Product Details
ASIN : 6303238734
Customers who bought this goods also bought.
Customer Reviews
On Exploitation (2004-03-22)  I've thought very hard about this movie after reading these reviews. I couldn't, and no matter how hard I try, can't distinguish the soldier's behaviour towards the boy from pure self-gratification - an exercise in narcissism, projected from 1st person to 3rd. The boy's regard for the soldier, I suspect would be entirely familiar to any boy who ever had a crush on an adult. but Love? I found it a thought provoking movie, because it used the cinematic conventions of a love story to tell a story about neediness. Sure, neediness is necessary to love, but sufficient? Hardly. I don't have a problem with a movie portraying sexual exploitation, but felt uneasy that the treatment here skirted perilously close to sanctification and propagandisation. It was certainly not 'portrayal' in any way I could make sense of. It has an uneasy resonance, for me, with a strong tendency in the community of men who exploit boys: they mistake the undoubted readiness of certain boys to form attachments, and their curiosity about sexual development, for love and/or sexual desire. I believe this impression is largely formed and reinforced by powerful expressions, like this movie. The problem is that such expressions almost certainly represent the wishful thinking of adults, rather than the authentic experience of kids.Even when the story is autobiographical, as I believe this to be*, it makes sense to me that the dishonesty could represent a sexualised variation on the self-replicating damage we see in schools and military institutions, where each incoming group "grows up" from being exploited and abused to perpetrate the same on the next intake. There's some sort of "empathy bypass" which seems to be inherent to the mechanism. *From reading the review of the book on which the film is based, the film has definitely been sanitised and perhaps crosses the line into fiction : in the book, the soldier forces sex with the kid, and his general behaviour towards him is even less consistent with love than is depicted in the film. I didn't know this when I wrote the preceding, and I somewhat sickened to reflect that the movie's promos and reviews ever led me to believe this was a film which might uplift me. The whole thing starts to feel like a triumph of romanticism over honesty, perhaps in the tradition of the "Olympia" films of Leni Riefenstahl, where the beautiful bodies and movement of athletes, and the considerable arsenal of artful cinematography, were conscripted in the glorious service of something horrible about to engulf Europe. I don't require my movies to condemn. In fact, I prefer them not to make moral judgements of any sort. It disturbs me, however, when they use misleading packaging to inveigle me into taking an interest, and then once I'm inside, use an essentially dishonest "insemination by imagery" process to surreptitiously advance a moral judgement - in favour - of the frankly indefensible. I defend your right to see this movie and make your own judgement, but I'm glad I can exercise my right to warn you about it.
Shattered Realities (2004-01-19)  'For A Lost Soldier' is one film which I have watched several times! It deals with a volatile topic, the story of a very young boy who finds love in the arms of a young Canadian soldier in World War II. Since the story is based on an autobiographical book, it is not the whimsy of a script writer but rather a glimpse into one man's childhood memories. The director took some liberties with the book, both in the introduction and again at the end, but otherwise stayed fairly true to the story. The movie challenges one's ideas regarding consensual sexual relationships which involve an adult and a minor. If anyone was seduced in the film, it was the soldier. The boy is in control and very aware of what it is that he wants from the soldier at all times. The event happened during the liberation of Holland and the liberation theme is tied closely to the young boy's own special liberation. The film also gives a vastly different view of life in Holland under German occupation. While 'The Hiding Place' portrays the horrors of Nazi power in a large city, this film shows what life was like in a remote village. The boy's ration card, so carefully guarded at home, is not even recognized by his 'adoptive' family. They appear to eat well and the village is only guarded by two German soldiers. The soldiers are so bored, they attend the local church service on Sundays, even though the minister is raining down hellfire and brimstone on the German forces in his sermons. One movie with two new concepts to explore, make the film a basic to any good collection.
Appealing only to those who actively seek such media (2004-01-05) The ostensibly "tender" portrayal of a 12-year-old boy's (Jeroem) sexual relationship with a Canadian soldier (Walt) in World War II. Apart from barely developing the kid as a believable character, there's hardly any redeeming quality to Walt. The man is openly a predator, using candy and promises of adventure to seduce his way into Jeroem's pants. There's only one real "sex" scene between the two, and the director handles it with as much taste and class as one can handle a grown man deflowing a preteen. In a scene where Jeroem's adoptive father confronts Walt about what he knows is going on, the man wilts under the fact that he owes his freedom partly to the Canadian army's driving Nazis out of their land, and his resolve crumbles. All in all, it's a pretty bland and full of half-hearted narrative excuses. I will give the film one kudo, tho: they didn't fall back on the cliché of abusive father-figure driving the boy into the pedophile's "loving" arms.
I'm Conflicted (2003-11-18)  Oh, my. What to say about this movie? It is, after all, about a young man having sex with a 12-year-old boy. First, the easy part . . . . The movie is well-crafted, structured around flashback, a deft mix of subtitled Dutch and English in reflection of the idiosyncratic communication that evolves between the main characters, and beautifully filmed in the soft light of northern Europe. As a piece of cinematic craftmanship, I'd give it 4 stars. But then there's the story itself. Can sexual relations between an adult and a child ever be excused by love or circumstances? Before this movie, the answer for me was a resounding no. After this movie, I simply don't know. The man here is not a sexual predator in that he is not attracted to the boy by virtue of his youth. Instead, he is a gay man doubly isolated by his sexual orientation and by being on foreign ground at the end of a world-shattering war. And, coming across a gay boy likewise isolated from his home at the end of the same war, a bond is forged that did not have sex as its initial aim and came to include sex only after love was so deeply established as to have rendered age irrelevant. Or did it? After all, the soldier is first attracted to the boy by his looks, not by anything he knew about the boy or his circumstances. And can age ever be irrelevant to sex involving minors? Do 12-year-olds ever know enough of themselves, their world, and its risks to be informed participants? If nothing else, this movie accomplishes something by making the question tenable. But does it, in the end, make this love affair all right? I simply don't know. This movie stands up as a thought-provoking film. It should not, however, be read as an unambiguous justification for adult/child sex. Since it, however, implies more than presents the ambiguities and could leave some thinking they've just watched an argument that child sex taboos are nothing more than unwarranted modern western uptightness, I discount it to 3 stars.
Nice but overrated (2003-10-22) There's nothing wrong with this movie in terms of cinematics, acting, directing, and quality of writing. It is sincere, character-driven and real. A caveat: To appreciate it at all you have to put aside the conviction that a relationship between a man and a boy is always wrong. Those things said, there is nothing particularly excellent about this movie. It is touching, nostalgic, and truthful, but it is none of these things to the point of truly affecting your heart. Part of the reason is that it's too short, another part is that the ambiance (editing/music/so forth) are not very well done, and another part may be simply that I had read so many extremely complimentary reviews that my expectations were just too high. It's a nice movie... but don't expect a masterpiece.
Look for similar items by category
Related Link
Powered by Amazon Web Services + Amazon Associates.
|
![]](http://resource.hanamoku.com/img/hanamoku_ca/00bar_top_right.gif){kind=small}
![]](http://resource.hanamoku.com/img/hanamoku_ca/00bar_bottom_right.gif){kind=small}
Goods, Product Information
