Good

"It's real."
Viggo Mortensen is a chief exponent of the Block-of-Wood School of Acting, but he is perfectly cast as Professor "Johnnie" Halder, a Professor of Literature and novelist in Hitler's Germany.

As GOOD opens, Johnnie is just like anybody else. He is dealing with a neurotic wife and demanding children, balancing home and work, and is dedicating time to caring for his increasingly frail and senile mother. Hitler has just come to power. He begins an affair with his student, Anne Hartman, more as a distraction than anything else, and maintains his friendship with Maurice Gluckstein, his former psychoanalyst. He decries Nazi book-burnings and dismisses the Fuhrer as a "joke."

In an attempt to establish its credibility, the new government is seeking out experts to endorse its policies, and they trip across Johnnie's sensitively written 1920s novel of a husband who aids his terminally ill wife in an assisted suicide.

Although Johnnie despises Naziism he is...

The Human Comedy: A Study of Adaptation
A new movement for change, promising a life richer in education, physical prowess, diminished crime, and increased wealth is like a magnet, and the promises that National Socialist Republic created in all forms of the media in the 1930s were probably heady enough that the post World War I Germans could turn a blind eye to the vacuous reality of a rising maniac's promises. GOOD is a film that suggests how the good common people responded to the rise of the Third Reich - the Nazi party with its loathsome guardianship in the Gestapo. It suggests how personal needs could cloud the mind to see only the benefits of a new order that would eventually destroy millions of people and attempt to transform the world in a new social order. And it is painful to watch the disease progress into every aspect of life in Germany.

John Halder (Viggo Mortensen) is a professor of literature and a writer of novels: his latest novel is a fictional story about a man who, out of love for his...

Good!
This movie provides an alarming view of what not only happened to good people in Germany to aide and abet the Nazi's death machine, but it also serves as a sober warning of what can happen to any people, any nation, any society that allows its government to become more important than the individual liberty and tolerance of its citizens. The storyline shows the seduction and dire consequences of individuals allowing themselves to be part of a patronage system of government and group think societal norms. Ahh, what could have been had the good people in Germany refused to go along with the Nazi game and locked their heals and stand their ground on self decency and virtue.

Good just as easily can be seen as the story of current events playing out in countries like Venezuela and other places where a free and democratic people surrender the sovereignty of their individual liberty to a strong man or progressive ideology that makes the state the central most important element of...

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