Absolutely Fantastic

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

When a young woman (Lena Stolze as a fictionalized version of Anna Rosmus) investigates her town's Nazi past, the community turns against her.Rosmus wrote her first book, "Resistance and Persecution - The Case of Passau 1933-1939", which was published in 1983. Undeterred by threats, she now wrote "Exodus - In the Shadow of Mercy", a book focusing on the plight of Passau's Jews during the twentieth century. Her work continued to cause unprecedented uproar as well as international praise. She was eventually forced out and moved to America.Lena Stolze is a perfect lead. She approaches the character an her world with a sense of wonder that anticipates "Amelie", though this material is much darker. The film, though light-hearted and innocent in many ways, does bring up an important point: it is not simply a matter of "erasing" or "forgetting" or "ignoring" history -- a community must actually confront it in order to move on.

'The Nasty Girl' tells an interesting story that I did a bit of reading about sometime before this movie came along. I had learn that a young German girl named Anja Rosmos had done some probing and found that her little town had had some major ties with Nazi Germany.The local politicians were outraged and warned her not to do anymore snooping around but she went digging anyway. She came to find that a former residence of Hitler resided right there in Passau. The townspeople were outraged and Rosmos' life became a nightmare. She was threatened, beaten, her husband left and her reputation was destroyed.The movie tells the same story but changes the names and makes the story lighthearted. The girl's name in the film is Sonja Rosenberger and she lives in Bavaria. Somehow these changes made the film feel artificial. I would much rather see either a straightforward biography or a documentary on this subject but not this approach in which I learned basically nothing.The movie is so light and nice about a rather dark subject. Watching Sonja I felt that I was watching a staged, sanitized version Anja's story by someone who knows little or nothing about this subject. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture so obviously someone found something in it to like but for me, I felt gypped

It may sound in outline like a bad joke, but this daring comedy about a young German girl's frustrated attempt to uncover the Nazi past is no laughing matter. The film has a lot of the same, sassy energy as its heroine, who as a schoolgirl began a lifelong investigative crusade to unearth the Nazi skeletons in the closet of her Bavarian hometown, discovering firsthand the hypocrisy and complacency of her friends and neighbors (and, by extension, of the entire German nation). The story is drawn from actual events, but the heavy stylization of the film takes (deliberately) some of the sting from the facts, by lending them an almost playful air of unreality sometimes unsuited to the subject. The approach takes a little getting used to, but it makes sense: in a country afflicted with retroactive amnesia, history itself can sometimes seem equally unreal. Altogether it's a fresh look at otherwise familiar material, with a sudden, unresolved ending offering plenty of food for thought.

Sonja (Lena Stolze) seems like any ordinary person. That is, until she has to research her town's history for a project. In the process, she discovers that her town was heavily involved in the Third Reich. Then, everyone in town not only turns against her, but tries in every possible way to silence her.Much like another West German film ("The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum"), "The Nasty Girl" shows a woman used as a scapegoat for something that was society's fault (it makes sense for German movies to deal with that; it's exactly what the Third Reich was all about). Another one of Germany's solid masterpieces.Watching this movie, I couldn't help but wonder what sorts of secrets any place, anywhere on Earth, carries.