The Pianist (Full Screen Edition)

Rating:
Summary: For shame
Review: Even though barely deserving a rebuttal, some of the reviews here are so beyond asinine that I cannot restrain myself, particularly with regard to those reviewers who had the gall to call Mr. Szpilman a coward. Mr. Szpilman risked immediate death every time he helped to smuggle a weapon or ammunition into the ghetto. The ghetto uprising itself was essentially a suicide mission, and everyone involved probably knew that. So Mr. Szpilman was a coward because he wanted to live, then? How dare you. While I don't believe that any work of art should be above criticism no matter what its subject matter, I have not read a single negative review here that has any remotely intelligent criticism of this film whatsoever. They pretty much describe it as "boring" or "another Holocaust movie." Schmucks. One reviewer couldn't even remember the protagonist's name, yet had no shortage of would-be scathing things to say about the movie. Almost as absurd are the unfavorable comparisons to "Schindler's List." Yes, Oskar Schindler was a great man, but the very straightforward good vs. evil nature of the subject matter must have appealed to Steven Spielberg's very American sensibilities. "The Pianist," on the other hand, boldly treads a ground that is decidedly messier, morally less clear-cut, and I think that only a man like Roman Polanski, who understands the particular time and place where these events transpired, could have made this film. And Adrien Brody fully deserved the Academy Award for this performance. And, yes, he does spend a good deal of time searching like a "rat" for food. What do these buffoons think it means to survive in such an environment? Idiots. Anyhow, this film is a masterpiece, an artistic triumph of the highest rank. The naysayers have not been able to level a single legitimate criticism against it.

Rating:
Summary: Szpilman - The Pianist
Review: Perhaps the best movie from Roman Polanski, about Jewish-Polish Wladyslaw Szpilman life during the Nazi invasion of Poland in WW2. Adrien Brody is perfect as Szpilman and does a excellent performence here. This movie is based on a true story and it tells you about how his life drastically changed from being great to being a hell. Szpilman was a very promisng pianist and his life in Warzaw was just well. He lived with his mother, father and siblings but suddenly during the nazi invasion they are sent to the ghetto and famine, insecurity and discimination becomes part of their life. His family are sent to a Nazi camp and he is the only one that escapes, after that "The Piansit" will about his life tils the war is over, It is truly a fascinating story about Szpilman's fortune during this time.

This movie will show you everything that happeneded during the nazi occupation. How desperate people were and how painful life was and also the brutality from the Germans and the destruction and famine that took place, It's one thing to read about it, but another to see it with your own eyes. This movie shows you everything about it, it's realistic and very well made. And filmed in Poland aswell, I think.

Sometimes it makes me curious to find out how Szpilman was thinking during the movie( If he would talk to himself or if we could hear what he was thinking) but we'll never know cause Polanski has chosen to not base the movie in that way, which is too bad. However, everything else is good about "The Pianist". A remarkable movie that deserved the prices it good. Good job.

Rating:
Summary: Music was his passion. Survival was his masterpiece.
Review: The Pianist is the true story of a Polish Jewish pianist named Szpielman, who had a bright future ahead of him - until the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. From that point forward, Szpielman and his family endured the Nazi repression of the Jews and ultimate confinement to the Warsaw ghetto. Upon losing his family to the death camps yet miraculously being himself spared the same fate, Szpielman's struggle turns into one of survival as he attamps to avoid the Nazis and the simultaneous destruction of Warsaw during the Second World War.

The story is beyond inspirational, there is truly something to be learned from it. A man who literally lost everything, yet in the end still had his dignity and his passion, perhaps the only thing that kept him alive. It is the triumph of a man in the face of great adversity. The movie itself provides a distinct, unique viewpoint of the environment and events in Warsaw during the war, with great pictoral effect as well as accuracy. From an historical standpoint the film is right on the money, and doesn't sacrifice anything. The acting is also superb, particularly with Adrien Brody as Szpielman.

Truly a great film and an amazing story. Highly recommended.

Rating:
Summary: This movie...( You can see my other reviews for books )
Review: Rocks. This movie was a true story and I didn't even know that until about the end of the movie. Adrian Brody delivered a masterpiece performance as Spilzman ( or however you spell it. )Hie role as this character made him seem real to those of us watching the movie. I never got to see this movie until last month because I wasn't allowed to watch it ( Don't ask. )Anyways, I thought this movie was going to suck and be bad and stuff like that. I was tired. That movie gave me a whoel new look on the way the jews and polish were treated and how the germans were so mean ( that is putting it lightly )But eeven though this movie is history, that does not mean it is inteneted for children. This movie includes lots of killing, murder, suicide, bomba and explositions, disturbing scenes ( somewhat ) and many, many curse words. The movie also has alot of dead people on the sidewalk and rotting, blood on the wall. Beware greatly. This movie is not intented for the squeamish and weak stomach stay away from this movie. But for those of you that have nice strong stomach and haven't seen this movie...watch t. You really don't know what you are missing.

Rating:
Summary: The Pianist
Review: This is the most moving film I have ever seen. It is comparative to Schindler's List in scale and scope, but where Steven Spielberg focuses on a German, a man that finds his morality during the holocaust, Roman Polanski centers on a victim.

Adrien Brody protrays Szpielman, pianist and composer, with brilliance and subtlety. One watches a slow degradation in living conditions, in emotional structure and composure, but not in dignity. The movie hits a climax with one scene, one heartrending scene, that those who've witnessed it will recognize and those who haven't must see. I can't watch it without tears and I can't stop myself despite those tears.

Buy it. If not that, see it.

Rating:
Summary: Inaccurate portrayal of non-jewish Polish
Review: This movie seems to help propagate the myth the somehow life for Gentile Poles was basically the same before and after Nazi occupation.

Nothing could be further from the truth.
[...]
Six Million Polish Citizens Were Killed During the Holocaust of World War II.

Half of These Polish Citizens Were Non-Jews.

On August 22, 1939, a few days before the official start of World War II, Hitler authorized his commanders, with these infamous words, to kill "without pity or mercy, all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language. Only in this way can we obtain the living space [lebensraum] we need".

Heinrich Himmler echoed Hitler's decree:

"All Poles will disappear from the world.... It is essential that the great German people should consider it as its major task to destroy all Poles."

Non-Jews of Polish descent suffered over 100,000 deaths at Auschwitz. The Germans forcibly deported approximately 2,000,000 Polish Gentiles into slave labor for the Third Reich. The Russians deported almost 1,700,000 Polish non-Jews to Siberia. Men, women and children were forced from their homes with no warning. Transferred in cattle cars in freezing weather, many died on the way. Polish children who possessed Aryan-looking characteristics were wrenched from their mother's arms and placed in German homes to be raised as Germans.

The story provides little hint of any of this.

Rating:
Summary: THE PIANIST - A Review
Review: "WTF is wrong with those Nazis?!?!". I lost count how many times I said that to myself while watching this film. It blows my mind that this happened not even that long ago and it just makes me so angry that there are still racist people today. Why can't people just realize that we are stronger united because we can learn from all different cultures instead of fearing each other which holds us back!
Ok, I'm done ranting...onto the film then =)

I'll admit I put off seeing this film because I wasn't ready for what I thought would be a very sad and heavy movie and while it is that, it is also uplifting, hopeful and beautiful. Roman Polanski shoots this film in a way that is very honest. I didn't feel that he tried to manipulate the way you feel by emphasizing the killings and suffering, he merely shows it to you and lets you decide the way it affects you by showing you only a little bit of reaction from the people in the film.
I only recall one scene in which Adrien Brody really cries, he is walking down a lonely street lined with abandoned belongings scattered on the ground. This makes the movie much more poignant and haunting because your reactions are completely your own instead of the actor's and actress's.

Being a pianist myself I really felt Adrien Brodys anguish when he sat down at the piano but couldn't play it for fear of being discovered. The final piece played in the movie is by Chopin and it was a wonderful choice because it is sad and hopeful at the same time, exactly like this film.

I recommend this movie for all teenagers and adults. Parents should watch this movie with their teens and ask them what they think of racism afterward.






Rating:
Summary: A rivetting and disturbing anti-war masterpiece
Review: The rubric on the DVD I purchased stated that "This [...] film follows [the pianist's] journey of survival with the unlikely help of a sympathetic German officer". I had imagined that the pianist in question would have been playing in some kind of café or bar throughout the five years that Warsaw was occupied by the Nazis, with this "sympathetic German officer" being a keen listener and showing his admiration for the pianist's marvelous playing abilities.

Whilst my speculation about the quasi-friendship was hopelessly wide of the mark, the last speculation was almost exactly on the spot, yet the officer (Thomas Kretschmann) sees the utterly scruffy, bedraggled and starving Szpilman (Adrien Brody) hiding in an attic in a devastated part of the Pole's home city barely weeks before the Germans retreated west before the advancing Soviets.

The state in which the officer found Szpilman conveyed in an unforgettable way the utter privations experienced by just one man in his bid to avoid being shot on sight, if not dragged off to the extermination camps, which would have happened earlier in the war had not one Polish Jewish policeman not physically dragged Szpilman out of the line of would-be deportees to Treblinka, since he knew who he was.

Seen from the perspective of one Jewish man, the Nazi policy regarding their treatment of the Jews is crystal-clear: ghettoization and extermination. Even the scenes depicting the so-called "Gentile street" running through the Jewish ghetto are powerful as a reminder of how physically cut off the Jews were from the rest of Varsovian society and of how utterly demoralized and ostracized the Jews were forced to feel as a people. How ironic, indeed, that a wall would divide the capital of the (then former) Nazi regime for 28 years, albeit along political, not racial, lines.

As might be expected, there are scenes designed deliberately to shock and appal - as well as remind the audience of just how brutally the Nazis, in the form of the S.S., treated the Jews. Who can forget the one where the old man is thrown to his death from his wheelchair from an upper floor of the building opposite where the Szpilmans were living, and the one where an S.S. man picked out people from a work party, which included Szpilman in its ranks, and summarily executed them. This illustrated just how hard-core Nazis dealt with those whom Nazi racial theory regarded as the Untermenschen ("sub-humans").

The conditions in which Szpilman found himself after escaping from the ghetto, destroyed in April 1943, were vastly different from before, as he found himself alone, having to live in a flat locked from the outside to avoid snoopers taking too close a look. When the Warsaw Uprising starts in August 1944, Szpilman is forced to run for his life and take refuge wherever he can as the Nazis snuff out all resistance, killing almost every Pole in sight. It was only at this point that the Kretschmann character, a captain in the army and not the S.S., helps him, but only after he manages to prove he is a pianist in spite of his utterly pathetic and miserable condition. Szpilman manages to survive the scenes of harrowing death and destruction, even if his benefactor was inevitably captured by the Soviet Army and fated to die in a POW camp.

Overall, "The Pianist" is as much an anti-war film as it is a war film, given that the aggressors had all the power at their disposal to do whatever they wished to their unarmed victims, although the will to fight on the part of the Jews is also highlighted, not just during the Uprising. Many of the film's scenes were shot not just in Warsaw, but also in two cities in Germany. The images are highly disturbing almost right from the very start, and that was the intention of Roman Polanski, who won the Academy Award for Best Director, for whom this movie was said to be "his most personal" on account of his own memories of war-torn Warsaw.

Adrien Brody gives a performance which richly deserved his Academy Award for Best Actor, as he immerses himself in the character, sharing whatever joys and pain came both his way and the way of his relatives and friends, and stoically displaying the emotions that one would readily expect in such situations as Szpilman manages to survive, his life intact, ready to resume his career, albeit in a Poland that had been changed irrevocably. English actors Frank Finlay, Emilia Fox and Maureen Lipman co-star with Brody and give sterling performances.

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest Holocaust-based movies I've ever seen
Review: This movie was just superb. The directing by Roman Polanski was amazing, the acting (especially Brody) made me feel as if I was there experiencing his difficulties along side him. The plot too was great, and the piano playing and music throughout the movie was incredible. Although some parts are slightly disturbing, this movie really brings out the struggles that Jewish men, women, and children had to endure in Warsaw, Poland. Overall, this movie expresses so much feeling that it will forever be in my mind and will forever effect me. This movie is worth buying, can be seen numerous times, and in my book is an instant classic.

Rating:
Summary: A better title would be: "The Accidental Survivor"
Review: Let me begin by saying that "The Pianist" is a well-acted and superbly directed film. One can immediately sense that Polanski put his heart and soul into the project (for obvious reasons, given his own life story), and this effort brought the best out of everyone involved with the film. I would echo many others who have expressed their admiration of this film as a work of art.

However, here is where I have an issue with this project: I am not sure that this story is worthy of such an effort. We are in no short supply of Holocaust-themed cinema, some of which rises to the level of masterpiece. Films like "Sunshine", "Europa, Europa", and the incomparable "Schindler's List" are not only visually stunning, but convey powerful life-affirming messages. Not the least of these is the idea that one must work pro-actively for one's bodily salvation. In "The Pianist", instead, we are shown a man whose does little to help himself survive. Instead, he is aided by a few sympathetic Poles, and a rather out-of-character Wehrmacht officer. The hero's complete passivity is almost incomprehensible. Is it worth all of Polanski's artistic efforts to glorify? I doubt it.