Schindler’s List (1993)*

A true story of character evolution during the holocaust, Schindler’s List is on a short list of must-see genre films set in and around WWII. When we first meet Oskar Schindler, he is a greedy capitalist, who is seeking to join the war production effort by exploiting Jews for finance and labor. He comes to a stirring realization that they are not commodities, but humans. To not be moved by this movie is to not have seen it. I couldn’t look away feeling, in some way, that I owed a debt to the real Schindler to learn of his efforts.

Awf Hand gives Four out of four stars.

*Time Magazine top 100 films of all time AND Yahoo’s 100 movies to see before you die.

It's a phenomenal movie. A triumph of set design, acting, cinematography and direction. Some scenes I would like to mention:

-The scene where the Nazis are coming up to the ghetto hospital to kill all the patients and the staff manages to euthanize them all before the Nazis can shoot them. There's a wonderful shot of the staff with slight, proud and defiant smiles on their faces
-The sequence in the restaurant near the beginning where Schindler takes a stack of bills and his natural charisma and turns himself from a nobody to a "Why that's Oskar Schindler!" in the course of a few hours. Wonderfully acted and completely convincing
-Pretty much any time Ben Kingsley and Liam Neeson are in the same scene

You know, it constantly blows my mind that OS was 34 when he "did his thing". The same age as me.

I have an awesome collection of level 80 WoW toons.

It's very interesting to see Spielberg apply his old Hollywood technique and summer blockbuster sensibilities to a kind of subject matter that isn't usually associated with those things.

It would be very easy to write this off as an American Beauty/The Dark Knight kind of thing: a cinematic training bra for people who aren't used to taking movies seriously. Unlike those flicks, though, Schindler's List manages to be excellent anyway. I don't know if it could have been anyone but Spielberg.