Tag: Schindler’s List

Defining Greatness

Is The Avengers a great movie? In this day and age, what sets a movie apart from being great and being culturally relevant?

Do you know what a great movie is?

“The Avengers” is not it. If you think it is, I’m starting to think it is not that you are wrong but that you are sadly naïve. Maybe you have a good reason to defend why it is great, why it is worthy of its praise, why it is a cultural landmark, but more likely, you had fun.

It is admirable that you have fun at the movies. A critic’s job should be to encourage the joy of going to a movie theater and watching with an enraptured audience. And fun and entertainment is inseparable from art. This much is obvious.

Hopefully my reason for targeting “The Avengers” is clear too. I don’t mean to attack those who had fun at it specifically. In fact, I did as well. But it’s the movie of the week, and those defending it have somehow convinced the world of its importance. It is not enough that this film is popular and fun, for the audience that loves it most feels it cannot have detractors either. It cannot be seen only as a popcorn movie or as something other than a landmark achievement, and those who dislike it do so because they don’t respect the art of comic books.

I’ve heard Michael Uslan, the producer of every Batman movie ever made, opine twice in person that comic books deserve a place in the canon of American folklore and great art. And yet when you see a movie like “The Avengers” raking in the record weekend high of $207 million domestically alone (it made even more last week overseas), it’s hard to see how any comic book fan can still call their culture neglected. Continue reading “Defining Greatness”

Shoah (1985)

 

“They were stacked like wood.” This is how the Nazis disposed of thousands of Jewish bodies in the Holocaust.

“They fell out like potatoes.” This is how the Jews looked as hundreds simultaneously tumbled out of gas chambers.

“They cried like old women.” This is how Jewish prisoners who were forced to work at Auschwitz and Treblinka reacted to seeing their dead families and friends.

And these are the words from the Devil’s mouth himself, a Nazi officer confessing to documentarian Claude Lanzmann the horror he perpetrated and the repulsive stench of the camps that still lingers in his nostrils.

This is one of the more powerful moments from “Shoah,” the most pivotal film ever made about the Holocaust.

Nearly 10 hours in length and mostly subtitled, “Shoah” proved to be the roughest, most demanding cinematic marathon of my life.

It is a harrowing, torturous documentary made by a ruthless director, French born director Claude Lanzmann.

Lanzmann asks tough questions, paints horrid visuals through testimonials alone and educates to an unspeakable degree. For Lanzmann, the purpose of “Shoah” is to document everything that surrounds the Holocaust to serve as a chilling reminder of our dark history. Continue reading “Shoah (1985)”