SCHINDLER'S LIST (Steven Spielberg)

[Heineken Skywalker]

I hadn't seen this film since 1993 when it was originally in theaters. Having just watched the brand new special edition DVD last night, I felt I should say something about it. I'll try to avoid "SPOILERS" for those of you who haven't seen it.

The film tells the true story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an industrialist from Czechoslovakia. Who in 1939 saw the war as an opportunity to get rich, but who ended up saving the lives of about 1,100 Jews.
He makes contacts with Nazi officials and opens a factory that will supply the army with everything from kitchenware to artillery shells, as well as provide several hundred recruited Jews with jobs.
Schindler meets Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a Jewish accountant, and decides they should work together. Stern can provide investors and use his expertise to run the business. The jobs give the Jewish "essential workers" a measure of safety.
About an hour into the movie, Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) steps into the picture. A Nazi psychopath who is put in charge of the camp where the workers are housed and likes to shoot Jews for "target practice". His evil is also one of the main reasons for Schindler's later change of heart.
The film is graphic without being tasteless. Spielberg shows the Nazi atrocities without dwelling on them.
One of the movie's only missteps is an overly dramatic speech near the end, which is definitely a "Spielberg moment of sentimentality", but that's a quibble of two minutes in a three-hour film.
The acting by all of the leads (one of Neeson's best performances), the cinematography and the score by John Williams are all top-notch. And Spielberg had his greatest year in '93 with the one-two punch of not just this film, which went on to much critical praise and many awards, but also with the release of JURASSIC PARK, a popcorn monster movie that was that year's biggest box office hit. 8.5/10

[Bartwald]

It definitely is a very good and important movie. I love the way in which Ralph Fiennes made his character such a convincing bastard and I admire Spielberg's courage to touch such a controversial subject (I mean, some people still argue the concentration camps never existed, right?). The black-and-white also makes sense and is not only used for giving this film more 'artistic' looks, as it just makes all the events more true, more like a set of old black-and-white photos from the past.

If somebody forced me to choose between Polanski's The Pianist and Spielberg's Schindler's List I'd choose The Pianist as being more grotesque and less sentimental, but that's not a fair choice: both of them are very important achievements of two groundbreaking directors.

[Heineken Skywalker]

"both of them are very important achievements of two groundbreaking directors."

I liked LIST a little more, but I agree, they're both excellent films on a tough subject.

What a depressing double feature that would be.

[Sybillness]

This is truly one of the best movies I've ever seen. I think my favorite aspect is the fact that everything is black and white, especially for Oskar Schindler, until he starts to care about what happens to the Jewish people, then he sees the girl with the red coat. Things are no longer black and white for him and he really begins to "see" what is happening. I've talked to a few people who say the red coat just confused them, but I saw it as a prelude to Shindler's epiphany.

I hadn't seen this movie for several years and I recently watched it on DVD. Still had the same impact on me that it did years ago. This is and will always be an important movie.

[Heineken Skywalker]

Wow, I never saw the little girl in the red coat as a metaphor for Schindler's "awakening" from the "black & white" world he lived in before. That's a great observation.

[Bartwald]

Many people are in fact so pissed off with Spielberg making another 'serious' movie that they'll keep repeating black-and-white is just a corny gimmick and the 'red coat' an unnecessary and inexplicable addition to the movie's artistic looks. That's not so, of course, and I'm glad Sybillness has straightened the controversy out once and for all!

[nomatchcheck]

I'm glad that you've brought back this movie and I'd like to make a couple remarks:)
1. first, I think that we all may agree that Shindler's list claimed to be -to some extent - a historical movie. And, as such, it should not convey any false image about the times it sought to depict. But it did. (and, do not be afraid, I'm not going to deny the existence of concentration camps;)
When it was being shot and then shown in Poland, there was some great controversy around this film. It concerned the way in which Poles were depicted -kind of unjustly, not as actual co-victims along with the Jews, but as either collaborants and traitors or somehow priviliged people. For this reason, I remember, I was just outraged, when I left the cinema. And I never felt like watching it again - it stays in my memory as a big sentimental overrated and shamefuly biased production.

2.I prefer The Pianist. Less sentimental, greater photography, the perspective of an individual, and an ordinary one, not a hero - makes it all more powerful and impressive. And the plot is more interesting, suprising, etc. And the director's personal history makes it also far more convincing:)

3. The girl in a red coat. Now she is a grown - up actress, always mentioning the Spielberg's epizode in her interviews and a star in Polish soap operas.