Word: camp
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...their looming presence in our minds renders a movie like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas ludicrous. It concerns an eight-year-old boy named Bruno (Asa Butterfield) whose career soldier father (David Thewlis) is placed in command of a concentration camp early in the war. The child is unaware of the camp's function. He thinks it is some kind of farm. All he knows is that he has no friends and no worthwhile activities to divert him. He isn't even allowed to go to school; he and his sister are tutored at home by a Nazi functionary...
...written and directed by Mark Herman, requires everyone in it to remain unconscious to every clue - and there are many - about what is happening in the family's backyard. Even when the gas chambers are fired up, smoke blackening the sky and stench filling their nostrils, they insist the camp is just burning some old clothes. The largest silence is Shmuel's, who never forthrightly explains his desperate circumstances to Bruno. Maybe he doesn't want to shock his new friend. More likely his true imprisonment is in the desperate manipulations of this movie, its need to keep everyone...
...think I've seen - at least since equally offensive concentration camp fable, Life Is Beautiful - a movie so reliant on human stupidity to achieve its effect, so totally dishonest in its insistence on that quality (which it presents as innocence) to achieve its narrative goals. Bruno and Shmuel may be only eight years old, but that is well past the age of reason, and they are caught up in situation that would force anyone to acquire a shrewdness well in advance of their years. I don't know if a movie as simpleminded and emotionally shameless as this one definitively...
Even Colorado, where Kerry won a measly 13% of the white Evangelical vote in 2004, proved relatively fertile ground. The Obama camp reached out to moderate Evangelicals in Dobson's base of Colorado Springs, bringing in popular Christian author Donald Miller as a campaign surrogate. The result was a 29-point shift in the vote on Election Day for Obama. By contrast, in a state like Iowa, where the campaign had little to no religious outreach presence, the white Evangelical vote was unchanged...
...Hamas, the Islamic militants who control Gaza, struck back, lobbing mortars at the Israeli forces and wounding six soldiers. Circling Israeli drones and helicopters fired missiles killing six Hamas fighters, and Israeli forces pulled back, after blowing up the house at the edge of a teeming refugee camp from which the tunnel was secretly being dug. As usually happens after an Israeli attack in Gaza, militants inside the Palestinian enclave responded by firing a hail of rockets, 35 of which peppered towns and villages in southern Israel. Two women were wounded in the barrage, but most rockets fell aimlessly...