Sunday, August 5, 2012

Movie Review: Young Adult and Sarah's Key

I saw two movies this weekend, Young Adult and Sarah's Key.  They were both very good but kind of sad.

Charlize Theron is in Young Adult.  She is a fiction writer who writes a young adult series kind of like The Babysitters Club or something like that.  She thinks she's a really big deal because she moved from a small Minnesota lake town to Minneapolis.  She gets a birth announcement from her old high school boyfriend (he and his wife had a baby) and she is perturbed.  She goes back to her hometown to win him back because small town + marriage and family = boring.  She thinks of it as rescuing him.



Charlize Theron is so good in this movie.  She is gorgeous and funny, but you can tell her character is depressed.  She drinks a lot and she seems to be stuck at about 18 years old or something (The movie is called Young Adult, get it?).  In the movie we learn why and it's kind of sad.  It's a good movie.  I'd recommend it.

The other movie was Sarah's Key.



It's two stories that converge around an apartment in Paris.  The first story is about a family who live in the apartment in the 1940s.  They are Jewish and they are rounded up by French officials and brought to camps.  When the officials come, the mom is home alone with her two little kids.  The girl, Sarah, can tell how afraid her mother is of these officials, so she hides her brother in a concealed closet in the bedroom and locks it.  She keeps the key.  The mother and daughter are taken to a stadium with the father where they are kept for days.  Sarah is frantic because she made her little brother promise to stay in the closet until she came back.  She is desperate to get back to him.

The other story takes place in 2009.  An American ex-pat is about to move into the same apartment.  She is a journalist who is writing a story about the rounding up of the Jews in the 1940s.  She learns that her new apartment was once part of the Jewish section of town.  She is disturbed that her apartment may have been stolen from a Jewish family by her husband's family who have owned the apartment since the war.  She goes on a quest to find out what happened to the people who lived in it before her husband's family moved in.

Guess what?  This movie is sad.  In case you didn't know, WWII sucked.  Especially if you lived in Europe and especially if you were Jewish.  My father-in-law is reading The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich right now and the other day he told me, "Hitler was a jerk.  I mean, a REAL JERK."  And you know what?  It's true.  Hitler was a jerk.

Other than the movie being incredibly sad, it was very good.  If you don't mind getting depressed, I would recommend it.  

2 comments:

  1. Sad to say, I avoid sad movies and books. I either want to laugh til I cry or sit on the edge of my seat and bite my nails!

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  2. i loved both of those depressing as shit movies. made me appreciate my life a bit more...

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