kate, do the decent thing

..and give back that Oscar you won for your performance in The Reader - you may be a six-time nominee, but that doesn't give you the right to win the most prestigious gong there is. She didn't really have much to do apart from take her clothes off and look as though she might have been an SS guard in a past life. As a cinematic experience it had so much going for it, with Germany's best actors forming the better part of the cast list. David Kross worked really well as the young Michael Berg, Bruno Ganz, who we last saw acting a deranged Hitler in Downfall, was excellent as the law lecturer, and Burghart Klaußner as the judge was a good turn. It ought to have had a great screenplay, adapted as it was from the novel of the same name by excellent German writer Bernhard Schlink. His Reader has great emotional depth while dealing sensitively with a difficult aspect of the German population's involvement in concentration camps.

I felt the film failed to be a true portrayal of how German's feel about the war, and how they react to it when it comes up in normal conversation or on the news. This is possibly because it used the 'Allo 'Allo technique of presenting foreign languages - in English, with a hammy German accent over the top, especially true in the case of Winslet. Just as the novel works better in German, I felt this film should have been filmed in its original language. It's on location in Berlin, Hamburg and Auschwitz, but for the sake of the two Brits Winslet and Fiennes, and presumably any British backers they had, the film has been made dreadful by distracting accents. There was no real sense of the collective "Schuldfrage", or question of guilt, often used to describe how Germans feel about the war. In the scenes made up entirely of German actors, such as in the university lecture theatre discussing the trial of the female SS guards, the impact was not as powerful.

As far as the 'reading' went however, I enjoyed hearing snippets of my favourite books being read aloud. Lady Chatterley's Lover, Tintin, T.S Eliot's Four Quartets, Huckleberry Finn, The Lady with the Little Dog... It did something for reading at least.