Schindler's List | | Cast : | Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes | | Director : | Steven Spielberg | | Studio : | Universal Studios | | Format : | Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound | | Released Date : | , 1993 | | DVD Released Date : | March 09, 2004 | | Language : | Spanish (Dubbed), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), English (Original Language), French (Original Language) | | Audience Rating : | R (Restricted) | | | BUY THIS DVD FROM AMAZON |
Customer Reviews
| Rating |  | | Date | July 27, 2005 | | Summary | Decent movie, the book is much better | Content
 | Steven Spielberg has made many good movies but badly wanted a great movie to his credit. The Holocaust is a topic that has its unique and riveting moments. While many movies have tried to capture it, few have come close to reality due to multiple reasons, the brutality, how much to show, collective guilt concept etc. The book written by Thomas Keneally was outstanding and must be read by anyone interested in this topic, it is fiction based on truth and gripping. The movie is beautiful in many ways, it captures some of the harshness and terror of the times but it failes to show who Oscar Schindler was. The book shows how he was as a person right from his childhood to his late life. He had a father who was not faithful to his mother and was resentful of that, but everyone in his family except him knew of how much he was exactly what he hated, a mean, petty, womanizing person.
There are parts in the book that are more brutal than the movie. I do not think that Spielberg did a good job of understanding the story. There is a part where the Nazi surround the oldest synagogue in Krakow, get the Jews to spit on the scroll. All the orthodox people accept the order but one person who was not religious says to himself, "I have not been true to my religion, but I will not do this." and refuses to follow the order. The Nazis gun him down and all the others too and burn down the synagogue. Instead of this scene, the movie had one of someone escaping with a chicken and a kid pointing to a dead person and saying "Him", which was silly.
When Schindler failed in his farm in South America, he tried to live in Germany but was hated there and was called a "Jew kisser." However, he was treated like a benevolent father in Israel. Whenever he went to Israel he ate at a Romanian restaurant of one of his children who made sure that he did not drink too much. When he died, he was buried in the protestant cemetary in Jerusalem, which is a joke as he was one of the least religious people. While the book brought out both the Holocaust and the human part of Oscar Schindler, the movie did a shoddy job of it. When I first saw the movie, I loved it. However, after I read the book my enthusiasm for the movie diminished substantially. I would still say that the movie is very good as it brought to light a person who would have been unknown to me but would recommend all to read the book. It is one of the best books written in the last twenty years in the literary sense. The movie is well acted and photographed, but not well scripted. The story could have been put together better. There was too much polarization - all Germans are bad, all others are good. While being Jewish myself, I recently saw a documentary of two Czeck Jews who escaped from a concentration camp and told that one of the SS guards told that he hated his job so much that he would rather be transfered to a job in Eastern Europe, which would mean certain death. I understand that this is a movie and it requires a degree of fictionization, but parts of it are historically incorrect and could offend people. Despite this deficiencies, it is a start for great movies such as "Life is Beautiful" and "Pianist". However, I do not think that it deserves the rank in AFI top 20 that it got. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 26, 2005 | | Summary | "Whoever saves one life..." | Content
| Steven Spielberg's film achievements stand unreachably tall in Hollywood, and "Schindler's List" is his masterpiece.
Oskar Schindler was not, by many measurements, a "good" man. He was a womanizer and failed several marriages. He was a german war profiteer during World War II, and failed several businesses after the war. He also took steps of bravery and personal sacrifice to preserve the lives of over 1,100 Polish Jews. At the end of the film a graphic tells us that today there are fewer than 4,000 Jews in Poland, but that there are 6,000 descendants of Schindler's Jews.
Liam Neeson also gives the performance of his career as Schindler. He is comfortable cajoling and cavorting with the Nazi's. He is initially only a businessman, and doesn't hesitate to bribe Nazi officials to get preferential business arrangements.
Ben Kingsley shines in a performance reminiscent in some ways of his luminescent portrayal of Gandhi. He portrays Itzhak Stern, an accountant Schindler hires to do all the work of Schindler's businesses while Schindler himself is glad-handing the Nazi's and "adding some panache" to the business. The central relationship of the film is between Schindler and Stern as the situation becomes increasingly grim for the Jews and Schindler realizes that he can use the same techniques that he has developed as a businessman to create "safe" jobs for the Jews. As long as the Jews are working in Schindler's factory they are spared extermination. At one point the German's are in danger of losing the ground where Schindler's factory sits and they are ordered to "liquidate" the camp again. Schindler uses all his war profits to "buy" the Jews from Goeth, then to relocate them to another factory where they will make artillery ammunition on machines that Schindler has miscalibrated. Schindler expends his entire fortune to save the Jews in an ammunition factory that never produced a shell that could be fired.
Ralph Fiennes steps out onto a limb portraying the terrible Amon Goeth, who rapes and murders and forgives himself as the camp commander over the Jews. To accomplish his goals Schindler befriends even Goeth, and in one memorable scene Oskar appeals to Goeth's vanity to have him stop being so trigger-happy murdering the Jewish prisoners.
We see horrors more terrible than any horror film. The Jews are initially all herded into the Krakow ghetto, then it is decided that the ghetto is to be emptied - Nazi soldiers stroll through the streets murdering Jews in cold blood. Later a trainload of Jewish women are mistakenly routed to Auschwitz. Their terror is palpable as they see the smoke billowing from the chimneys over the ovens. They are then stripped and herded into the showers where they have heard the whispers of the "special treatment" that the Jews are receiving. The terror of that scene is beyond any fictional machete-wielding movie madman.
Spielberg is a master of visual storytelling, and he made a brilliant decision to shoot in black and white, but to use color in just a few shots for a few specific items. In one key scene candle flames burn their brilliant orange and in another mesmerizing use of color Spielberg highlights the red coat of a little girl who is walking through the carnage of the liquidation of Krakow. When we see the red coat again an hour later, our eyes are drawn to it, and we know it's meaning.
Spielberg attaches faces to the Holocaust. The ending is one of the most powerful ever seen as surviving Schindler Jews are paired with the actors portraying them in the movie. They line up to file past Oskar Schindler's grave and we feel the impact of Schindler's actions.
He has not "saved the world", but he has saved many, many lives.
|
| Rating | | | Date | July 24, 2005 | | Summary | Deserved the Oscars it recieved | Content
| Classic film at it's finest. Needs to be in every library of good WWII films.
While it is in black and white, this will not reduce your enjoyment of this film. In truth? I don't know if I could have stood watching it in color. |
| Rating | | | Date | July 08, 2005 | | Summary | A breathtaking work of art. | Content
| Absolutely unforgettable in every sense....Liam Neeson pulls on your heart strings. |
| Rating | | | Date | June 25, 2005 | | Summary | Absorbing, but almost utterly fictional | Content
| Schindler's widow said there was almost nothing true in this movie about her late husband. In reality Shindler only saved some Jews because he knew the war was going to be over in about six months, so he tried to stay ahead of the game. He was not the noble man portrayed in this film, but a vile human being who exploited those under him in almost every conceivable way. Certainly an absorbing film, but one with only a grain of truth in it.
|
|
Picture 01 (20)
