Movies -- A Recap -- Part III

We decided to temper all that outdoor excitement with a bit of a downer: The Accountant of Auschwitz.  It's a documentary about the eventual trial of Oskar Groning.  He was barely out of his teens when, as a member of the SS, he had the job of taking personal belongings from Jews who were brought to Auschwitz.

It was an interesting partner to We Were the Lucky Ones, which I just finished reading.  More history, less personal story, but definitely an opposing perspective on the events of 1944.


I didn't remember much about Sling Blade from when it came out, except really not understanding the clip of it that I saw when Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for an Academy Award.  It turns out, it's quite good.  It's a simple story with simple characters, but tells the touching if someone fantastic story of a developmentally delayed man released from a mental hospital where he had lived since he murdered his mother and her lover as a child.




For some reason, we had The Place Beyond the Pines on our Netflix list.  I had no idea why, no idea what it was about, but we decided to watch it recently.  It's an interesting good-guy-bad-guy story, one of those morally ambiguous story lines that leave you thinking about the situation someone finds himself in, the cascade of choices that led to that point, and the life that follows.

Beware of act three: the teenagers' accents are infuriating.  And from that point, it goes downhill.


Palm Trees in the Snow was a random Netflix pick.  It had a lot of potential, and it didn't entirely disappoint.  It didn't fully satisfy either.  When a young Spanish woman's father dies, she finds papers among his personal possessions that lead her on a quest to discover her family's history, tracing it all the way back to family's plantation in Africa and uncovering the stories that were never supposed to be revealed.