Incannerax
What a waste of my time!!!
Grimossfer
Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%
KnotStronger
This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.
rmanory
Because the movie is about children experiences in WW2, I compare it to French movies with a similar plot and I can tell without doubt that this is perhaps the most terrifying of all. I think that the rough unexpected ending is not justified by the events preceding it. The boys do train themselves to withstand hardship--this is a very interesting point in the movie--but there is no justification to the way they treat their father. They cannot blame him for their hardship, except perhaps the fact that he returns from the war as a broken person, hardly compared to the attentive and loving father he was before he was recruited. I think the movie is outstanding in many aspects. There is no good person and bad person in their life during the war, but that's no reason for their last action. Their separation is also hard to understand. All in all however, it is a masterpiece and deserves to be widely seen.
Harriet Deltubbo
This is a story about a place most people might not be able to conceive. It gives a picture of a backwards society that diminishes reality, where culminating incidents brought by suffered individuals show the truth. Twin siblings enduring the harshness of WWII in a village on the Hungarian border hedge their survival on studying and learning from the evil surrounding them. The characters in this film have a lot of depth and the realism with which they are portrayed by the actors is shocking at times. There is a real duality to all the characters. Unfairly dismissed by some as confusing, I have made the decision to award this film a rating of 7/10.
Azadeh Ta
The film is not only beautiful to watch but also very deep. It shows the cruelties of the war through the life of two twin brothers that are left to the care of a non forgiving grandmother during the war. They are so innocent and so good but that has to change because their new place is very cruel. People are cruel, environment is cruel and everything is even harsher because of the World War II. So they decide to overcome their weaknesses by fronting their fears. They are in the end successful in that. They become as cruel as the place they are left in and they refuse to leave their once detested grandmother to live with their loving mother. They even use their father's life to get to their own end. Overall a very moving, very real depiction of war time. The audience does not have to endure graphic violence scenes, but the violence is conveyed through the stern faces and determined behaviour of the two very young boys who are identical to look at, which makes it all the more memorable.
maurice yacowar
Janos Szasz's The Notebook is a fable about the destructive effects of hardening oneself against suffering and loss. Two 13-year-old twins are left with their brutal grandmother to be saved from WW II. They determine to harden themselves against pain, suffering and emotions. They survive the grandmother, the war, separation from their parents, while feeling themselves inseparable. Lying together asleep they breathe in unison as if the twins were indeed one person. Having deliberately forgotten their mother's loving words and burned her letter they can refuse her attempt to retrieve them. They grow so remote from their father that upon his return they coolly send him to a fatal mine. Climactically their hardening against the outside forces leads to their hardening against themselves. That's why the boys who have been inseparable for so long now split up. One crosses the border, the other stays behind, because they have hardened themselves to accept a loss they couldn't conceive of before.None of the characters have names. They are the twins, the grandmother/witch, the officer and his friend, the maid, etc. The lack of names coheres with the twins' abandonment of their humanity and identity.The title refers to the journal that the father, as he goes off to war, gives the boys to record their every detail of life. The assignment becomes a central part of the studies which their mother exhorted them to pursue but also encourages their self-awareness. The pages we see reveal their growing awareness of the world's harshness, especially the flip-book cartoons of repeated violence. The violence in their clinical collection and killing of insects and animals grows into their violence against the pretty maid who bathed with them but then slandered their friend, the Jewish shoemaker. With the former sexual initiation followed by the murder of the Jews the boys first come to terms with adult experience. They are not improved by it. For more see www.yacowar.blogspot.com.
