Hi to everybody...we have just sat and watched a film I recorded a while back called 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'...we had heard the story of a little German boy at a concentration camp who helped keep alive a little Jewish boy by feeding him through the fence and he survived and years later, they met in America, I think, by accident when they were both old...this is the story we were expecting to see...we didn't...this turned out to be a fictitious story, which had the atmosphere right for the period and the acting was fine on the part of the people in it, but then we realized suddenly it wasn't the story we had been expecting but one that could never have happened and the ending was even more implausible, and, not only that, but the film makers left out the end of the book completely, leaving you with a feeling of being cheated and it was utterly depressing as well...so, all in all, I cannot recommend this film at all and really don't understand why the BBC had anything to do with it which it did, apart from the fact that it has sold five million copies...there were huge flaws in it, not least, that the fence the little boys talked to each other between wasn't electrified and it would have been.
Irish novelist, John Boyne, wrote it as a children's book, and it seems to both of us, it is a very bad book to give to children because such an unreal picture of a concentration camp, or in this case, a death camp...if you're going to write a book about that period, it would be much better to portray the characters much more realistically, and the ending is impossible as the little German boy could never have ended up where he did.
So, a disappointing evening's entertainment, and one that I wish we hadn't bothered to watch. Ah, well...can't win 'em all, but this is one film that shouldn't be shown to children because totally unreal...
Hope you have a good night, sweet dreams and send great big hugs to one and all...