I have now seen the movie, “Life is Beautiful,” which is being currently shown in Chicago. The movie treats the Nazi concentration camp as a matter for comedy. Tribune movie critic Michael Wilmington is featured in ads as rating the film four stars (and calling it) “A masterpiece,” “One of the triumphs of the year.”
Since the Nazi concentration camps were the ultimate instruments to what a book reviewer has called, “the most fiercely focused genocide the world has ever known,” it strikes me as irresponsible for a major movie reviewer to write without regard to a moral focus as a part of the reviewing responsibility. A Nazi concentration camp cannot become a matter for comedy in a civilized society.
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