WTF: Nazis on Christmas
Posted by Kevin Carr (kevin@filmschoolrejects.com) on December 24, 2008
When you think of Christmas, what comes to mind? Is it visions of sugar plums dancing in your head? Is it the thought of your favorite holiday movie being aired 57 times on television?
Apparently for Hollywood, Nazis come to mind when they think of Christmas.
What the fascist?
Why are the cineplexes filled with all these Nazis when the holidays are supposed to be a time of celebration and religious significance? I don’t recall this many Nazis invading the movie screens during Christmastime ever. It’s like the movie houses are Poland in 1939.
The highest profile Nazi movie in release on Christmas day is the sure-to-be-flop Valkyrie, starring the pathetically un-German-esque Tom Cruise. Granted, this film (and pretty much all the others) show the Nazis in a bad light, so we can be secure that Hollywood isn’t recruiting young boys for the Hitler-Jugend anytime soon.
But Nazis seem to be popular in 2008. In addition to Valkyrie, you have films like The Reader and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas in limited release, with Defiance coming over the barbed wire next week.
And to make things worse, it’s not just the award bait films that are doing it. For some inexplicable reason, Frank Miller figured it’d be cool to have Samuel L. Jackson strut around in jackboots during his mish-mash of a comic book film The Spirit.
It’s not that I have a problem with Nazis as the bad guys in the movies. They were some bad dudes, and they make the best bad guys in film. But seriously. Do we need to see this many swastikas on Christmas?
Chill out on the Nazi front, Hollywood. Even Steve Spielberg stepped away from them with the last Indiana Jones film… and he’s made more movies about the Nazis than the Nazis did during their propaganda push in World War II.
Anyway… Merry Christmas to all. Or as Hollywood might say: Frohe Weihnachten!
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