Dark, cold Sunday carries on

Here’s a life tip: Don’t start out your week by watching a Holocaust movie at 10:30 Sunday morning. It’s likely to set you into a depressive cycle.

Not that I know what the rest of the week is going to be like. Come Wednesday, when I jet back East to the Tribeca Film Festival, things might pick up quite a bit.

Today, though, wasn’t exactly a kissing festival with Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. I’d spent the night tossing and turning, no doubt still reliving the doomsday prophesying of Naomi Wolfe at the Bing Crosby Theater as part of Get Lit! Yes, we’re at the “End of America.” That tune you hear is me humming “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Then at 10:27, we were in the AMC, watching the foreign-language Oscar winner, “Die Fälscher” – or “The Counterfeiters.” And I can’t fault the movie (which, being Austrian, is in German with English subtitles). It’s well made, well acted and, of course, it concerns an important topic.

But … please. The story involves one Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), “the world’s greatest counterfeiter,” who gets arrested and, because he is Jewish, sent to a concentration camp. Somewhere before the end of the war, though, he is recruited to oversee a counterfeiting operation at a camp just outside Berlin.

The point: to make British pounds and U.S. dollars. The money, if it’s good enough, will be used, one, to ruin the economies of the Allied countries and, two, to help fund the German war effort. But there are difficulties. This is still a camp, filled with the standard sorts of sadists who target anyone who is the human equivalent of a limping gazelle.

And then there are those prisoners who don’t believe in helping the Nazis maintain their war machine, a reluctance that threatens the welfare of everyone else.

So, yes, “The Counterfeiters” is a worthy view. But it doesn’t exactly put you in the kind of genial mood needed to sit afterward through a literary reading, which I did at the Spokane Club when Tobias Wolff appeared as the last headline of the 2008 Get Lit! Even with the always-entertaining Jess Walter introducing the event, tossing off one-liners like an East Valley Jerry Seinfeld, I barely cracked a smile.

Then I went and worked for the rest of the afternoon. And, now, I’m sitting on my living-room couch, still feeling as if my mood is sepia-toned.

Maybe I’ll screen “Toy Story.” I think I need a little “To infinity … and beyond!”