jcsmith-00566
Schindler's List is a cinematic masterpiece and Steven Spielberg's best film. This is a perfect movie, so I am giving it an A+, for its amazing story, flawless performances, cinematography, and its great score.
This movie is the best 90s Best Picture by a lot. Now the 90s was the worst year for Best Picture choices, think about all the movies that should have won the award. Saving Private Ryan ( Spielberg's second best film) should have beaten Shakespeare in Love, L.A. Confidential should have beat Titanic, really anything could have beaten Titanic. Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption or Quiz Show should have beaten Forrest Gump, and finally, the one the pissed me off the most was how Goodfellas should have beaten Dances with Wolves, one of the worst movies ever made. But I do agree with American Beauty, Unforgiven, The Silence of the Lambs, and this movie winning Best Picture.
I would like to talk about the acting Schindler's List because let me tell you, it was flawless, it hurts me to know that Tommy Lee Jones beat Ralph Fiennes in the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Now Tommy Lee Jones did a great job, but comparing the type of role that Jones and Fiennes did, Fiennes did a better job acting. I think that Ralph did the best job acting in Schindler's List. Now I can see why Liam Neeson did not win Best Actor because he was up against Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, also Neeson did a good job in the role but he could have done better. Ben Kingsley delivers another amazing performance as Itzhak Stern, he is Oskar's assistant, he almost dies about three times, I was sad that Kingsley did not get a nomination because again he gives the audience an amazing performance.
What I found interesting about Schindler's List was that Spielberg had originally pitched the idea to Martin Scorsese and Roman Polanski because how tough the subject was. Spielberg did not think that he was up to make a movie about the Holocaust. But to be honest I think that only Spielberg could have made Schindler's List and that is saying something because I am a big Scorsese fan. The way Schindler's List was made is flawless, it is a mostly black and white film, but the way Allan Starski and Ewa Braun ( the art directors) incorporated the use of color and black and white is excellent.
Schindler's List is a long movie, so if you plan on watching it you should take three hours out of your day. It starts out with a Jewish family singing a song before dinner, they light a candle and you see the flame but everything else then turns black and white. You then watch Oskar ( Schindler) get ready for a party hosted by the Nazi party, and that is where you find out who Oskar is. The next twenty minutes is watching Oskar make connections with Nazis' and jews'. Fast forward 20ish minutes, and you get to watch the liquidation of the ghettos, now this scene is pretty intense and it is the most violent scene in the movie. Schindler's List is an essential movie to watch, and you will probably watch it in school. I will say that you can probably show this movie to your kids when they are going into freshman year of high school, because watching movies for the first time in school gives the movie a certain reputation, and people end up not liking it. Now that does not go for all movies, but most.
If you plan on showing Schindler's List to your kids, just remember to wait until they are going into high school, that they know about the Holocaust, and that they can sit through it respectively. Keep in mind that Schindler's List is still rated R for a reason, the big reason it is rated R is that of the ongoing violence and intense scenes. But there is still sexuality and nudity spread out through the movie. The nudity in Schindler's List is both sexual at some points but also non-sexual, in fact, most of the nudity is nonsexual. Just keep that in mind before showing this to your kids. Also if you don't like your kids hear vulgar language, there are twelve F word uses in the movie along with other bad words.
Schindler's List reminds me of Roman Polanski's 2002 holocaust drama The Pianist because it tells a story about the struggle for survival during the Holocaust. But that is the only movie it reminds me of. Now when I told people that, they were surprised that I did not think it was like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and it does not, the only thing Schindler's List and The Boy in the Striped Pajamas have in common is that they are both about the Holocaust, and to be completely honest I really did not like The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
To end the review, I would like to say that I think Schindler's List is a cinematic masterpiece and the best 90s Best Picture, and how it is one of the best movies ever made. My final grade for Schindler's List is an A+, for its amazing story, flawless performances, cinematography, and its great score.
