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Summary: What a movie!
Review: Incredible is what I can describe this man's life story. Here you have a concert pianist, who with his family, ends up in the Warsaw ghetto, but by one of the Capo guards pulling him out of line, Spillman was able to escape the fate of many other Jews during that time. What surprised me is the Nazi Officer's compassion towards him(probably thinking that it was too late in the game to shoot him or send him off),even to the point of giving him his coat(which almost got him shot when the Russians came to Warsaw),but still a great film just the same. I cannot compare it with Schindler's List, since I haven't seen it in its entirety, but I feel that it is worth every five and more of its stars.
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Summary: The Real Best Picture of 2002!
Review: My favorite film of 2002 was The Two Towers but I thought Chicago was still a deserving Best Picture winner ...until I saw The Pianist and came to the reason why it won the top awards overseas (BAFTA's Best Film,Cannes film festival's The Golden Palm). I was shocked at how much I was moved emotionally by the end. This is the most emotionally powerful film I've seen in a while. I don't know what else I could say except definitely the film will become a true classic.
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Summary: The Pianist - An extremely poignant true story!
Review: This extraordinary film serves skillfully as a poetic reminder of humanities startling capacity for insufferable cruelty towards one another and amazing capacity for kindness to one another in particularly difficult situations! Although there are several scenes throughout this film that are dreadfully difficult to watch it is a film that should be watched and the reminders it displays continued to be learned in the sincere hopes that nothing like this ever happens again in the future of humanity.It is of little wonder that this film that is based on a true story won three Academy awards; Best Actor for Adrien Brody, Best Director for Roman Polanski and Best (Adapted) Screenplay for Ronald Harwood. Adrien Brody's unforgettable performance is nothing short of stunning as he plays Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Jewish pianist caught up in the Nazi's war against the Jewish in Poland during World War II. This extraordinary film wouldn't have been as nearly successful without the exceptional performance given by all the supporting actors in this film as well who all deserve as much praise as possible for their parts. Strangely enough, this is the first film I've watched that was directed by Roman Polanski, which is a mistake that will be corrected. From the beginning to the end this film is a highly gripping one and I'm sure the credit for that goes just as much to Roman Polanski's direction as it does the script and the actors performances. The Premise: "The Pianist" is the true story Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish man of Jewish faith who, with his family and millions of others, was swept up in the Nazi occupation of Poland and their quest to exterminate the Jewish people. Szpilman, being an exceptional pianist finds himself spared from the horrible train ride to a death camp but must bare the memory of watching his entire family take that ride as he continues to do what he must to survive to make it to the end of the war... It is exceedingly difficult not to find yourself shedding a tear for the events that go on throughout this true tale of survival during the holocaust, which brings that much more poignancy to the film and its story. I highly recommend this film to any and all! {ssintrepid} Special Features: -A Story of Survival: Insight into the making of the film and its authenticity
-Roman Polanski's own story of survival during WWII
-Behind the scenes interviews with Oscar winners Roman Polanski, Adrien Brody and Ronald Harwood
-Clips of Wladyslaw Szpilman playing the piano
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Summary: Read This....
Review: Life in Nazi Germany was a terrible thing, not a hollywood feel-good experience. For those of you who do not like seeing the reality of that time period; jews selling out jews, people scrambling for their life, fear, and solitude, than watch "Schindler's List", or "Life is Beautiful." But if you want to know what it was like to survive amidst a torrent of hatred, from all people, not just Germans, watch this movie...correction..read the book.
Szpilman is not trying to make himself a marter, a hero, or an icon for the resistance, he is simply explaining how he survived, and how people more brave than himself did not. If you want character development, watch "Fried Green Tomatoes." This is a story of survival. Something lost upon you liberals who view our fighting overseas as excessive.
Our protagonist is accurate, honest, and in a most amazing way, emotionally detached from the horrors that we know affected him far more than he described in his book. Polanski does a fabulous job of bringing this man's story to life. Bravo...
And for the naysayers, ignorance justifies your position.
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Summary: Historically acurate, great!
Review: This movie was very powerful, very sad at times, sometimes uplifting, and a seemingly accurate account. It focuses on the life of a man who avoids being sent to the death camps of Nazi Germany during WWII, and the struggles he goes through. Very powerful, actors/director did a great job. Something I appreciate: it was based on the accounts of a man who lived during the time.
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Summary: Three Academy Awards.........
Review: ....Should have been FOUR, Another for Best Picture. A Great and Important movie!
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Summary: Another Surprise
Review: This is a truimph of a story. A Warsaw ghetto survivor making it through the war, suffering, alone, scare and scarred, yet undaunted. It showed the human side of tragedy, the cruelty and the heart. Brody plays his part excellently. This movie kept me riveted. It is worth owning.
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Summary: An Awakening
Review: I have never in my life been so affected by a film. I was forced to watch it over a period of several weeks as it was difficult to digest the horror & apathy all in one sitting. How any group of people could degenerate to this level and the world turn a blind eye for so long is beyond comprehension. I was able to put aside the initial hate & disgust and see this masterpiece of filmaking through the eyes of one man's family. From this I have developed an entirely different view of "isolationism" and would recommend it highly to anywone interested in world history.
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Summary: Spectacular in its innocence
Review: After it was garlanded with awards and so much critical acclaim I decided I had to watch The Pianist, even though with war movies you never know whether you'll get something honest and affecting or trite and clichéd. Polanski's movie definitely belongs to the former. Charting the life of the Jewish pianist Szpilman (Brody) against the backdrop of war in Poland it's a powerfully emotional piece that, once you've seen the end especially, makes it well worth sitting down for two and a half hours to watch. Interestingly, rather than show us a view of the Polish resistance or an inside view of the harrowing concentration camps, this is all about one man, and all the better for it. The Pianist achieves a kind of intimacy with its subject that other similar films cannot boast. Beginning with the bombing of the radio station where Szpilman plays to Polish listeners, his family are rapidly dispatched to the Jewish ghetto. I've heard a few reviews stating that the parts of the movie involving Szpilman's family life are clichéd. In a way this is easy to see, with stereotypes being made of various figures such as the brother who refuses to be put down, the valiant sister and the elderly father being used for the sympathy vote. However, the movie is told in such a brilliant manner that you forget all of these clichés (especially since it's based on a true story). There are some scenes that are very difficult to watch - people being shot point blank or tossed from windows - but it's this kind of emotional intensity that make it all the more worthwhile. It was certainly a wise choice to stay out of the concentration camps, in part because the looks on the faces of the Jews being herded into cattle trucks to be sent to their deaths is enough to affect any viewer, and also because it might have been too harrowing for the viewers. Significantly, it is when Szpilman is alone in the bombed down city streets of Warsaw that the movie really scales down to the intimate and where Brody's performance stands alone as one of true excellence. Admitedly these parts can get a little slow, but they're worthwhile for the conclusion, which couldn't have come about without these parts and it's certainly brave of Polanski (and typical) for him not to flinch at any part of Szpilman's memoirs. The final moments though, are just sublime. Starving in an abandoned house Szpilman is finally discovered by a sympathetic German officer, and these scenes really burn a deep impression into your memory. Acted with humiliation and sense of what's lost, culminating (inevitably) in Szpilman's uplifting/depressing performance of Chopin, it's the emotional core of the movie. Put simpy, this deserved every award it won, and then some.
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Summary: Polanski's Best Since "Chinatown"
Review: Wladyslaw Szpilman was having a happy enough life in Warsaw in 1939, making a living by playing the piano on the radio. Then the Nazi tanks rolled in and the next six years were very very desperate as the events of the holocaust unfolded. First, all kinds of laws came into effect restricting the movement and activities of Jews. Jews must wear a Star of David, must walk in the gutter, are routinely brutalized. Then the Warsaw ghetto is constructed and Jews are walled off in a closed world of escalating brutality and starvation. Then they are told the majority of them will be deported, taken to places they are told are "labour camps" but which they are beginning to realize are something must uglier... Szpilman escapes this fate though he must watch his entire family taken away to their deaths. He is put in a work group, labouring in the city outside the ghetto. He then escapes out into the city where he is helped out by friends and resistance workers including Dorota, a young non-Jewish Pole he had courted before the ghetto was built, and her husband. From the window of the room he is hiding in he watches the 1943 uprising of the survivors of the ghetto. (Of course it fails and they are all killed.) Then abandoned by the man who was meant to be helping him he is relocated to another room elsewhere right opposite the Nazi police station. There he stays until the water supply is cut off and the building is bombed and burned out by the Germans. Now altogether alone, he hides out in the ruins of Warsaw and, as the Russians advance against the collapsing German army, he is helped to survive the closing stages of the occupation by German officer Wilm Hosenfeld. That is the story of this movie and it's a true story taken from the memoir Szpilman wrote soon after the war. It also owes a good deal to the memory of its director as Polanski, a Polish Jew, himself survived the Holocaust as a child. It's a wilfully unflashy piece of cinema where everything is extremely understated. The performances are quietly excellent. Brody's in particular is superb but creeps up on one only very slowly. There is no score, no incidental music and music is only heard when it is being played for real as part of the action (except in one scene where it is very pointedly not being played.) It is as if Polanski wants to present these events as plainly and straightforwardly as possible and have us respond to them as directly as possible. For the most part this strategy pays off and the film is an extraordinary and moving experience. The most extraordinary and unforgettable parts are also the parts that involve the greatest artistic risk on Polanski's part when Szpilman, after escaping the ghetto, is completely alone is a bare room with nothing to do except sit around and wait, hoping that maybe someone will bring him some more food before he starves, watching from his window events in the street at whose significance he can only make frightened guesses as months and months pass. The risk with theses scenes of course is that they could so easily have been just boring and the temptation Polanski resists splendidly is that of being driven by anxiety on that score to sex these scenes up in ways that would have killed off their effectiveness and their integrity: adding a bit of music, perhaps, or a voiceover or cutting into Szpilman's narrative with scenes from elsewhere telling, say, Dorota's story too. But no: here as elsewhere, Polanski sticks rigorously to relaying events as Szpilman experienced them and eschews any other perspective. And in fact these scenes are the triumphant reverse of boring as is the whole movie. One thing troubled me. This film is always sold as a story of how Szpilman is saved by his love of music and it's hope-inducing dramatic centre is, I think, intended to be the scene amongst the ruins of Warsaw when Szpilman has just been discovered by Hosenfeld and, asked to play the piano to him, proceeds to do so. This scene is intended to be moving and it is but it's also surely a little disturbing. It's not entirely clear whether we are intended to think that this is the point where Szpilman is being saved by his love of music and if it is thereby implied that, if he had been a less accomplished pianist, or if he had been a fishmonger, say, or a dentist, Hosenfeld would not have bothered with him. I'm sure that's not the idea and yet there is a deeply troubling sense in this scene that we are unsure to what extent Szpilman is being tested out to ascertain if he is, in some sense, worth saving... In any case, this is an extraordinary film, certainly Polanski's best movie since "Chinatown" and a spectacular return to form after the altogether unremarkable "Ninth Gate".
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