Both are posts taken off facebook
Film Review: Jojo Rabbit. May have spoilers. I was sure I was going to have mixed feelings about another film that rewrites history of the Holocaust. I didn’t, this was terrific! A well done film, very clever, well written, acted, directed and filmed. In this film Hitler shows up as an imaginary friend/delusion/hallucination to a young boy, Jojo, who’s a Hitler youth played by Roman Griffen Davis. His mother Rosie played by Scarlett Johannson (great job!) hides a Jewish Girl in her attic, Elsa played by Thomasin McKenzie. Taika Waititi plays Adolf Hitler, he also directed, produced and wrote the screenplay from the book Caging Skies. Also in the film, all great were: Rebel Wilson, Stephen Merchant, Alfie Allen, and Sam Rockwell. Special shout out to Rebel Wilson who is a favorite of mine. Scarlett and Rockwell turn up in a lot of films together as they are Bryce and Ron. The two songs in German are also done by Ron. Well done.
I went through the reviews and in part this sums up my initial concerns about the film, “On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 79% based on 244 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10. The website’s critics consensus reads: “Jojo Rabbit’s blend of irreverent humor and serious ideas definitely won’t be to everyone’s taste—but either way, this anti-hate satire is audacious to a fault.”[38] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 58 out of 100, based on 50 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.[39] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A” on an A+ to F scale, while those at PostTrak gave it an overall positive score of 96% and an 87% “definite recommend”.[36] wikipedia
I’m going to give the film a 10/10. This could be seen even in view of the upcoming memorial to Kristallnacht. If the reviews are uneven it’s because the film is complex and draws on every emotion. The film left me in tears.
Prequel to film review above though not related to film: During the last days of the war my father, Moise Borochowsky was taken from the camps where he had spent 3 1/2 years going from one to another, taken on a hundred mile death march and wound up in one of a dozen or so cattle cars somewhere in the mountains. While the prisoners, mostly Jews waited for three days in these mountains the order to kill them all was disobeyed by the man in charge of the train sparing the lives of these Jews with the exception of one car of slaves who carelessly ran out of the car in celebration of the end of the war and were mowed down a machine gunner who probably hadn’t heard the news that the war was over…or perhaps he just hated Jews…there seemed to be a lot of that going around at the time. The commander of the train had his life spared at the tribunals because of this act of decency.