Lions Gate has released the first trailer for "Max", starring John Cusack, Noah Taylor, Leelee Sobieski and Molly Parker. The movie comes out in December.
Dutch director and writer Menno Meyjes who also wrote the scripts for "Indiana Jones III" and "The Colour Purple" had been talking to Steven Spielberg about the project, but the father of E.T. thought it was too controversial.
By now, the film has been attacked by everyone from the Jewish Defense League to the New York Times after it has been shown at the Toronto Film Festival.
Cusack plays the Jewish art-dealer Max Rothman from Munich who has to deal with a young and reckless student called Adolf Hitler. We see the dictator as a young man in 1918 and the movie tries to show us the "human" face of the "monster".
It looks like the early years of Hitler are ready to get manufactured by the mainstream. There are more movie like that in pre-production right now. It's about time to get rid of the historical roots and use the full potential of the historical figure for the entertainment-industry.

Hitler is still the arch-villain, but he has not been seen in as such in a mayor-production (except for comic-books like Captain America of course, but even Cap rather fights Hitler's henchman The Red Skull instead of Adolf himself. This reminds me that I wanted to write something on the potrayal of the Third Reich in World War II-comics like "The Invaders", "The Crusaders" etc...)
But, imagine Bruce Willis swinging through some window to rescue Kim Basinger who has been kidnapped by the Führer to breed new aryans or some shit like that. I mean, why didn't Indy kick his ass in "Indiana Jones Part III"?
Without Hitler there wouldn't have been a Superman or Lex Luthor or Dr.Doom or whatever they're called.

Salon.com - Was Hitler human? - an round-table-interview with John Cusack and others concerning "Max"

"Menno Meyjes: I think that Hitler was a new kind of man, who came from a little mountain village to the big city and picked up all these hatreds, and had this insane desire to be famous. And he understood fame in a very modern way, which very few people did in those days. Who was famous in those days? Hindenburg, generals were famous, politicians. I mean, Charlie Chaplin had barely been invented. But those pressures are very strong to this day -- people fear anonymity. He needed that kind of mass recognition in order to know himself.

Salon: So he was the first modern man in that sense?

Menno Meyjes: Absolutely.

Sidney Blumenthal: Hitler was such a nullity as a human being, a man filled with raw feelings of disgust and self-loathing. His genius, which was an evil one, was to have the capacity to articulate that in a way that appealed to those feelings in others, which in postwar Germany turned out to be a mass audience.

Salon:The film says that Hitler was a failure as an artist, but he succeeded in turning politics into art.

John Cusack: Yes, he ended up becoming a black artist, someone whose art was to set the world on fire."

MAX - Trailer Cusack for President!

good scans of covers of Anti-Hitler-Propaganda-Comics from the 1940s