Happy Boxing Day, Rowling Readers, Potter-philes, and Serious Strikers!

It’s too lazy a day for heavy lifting and up-close reading, so let’s keep it light with another Ryan George ‘Pitch Meeting’ video, this one about the Hogwarts Saga film franchise.

For the individual Warner Brothers adaptations Pitch Meetings of each of the Potter novels’ eight films, see Harry Potter Movie Pitch Meetings: Warner Brothers Bought ‘Em All.

For the three Fantastic Beasts films, check out Every ‘Fantastic Beasts’ Pitch Meeting.

Tomorrow back to Pregnancy Traps and the hard core looks at Rowling-Galbraith work — or just an announcement about the Hallmarked Man publication date? I think you can find the rumored answer to match up with a note expressed here recently — but that would be telling. Stay tuned!

Ten days ago, Zone of Interest, a Holocaust film, was released in the United States. It’s one of those movies that gets serious ‘Best Picture’ talk at Academy Awards time. From the picture’s Wikipedia entry:

The Zone of Interest is a 2023 historical drama film written and directed by Jonathan Glazer, loosely based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Martin Amis. A co-production between the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland, the film centers on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife as they strive to build a dream life next to the concentration camp. It stars Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller in the lead roles.

 The Zone of Interest premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival on 19 May 2023 to critical acclaim, winning the Grand Prix and the FIPRESCI Prize. It was released in the United States on 15 December 2023, and will be released in the United Kingdom on 2 February 2024, by A24, and in Poland on 9 February 2024 by Gutek Film. It was named one of the top 5 international films of 2023 by the National Board of Review and was selected as the British entry for the Best International Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards, and was one of the 15 finalist films in the December shortlist.

If you’ve read the Amis book on which Zone is “loosely based,” I think you’ll shake your head in wonder: the plots of the two story versions share a scene and major characters — the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Commandant’s home just outside its walls and him and his family — but little of the action. The novel turns on a love triangle of sorts and involves a collaborating prisoner forced to choose between killing the woman in the dispute between two Nazis and the survival of his own wife; the movie doesn’t have a plot more engaging than the true-to-history assignment of the Commandant to Berlin and back to Auschwitz. “Loosely based,” though, may be exactly right because the two stories share the remarkably sharp message of the human capacity to be consumed with their individual lives in feigned ignorance of and real indifference to the madness taking place all around them.

The movie is making such a big splash because of the way it delivers its version of the message, a method impossible in a book. The writer and director filmed the movie with its bland plot-line — there are no scenes filmed within the operating Concentration Camp or characters trying to kill or save each other — but, post production, he added a sound track of all the noises coming from the machinery of mass murder just out of sight but not of hearing. The viewing audience, however, gets the full audio and is, as you must imagine, stunned beginning to end by the deliberate obliviousness of the story’s players in their relations with one another to the historical crimes against humanity, the scientific and systemic slaughter of more than a million people, taking place within easy earshot.

The trailer for the film can be watched via this link and the story of Glazer’s unique film-making choices can be read at How ‘The Zone of Interest’ Uses Our Ears Like No Other Film. It’s not currently showing in Oklahoma City but I hope to see the movie when it arrives, before or after next year’s Academy Awards. Zone of Interest  seems that rare film that communicates a simultaneously timely and timeless meaning, one that this medium is uniquely capable of delivering so powerfully.

After the jump, I share my thoughts in direct violation of the dictum not to talk about politics or religion over the holidays. Please stop here if you couldn’t be less interested in my ‘take’ on this film and why it is causing such a stir at Christmas time this year. No apologies will be offered to anyone scandalized by the contrarian opinions and traditional perspective which follows.

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