Megamind To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Derrick Gibbons An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

can545-1 What the movie does not show enough is that the spoils of war are now returned to families out of sheer GREED by the families. They are not returned to stay in the museum of their choice, but given back to the families after several generations to keep or sell as they choose, even when the will says to donate it to the country. Few family members were alive to see the works or have any personal significance to them.The attitude from the Russians is simple--we took it, it belongs to us. I think that is stealing but because it is the Russians, no one does anything about it. i bet the Jews of Russian heritage do not claim a single Russian piece of art. Russia is about a democratic as Mao Zedong.What the movie also does not say is that works of art have been taken by all nations since time began. It makes it out to be only the Jews that suffer this indignant slap.In addition, the movie never discusses the Jews blame for the war waged on them--see the 1933 declaration of war by the Jews against Germany and Herschel Grynspan killing the German ambassador in Paris, the Versailles treaty which humiliated the Germans that was a Jewish creation, as causes for the hatred.No Jew deserved to die, but they were not as innocent as is portrayed. The Rape of Europa is about the greed of nations and individuals to reclaim what was theirs when they left it or was taken from them.Shall we give the US back to the native Americans or the gold in Spain back to the Incas?The greed here is more one sided than shown.

samkan Really fascinating glimpse on WWII from a perspective not often viewed. I didn't like the USER COMMENTS herein about war-is-war, same-old-stuff, what-do-you-expect, etc. Such might be true but here we get to see the effects of modern war on the theme of plunder and booty: bombing, communications, transit, etc.I will concede that some of the narrators/narration had sort of a lofty, elevated sense of themselves and/or their concern. Hey, war is a fact of life and if the uneducated rabble didn't fight it you art affectionadoes wouldn't be around to bid 6 million at Soothebys. But the film is great, however intended, because it conveys so many human traits at work; e.g., pride, nostalgia, sense-of-self, etc., as well as greed, pretensions, etc.I especially liked learning that we Americans actually appointed guys to preserve, protect, etc., art. Don't think for a second such was done for any reason other than political concerns! Also, I couldn't help think that when tired, ragged, homesick GI's uncovered some of the troves they cared not about art but rather the hooters on those painted babes.

Terrell-4 How much is a life worth? How much is a great cultural work of art worth? It's impossible to assign a value to either, except to say they both are invaluable. The Rape of Europa is a fine, fascinating documentary about the German plunder of significant art during WWII, organized as meticulously as the Germans organized the murder of millions of human beings. This film illustrates and explains the wholesale looting on a vast scale of easily a fifth of Europe's significant cultural treasures. And where these treasures were considered a part of Jewish or Slavic culture, they were destroyed. While the Nazi leaders were psychopathic, racist thugs, it's important to remember that their crimes were made possible by all those German men and women, mostly not Nazis, who worked each day at making stealing and killing possible, then returned to their homes to play with their children, eat their braised rabbit, make love to their spouses and then start the next day again. One can't plead ignorance when one is filling a syringe with poison in a mental institution, or attaching explosives to a beautiful Renaissance bridge, or typing an order for more pencils while smelling the near-by crematoriums at work. This is the banality of evil that makes widespread evil possible. Hitler was fascinated by art. He considered himself an artist of the first rank. As German dictator, he was determined to bring to Germany all the great art of Europe. He had plans for a huge art museum at Linz, his childhood home. He determined what was good art and was not art (modern art was Jewish art, in his view, and should be destroyed). With German thoroughness, his minions drew up of lists of cultural treasures, raided public and private museums in occupied countries, destroyed what they disapproved up, and organized incredible amounts of transport to bring this art into Germany. All the while, taking their cue from Hitler and Goering, Nazi functionaries and German Army officer suddenly became passionate art collectors. All they had to do was take what they wanted. German bureaucrats knew what they were after even as German troops invaded a country. For Slavic countries like Poland, it was a matter more of destroying a culture than taking the art. When German soldiers were at the front in need of clothes, ammunition and supplies, when gasoline was always in short supply, thousands of boxcars were filled with looted art and sent by special trains back to Germany, continuing even as the war was almost over. When Allied bombing began in earnest and when the invasion of Italy began, it became clear that, while the Allies did not know the extent of German looting, widespread destruction of Europe's cultural heritage by the Allies should be avoided where possible. Thanks to Dwight Eisenhower, a small group of young American artists, curators and art historians were recruited to join the Army and identify and try to preserve what they could as the fighting moved forward. These men, called the monuments men, are the heroes of this story. There were fewer than four hundred of them doing a risky job with few resources and not much clout. They performed incredible feats of preservation, working to save great art and return it from where it was looted. If the first half of The Rape of Europa is shocking, even after so many years have passed, the second half is almost redeeming. For these men, several of whom are interviewed, their work was clearly intensely satisfying. They were saving an essential part of what makes us civilized. The Rape of Europa covers a great deal of ground, perhaps too much, but it all is fascinating. Probably separate documentaries could be made about the immense effort it has been taking to make museums today return works of art they possess to the descendants of those who once owned the art...or to the young German who now has undertaken to return looted Torah crowns to the Jewish descendants...or the huge work during the war of museum curators and staff to pack and hide their museums' art from the Germans...or to the middle-aged, unremarkable French woman who was able to secretly keep lists of individual works of art and their destinations that the Germans were sending out of Paris...or the behavior of the German armies in Italy who destroyed without rational reason great historical buildings and bridges as they retreated north...or all that art the Soviets looted from Germany which now sits in the thousands in the basements of Russian museums. What separates humanity from other animals is that we create art...and that we are so easily led to destroy the art we create, as well as to kill vast numbers of our brothers and sisters.

imxo "The Rape of Europa" is a documentary film about the Nazis' concerted, organized, and methodical theft of the art patrimony of Europe during the Second World War, and the film tilts heavily toward the Nazis' theft of art from Jewish collections. Ultimately, this emphasis on the anti-Jewishness of the Nazi program is the film's weakness. While the documentary appears to shine a light on the loathsome Nazis, there is also a detectable anti-German subtext to the film and, in particular, the Austrians come in for muted scorn.No one can come to the defense of the megalomaniac Adolf Hitler, so why do some people continue to go out of their way to slander him as a "bad artist." Let's be honest here, that disturbed man was without a doubt a better artist/painter than 99.9 percent of all of us reading this IMDb forum. Has anyone ever heard of Winston Churchill being described as a "bad painter?" To slap the "bad artist" tag on Hitler comes across as mere propaganda, and propaganda always casts doubt on the ultimate truth of a work of non-fiction. There is a also a noticeable tone of artistic condescension in this film, especially in interview segments with author Lynn H. Nicholas.The film touches on the controversy surrounding Gustav Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. Bloch-Bauer herself wanted the portrait to go to the Austrian State Gallery upon the death of her husband, but when he fled Austria the Nazis apparently confiscated the painting. While the painting did eventually make its way to the Austrian State Gallery after the war, it was decided in the 1990's to remove the painting from the that gallery and award it to Bloch-Bauer's remaining relatives. They subsequently sold this family heirloom for something in the neighborhood of 100 million dollars. So much for honoring Block-Bauer's bequest. One might get the impression that the whole affair was not about truth or justice or rightful ownership, but about money.This film would be a good primer for those who have heard relatively little about the destruction wrought on Europe and its culture by World War II. However, there must be hundreds of other documentary films that touch on the subject in a better way. I found Joan Allen's narration to be particularly weak, her lightweight voice lacking the authority required in a serious documentary film. She's certainly no Alexander Scourby.I do not think that anyone anywhere can adequately convey the hell on earth that was the Second World War. This narrowly focused film only confirms that view.