Othello

A smaller and grittier The Shawshank Redemption. I haven't liked Defoe since I was a kid, but he was perfect here, Danny Trejo is my secret crush, and I like Rourke too, even though I didn't recognize him at all here. The direction is decent and tries not to take your eyes off the camera, so scenes like the razor in the shower, or the close-up of the slashing of the vein, for example, will make the weaker characters turn away with a guffaw. Some of the glimpses of prison life are hard to believe and I didn't really buy them, but what the hell... It was a hell of a good watch, and the last line of the film, "Better to rule in Hell than serve in Heaven," pretty much sums up what this is all about.

The duty of every respected Jew to show people how horrible the Holocaust was, using the resources at that person's disposal, led Maestro Polanski to come to terms with the past with The Pianist. And it does indeed fulfill the agreed assignment. Throughout the film, the Nazis are disgusting, stupid, narrow-minded pigs, while the Jewish community suffers and despairs unjustly. What we all know, and anyone who doesn't know it or denies it is an asshole. Meanwhile, the story of Władysław Szpilman unfolds (the similarity to Vladek Spiegelman from the Maus comics purely coincidental?), a brilliant pianist who finds it increasingly difficult to escape deportation. He is actually behind one of the few innovations compared to other war films, and that is the beautiful piano solos that the main character creates (and playing the piano without being able to touch the keys is definitely one of the most beautiful scenes in the film). Otherwise, the film does not bring anything new, which would perhaps not have mattered so much and I might have reached five stars if it were not for the fact that English is spoken in Poland and I can never get over these things.

A sad and depressing film. The beautiful and thorough scene structure and the amount of detail in the film convey the atmosphere of the time to the viewer (they say it's called neorealism -) ) and the ending is downright surprising.