "in indie Hollywood that no one wants Manohla Dargis to review their movie, fearing that the outspoken critic will tear their film limb from limb. It’s the ultimate backhanded compliment, since what they really fear is Manohla’s persuasiveness — that she’ll write a review whose combination of vitriolic snarkiness and intellectual heft will actually persuade high-brow moviegoers to drop the film from their must-see list." Dargis, he charged, displays a "“lack of empathy for the challenge of tackling difficult material.” Unless you're a third-grade art teacher instead of an actual paid writer, it's a novel thing indeed to argue, or even imply, that someone should get points for "tackling difficult material;" it may even be that having seen too many movies that were praised by gutless reviewers for the filmmakers' intentions instead of what they'd managed to get on the screen may help to drive audiences away from seeing more movies with grand ambitions. Goldstein took a righteous pasting in some quarters for having chosen to use his space on-line to slip into his cap and bells, but it's doubtful that he would have had the Hooksexup to make such an argument at all--on behalf of a ridiculous movie based on a silly book, an expensive major release with attention-getting sex scenes and big stars and a Harvey Weinstein-approved promotional budget, directed by a man who got an undeservedly smooth ride for his previous ridiculous movie (The Hours) based on a silly novel and full of big stars and with a promotional campaign to match--if he hadn't been able, when the shock troops came around to punch some sense into him, been able to squeal, "It must be treated seriously! It's got Nazis in it!" The last word on how flimsy this line of attack is turns out not to be Life Is Beautiful or Hogan's Heroes but The Boy in Striped Pajamas, an atrocity for the whole family that will probably stand as the ultimate demonstration of how to turn historic tragedy into pap until Jerry Lewis kicks off and we all storm his house and watch The Day the Clown Cried. Until then, Lauren Wissot has a new holiday tradition in mind.

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