Rating: 
Summary: Masterpiece, an epic told with great lyric intensity
Review: I hesitatated going to see THE PIANIST because I could not imagine how another holocaust story could shed new light on this the darkest moment in human history but this film does shine new light and what light! I also thought Polanski had finished making great movies when he made Chinatown back in 1974. Wrong again. This film--which is a French, German, and British production--is as technologically impressive as Spielbergs great holocaust film Schindlers List. It is also a film that comes straight from the heart and soul as the film is directed by a survivor of the holocaust(Polanski)and is based on the memoir-novel written by another survivor--the films main character the pianist played by Adrian Brody. The scope of the film is immense covering the war from beginning to finish but the feel remains an intimate one as the events are all related through one mans eyes. The audience only sees what the main character sees. Thus the power of the film as we cannot help but empathise with him and perhaps even become the main character ourselves--we feel we share his every experience and sensation and thus it feels these things are happening to us. It is an English language film but through vast stretches there is very little dialogue just the sensory experiences of one man who is alone and such visceral intensity has rarely if ever before been brought to the audience with such profound results. The film is a great technological achievement and yet what really shines through is its lyric precision. No matter how powerful all the machines of war are and how much destruction they bring down on Poland the greatest instrument, the one that is most powerful is the one that speaks to and of mans highest nature, the piano. Few films make you feel you actually experienced an event but this one leaves you feeling you were there, and the music that plays at the close of the film feels like nothing less than a deliverance. The very highest recommendation.
Rating:
Summary: a masterwork
Review: The Pianist is a unique and beautiful film in that it tells the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman without marring the truth with pretense or bravado. The film, as a whole, presents a vision of world war 2 Poland that was painstakingly crafted as to give the viewer an idea of the chaos, cruelty, and reality that was the backdrop for the life of the protagonist. The plot is essentialy about the survival of Szpilman as Nazi Germany invaded his homeland, sending his family to concentration and labor camps to die.The cinematography is an achievement in itself and the film is historically accurate, in one scene even showing a Nazi cameraman filming the proceedings as the Nazis truly kept thorough records. This film does not hide the ungodly practices that were Nazi doctrine, and throughout the film, we see the arbitrary brutality that was the fate of so many polish citizens. A young woman is shot in the forehead when she asks what soldiers intend to do with their prisoners and a young boy is beaten to death trying to escape a prison wall, a scene that diector polanski lived through when he escaped nazi occupied Poland through a wall. However, because Wladyslaw Szpilman is a great artist , and more importantly, because he is very lucky, he manages to escape this ill-fates of his family members. It is through this journey that we become aquainted with the other characters in the film. These characters form the incredible depth of the film. The Polish people as a whole are not made out to be saintly patriots,one dimensional sufferers, or the subhuman manifestaion of Nazi theories.They are more accurately sculpted as human beings with weaknesses and strengths, and their own dark sides. Wladyslaw Szpilman's family represents a side of Poland that was intellegent and artistic, with strong and cohesive families, the embodiment of what so many of us strive for. For them, we feel sympathy. Their loss is truly tragic, because their fall is so great. They are not without their imperfections though, and this is shown succinctly when Wladyslaw's brother lets his sister know that he ," Wished I could have known you better..." before being sent to a camp. Also depicted, are characters who would steal a guandis and dying musician's money for survial, a below average intellegence propaghandist newspaper distibutor and prisoners who fight old women for food. On the other hand, we are not introduced to many Germans on an intimate level. The soldiers who are represented are usually brutal and murderous, fufilling the grand design of the Nazi plan. From soldiers, this behavior was solicited and required, but we also encounter a nasty german woman who would have the protagonist shot for being Jewish. This seems to suggest an evil nature of the society as a whole... until Wladyslaw meets a german officer who saves his life. The scene of their meeting is particularily striking and beautiful. Up until this point we have really only seen Wladyslaw Szpilman reacting to the chaos around him. Here he is confronted by the officer with the question of "who are you". Wladyslaw explains that he is a Pianist, but then stutters and stops..." I was a Pianist". And this is the state to which he has been reduced. He is no longer an artist. He is no longer human, nand does not look more alive than dead. He has been stripped of his humanity completely, and thus of his identity as THE PIANIST. But instead of killing him, the soldier asks him to play, and so is the character revealed to us. He is revelaed by his music, and while he plays, the officer listens, overwhelmed by the identity that Wladyslaw has recovered.
Rating:
Summary: Humanity is still there
Review: This DVD i was searching for last so many days and afterall got it from amazon.com. It's a very very good movie. What a brilliant acting and a true story too! After seeing this dark movie I came to conclusion that humanity is still there.
Rating: 
Summary: Cowardly
Review: To the Michigan reviewer. What the heck does this mean? "Or are you really that narrow-minded that nobody suffers like us?" I have No Clue as to what you are talking about. Be concise. The movie is well acted & directed. The fact that the story is true sickens me. If I find the movie boring due to the pianist's lack of backbone, that is my right. I do not hold well with spineless acquiescence nor willfull brutality. The mere fact that you enjoyed it seems to vilify your own sense of right and wrong. The entire movie imputes flight rather than fight. Wrong, wrong, wrong! National treasure? National coward!
Rating: 
Summary: Docu a must for Polanski admirers
Review: No one who cares about Roman Polanski's work should miss this DVD's taut documentary about "The Pianist" and its director. Billed as a making-of featurette, "A Story of Survival" transcends that reliably lightweight genre on the power of Polanski's words and vivid recollections. The director tells his personal story clear-eyed, almost matter-of-factly, but with heart. As he speaks, images from Nazi camera crews are intercut with nearly identical clips from "The Pianist," showing how the director used WWII film archives to ensure authenticity of the movie. The making-of includes recent footage of the real-life Wladyslaw Szpilman playing a Chopin nocturne (the pianist died in 2000). Polanski says he chose the autobiography of Polish musician Szpilman because it was written right after the war, when the memories were fresh. The book's detail of the Nazi occupation was "vividly true to me, a child of the same period," Polanski says. "The Pianist" looks fine, up to major studio standards. Audio is generally OK, in DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1, with a fairly tame mix that makes little use of the rear sound stage. Center-speaker dialog is noticeably muffled at times. The DVD opens with the studio's usual ads for upcoming films, particularly obtrusive given this film's subject matter and tone.
Rating:
Summary: artistic triumph
Review: Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" is a brilliantly produced tale based on the true story of a Polish Jew whose strong will to survive carried him through the darkest days of Nazi occupation of Poland. The acting is superlative in all the roles, from Adrian Brody's lead to lesser roles, like the well-dressed lady in the Warsaw ghetto who obsessively asks everyone, "Have you seen my husband?" A notable acting performance is also given in the role of the German captain who, as the Russians approach Poland, gives his overcoat to the pianist, partly out of kindness and partly to try to enlist his aid as the Germans are defeated and captured. The photography is superb, the attention to detail is excellent. This is Polanski's master work. Although the movie is bleak throughout, with much suffering and no light relief or moments of humor, it is also suffused with hope, with endurance, with the will to survive. One of the most moving scenes is when the pianist lifts the lid of a piano in the apartment where he hides. He cannot play it, for the sound might alert others, but he holds his hands over the keys, fingers the air, and mentally hears the piece his hands are playing. Although the theme is bleak, "The Pianist" will lift your heart. Thumbs up and the highest recommendation!
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding movie of the year
Review: This was the outstanding movie of the year. Though it was competing against movies such as the Hours, it was awesome in its portrayal of the Holocaust. Adrian Brody was superb as the main character. There was a balanced portrayal of people on the story, not a totally one-sided one. In Schindler's list for instance, the Jews who were making money off the other Jews such as Goldberg went off to South America in the book to escape the other Jews after the was. This was not shown in the movie. This movie has a different outlook. Though it was slow to some people, it did not give enough time for important parts such as the rise of the Warsaw Ghetto. The story shows the gifted musician and how he goes through the different phases of the war. Since he is a passive person, he does not know how to fight back. He is helped along by his Polish friends and a German. That part is sad, though realistic. The music is wonderful as is the direction by Polanski, though I hate him (not as a director, but as a person). It is shameful how the Miramax people did their best to discredit him for this movie and thankfully it failed. The movie deserves all the kudos that it got. It is different from Schindler's List and Life is Beautiful. Both of these movies are great, but so is this movie. I think that it deserves the Best picture too, Chicago was definitely not the right choice. This movie has more depth of character, storyline, acting and realism.
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and ultimately redemptive
Review: It's hard to watch this film and not think of the situation in the Middle East today. What is worse, being stuffed into cattle cars and sent to death camps or being blown up by suicide bombers (or bulldozed by machines of steel)? For me the answer to this strangely relevant question is the former. I know that the old Jewish Defense League that I recall from my college days, whose slogan was something like, "Never Again," would agree and so would most of the population of Israel. I think the terrorist Islamic groups ought to be required to view this film and/or some others like it on what happened to the Jews in Europe during the time of the Nazis so that they might have a better appreciation of why they will never be able to overrun Israel and why the United States continues to support Israel even while questioning some of Sharon's policies. Director Roman Polanski tells the familiar horror tale, this time with a concentration on the Jews of Warsaw and in particular on the famed pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman. (The screenplay by Ronald Hardwood is based on Szpilman's memoir). Polanski spares us none of the brutality or the sadomasochism that is an inevitable interpretation of the events. He has the Jews meekly acquiesce to the increasingly horrific Nazi demands, and then has them just lie down when told to and accept a bullet through the skull. (Actually the vast majority of the Jews were not shot, of course, since the bullets were too costly and needed elsewhere. Indeed, as long as I am doing an aside, the stupidity of the Nazis in wasting their resources in genocide contributed to their losing the war. Small irony. But of course that was a war they could not win anyway. If by some magic they could have gotten the Jews--especially Jewish physicists--to work for them, that would have been their only chance, which once again demonstrates the self-destructive nature of Hitler and his followers.) Polanski shows us the Jews who collaborated with the Nazis and he even has a Jewish boy in the compound as they await the cattle cars selling candy at inflated prices, and then later a Nazi who talks to his Jewish workers about trading goods and says, rubbing his fingers together, "That's what you're good at, isn't it?" It is interesting to compare The Pianist with Vittoria De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1971), an entirely different sort of film, but one with a similar theme and some similar scenes as the Jews, this time Italian Jews, are loaded into the cattle cars. The experience in these films is always the same for me in at least one respect. I want so much to shout: "Do something! Don't let it happen! Charge them with the sheer mass of your bodies, if nothing else. Better to die fighting than to die like cattle." But of course I was not there. We think we know what we would do, but unless we are confronted with the actual situation, we don't know. And of course we have hindsight. At one point, Szpilman and his brother are talking as they eat their thin soup and their bread. The brother tells him that the cattle cars are going to Treblinka but they return empty and that there are no cars containing food that go that way. He concludes, "They are exterminating us." Polanski's point is that the Nazis were able to actually commit their ghastly mass murders (and the German populace to excuse them) because they had come to believe that Jews were not human and that they were only killing vermin. The Jews had been demonized, which is the first step toward genocide. We declare that our enemies are not human, and that allows us to kill them with moral impunity. I had a new thought while I watched this time, thinking: a respect for animals and a belief in animal rights might serve as a moral buffer so that when one group of people hate each other and begin to turn the other into animals, they will still have a step to go before they can begin the mass murders. It is in the second half when Szpilman goes into hiding that Polanski's film distinguishes itself. Here the focus is entirely on Szpilman and his need to survive. The cinematography of the Warsaw streets, the apartments he lives in, the snow, the gray buildings, the people below in the streets, the hunger, the music that he hears in his mind but cannot play, the burned-out buildings, and then the scene in which the German officer says, "Play something" and he does. It is here that the film becomes magical and a testament to the best that is in humans. Note that the pianist has become in his beard and his persecution a Christ-like figure who never raised a hand against anyone. He is the Christ who turned the other cheek. And note that it is his ethereal talent as a great musician that saves him. This is Polanski's message and the reason he made the film. The best that is in humans can rise above the brute that is in humans. See this for Adrien Brody, who gave it everything he had, and then some. His performance will haunt you. Polanski's clear, Hollywood-like, almost Spielbergian direction, tells the story a bit too brightly at times, and a bit too simplistically at others, but he has planned well so that in the end we see that he has told it brilliantly. For those who have never actually had the details of the Holocaust acted out for them, this will be quite an eye-opener and a chilling, depressing and deeply disturbing experience. And see it because we need to be reminded of what can happen when we give way to hate and prejudice.
Rating:
Summary: This is a keeper. Required viewing!
Review: I thought, another stereotypical albeit well-baked movie about a minority group (Jewish) in the throes of the holocaust. How big a deal could that be? Boy, did I underestimate Polanski's (China Town, Ninth Gate) mettle as a story teller! Half-way through the movie, you'll be far too immersed in the vein of the story to worry about your preconceived notions about an archetypic war movie. Theme-wise, this is a story of Szpilman (Adrien Brody), a Jewish pianist who is ghettoised when the Nazis invade Poland. A frail and delicate man, he is ill-equipped to cope with the rigours imposed, or the political shenanigans his colleagues employ to try and gain favour. His music is his continual companion and his sole retreat from the misery. All the elements of a WWII movie are smooshed in -- the litany of Nazi cruelty, the change in the Jews from helpless victims to freedom fighters, the triumph of the human spirit etc etc. So those of you anticipating some sort of action and suspense won't be disappointed. But where the movie transcends expectations is its superlative control of the characters -- Germans or Jews -- as flesh-and-blood human beings, highlighting their fears and the motivations behind why they did what they did. The Pianist potrays a vivid barbaric spectre of WW II as poignant as La Vita è bella or Sophie's Choice, as visually stunning as Saving Private Ryan or Platoon, and as emotionally epic as Full Metal Jacket or Schindler's List. IN fact, more like La Vita è bella or Sophie's Choice perhaps, this is a deeply personal narrative that real and genuine people can relate to and will treasure for the lessons that may be draw from it. I appreciated its honesty -- Polanski refuses to trade on sentimentality to achieve its power. Szpilman's reluctance to let us in on his thoughts about his family, friends, and the people who helped keep him alive make him appear aloof, but the reality is so far beyond normal comprehension that emotional numbness may be the only appropriate response. When Brody finds a kindred soul in the German Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann) who discovers his hiding place, however, we are finally drawn into the humanity of his character. It is here that the soulful music of Chopin's Nocturne in C played by Szpilman in a hollowed-out apartment in the midst of desolation lends a bizarre beauty to the unfathomable night. An important message, this -- not all the Germans were evil. While you may occasionally feel that Polanski was a bit too obvious with the good/bad personifications (e.g., the evil Germans were all rugged & scowling whereas the protagonists heroic underground rebel Jews were all fairly handsome and jovial), you'll nevertheless finish the movie with some very beautiful imagery that'll linger in your mind for a while, in fact if my weak-kneed experience is any indication, perhaps in your eyes too. And what an incredibly ironic timing it will be given the supposed "shock and awe" we are being served in Iraq as I write.
Rating:
Summary: Some lied when they vowed "Never Again"
Review: For the record, let me comment on Dennis Littrell on his same review of this film. I find his opening statement repulsive, as he used the persecution of Jews during WW II as an excuse to justify Zionist persecution against the Palestinians here. Littrell is solely wrong if he thinks The Pianist is a film of Jewish supremacy overcoming all odds. Adrian Brody commented that in Szpilman's book (which this film is based), he narrates his experiences in an objective view. There were not just evil Nazis running around persecuting Poles and Jews, but there good Poles and bad Poles, good Jews and bad Jews and even good Germans among Nazi ranks. Even Polanski allows this in his film, where poor and suffering Jews complain of rich and influential Jews doing nothing to allevate their suffering. You can see the extreme contrast of rich and poor gap where you see the Jews in the restaurant where Szpilman plays the piano and the streets where you can see corpses lying on street, victims of starvation. In the beginning of the film, the Germans have invaded Poland and the Szpilman family are adjusting their lives to the new ruling of the Nazi Germans. They find their living conditions deteriorate as they are hustled away from their comfortable home to Ghetto and finally to the "melting pot". We see two brothers conflicting with each other as Hendrik, Szpilman's brother did not like the way he supposedly grovel to the authorities and using his privilage as a famous pianist which many Jews may envy. Even Hendrik was ungrateful when his brother freed him from prison. "Are you mad?" Szpilman asked. Hendrik's reply was "That is also my business." Szpilman's influence was so great that he was spared when his family was sent off to the gas chambers. He lost every one of his family and when he goes back to the Ghetto where virtually all Jews were wiped out, here is a man completely devastated. We see the second half of the movie being akin to The Fugitive where he wriggles away from the claws of ever-suspecting Nazis. When caught by Captain Wilm Hosenfeld and asked to play the piano, he plays the piano for the first time in a few years he had to be in silence for fear of alerting those around him (in apartment where he lives, he cannot play the piano as to alert everybody around him that there is a hiding Jew). This is one of the most redemptive scenes in the history of film, Szpilman plays the Chopin's Ballade reflecting the ordeal he went through. It is akin to Furtwangler conducting the great Beethoven Ninth in 1942 with battlefield sounds heard from distant. At this age, where we cannot foretell the conclusion to the Middle East conflict and Americans squandering up their operation in Iraq, the pathetic music of MTV is contrary to music in Szpilman's time. Great music can only be created with great suffering. Gustav Mahler said that if his life flows like a calm meadow, he would not have the ability to compose anything. The classical music age has lost it's Szpilmans, Furtwanglers, Menuhins and the like. When another horrific World War comes, will there be another artist like Szpilman? Time can only tell.
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