Jojo Rabbit

Director: Taika Waititi
Year Released: 2019
Rating: 1.0

A ten-year-old named Jojo (Roman Griffith Davis), who lives with his mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) and is a member of the Hitler Youth, finds out there's a Jewish girl (Thomasin McKenzie) living in a secret compartment of his home and he's unsure of whether or not to report her to the authorities ... oh, and he also has an imaginary friend in Adolf (Waititi) himself.  What begins as some very ill-advised 'parody' of Nazi Germany in which the Nazis are depicted as colossal buffoons - therefore trivializing their actual psychotic villainy - then becomes this somewhat grim war movie (I take it the director has seen Come and See) in which it has the gall to shift to manipulative tragedy, with one of the main characters swinging from the gallows for aiding the resistance.  I respect Waititi, who is Jewish, wanting to make a movie that's an engrained part of his religious identity, but running World War II through the lens of Wes Anderson with 'wacky humor' doesn't add much - if anything - to the conversation about hate.  Oh, and real Hitler would have never offered Jojo a cigarette: the Führer hated tobacco.