Results tagged “hitler”

We're sure you've seen the non-stop TV ads and heard all the terrible buzz on Valkyrie. The film, based on a true story about one of several assassination attempts on Hitler by German officers, was pushed back from a summer 2008 release date to the February 2009 dumping ground before getting moved to a Christmas debut. But it's not as bad as what you've heard. The script (written by Usual Suspects Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie) is fine, Bryan Singer's direction is capable, and the cast features a bevy of talented British actors (including Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, and pretty much everyone in Black Book). In fact, there's really only one problem with the film, but it's a big 'un:

A Hitler mashup about the Apple Cup made it onto the P-I's Big Blog the other day, and Managing Editor David McCumber has ordered it taken down posthaste: "I think we goofed in this instance." Hitler isn't funny, McCumber says.

We know what you're thinking: Wait, Hitler had a bookmark? But this is a special bookmark from Eva Braun with a little note that says, "U & der Reich 4Eva!" (Now is probably a good time to mention we can't read German.) Anyway, the AP says, "Christian Popescu, a Romanian national, was arrested Tuesday outside a Bellevue Starbucks after trying to sell the bookmark to an undercover agent for $100,000." How sordid. No word on Popescu's choice of coffee beverages. How about it Bellevue Starbucks baristas? Did he order?

There was a woman, born in Germany, who thought Hitler was about the best thing to happen to Germany since, well, ever. Though she never joined the Nazi party, she became a "close personal friend" of Hitler. He supported her work: the documentaries Triumph of the Will (about the 1934 Nazi rallies at Nuremberg) and Olympia (about the 1936 Oympics). She shot a lot of film during the war. Sometimes the extras were trucked in from a concentration camp. When she got married in 1944, she introduced her husband to Adolf. She was a woman who both didn't know about the camps, and only cooperated with the Nazis because she didn't want to be sent to one.