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Schindler’s List Is Not About Goodness. It’s About a Man Who Learned the Price of a Person and Decided to Pay It.
The Transaction Oskar Schindler is a war profiteer. This needs to be said first, before the tears, before the speeches, before the girl in the red coat and the final scene at the grave, because Schindler’s List is a film that earns its emotion only if you understand what the emotion is built on. It…
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The Pianist Is Not About the Holocaust. It’s About the Man Who Was Left Over.
The Remainder Władysław Szpilman survives. That is the entire plot of The Pianist. A Polish-Jewish pianist in Warsaw survives the ghettoization, the deportations, the liquidation, the uprising, the demolition of the city. He survives when his family is loaded onto a train and he is pulled from the line by a man who recognizes him.…
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Apocalypse Now Is Not an Anti-War Film. That’s Why It’s Terrifying.
Here is what an anti-war film does. It shows you the suffering. It shows you the bodies, the grieving mothers, the soldiers who were boys yesterday. It shows you the cost. And it asks you, with the earnestness of a petition, to agree that war is bad. To feel the appropriate feelings. To leave the…