http://www.jidaily.com/c48e4?utm_source=Jewish+Ideas+Daily+Insider&utm_campaign=ae2559882d-Insider&utm_medium=email
“……. that turns Schindler into a feel-good movie about the handful of Jews who survived thanks to our hero. It doesn’t minimize the real Schindler’s achievement to point out that the Holocaust was about the doomed many, not the relatively lucky few. Pity the poor Jews who didn’t know him.”
Universal has just brought out a 20th-anniversary Blu-ray edition of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie, Schindler’s List. Don’t blame whoever got stuck writing the box copy—”Experience one of the most historically significant films of all time like never before,” and so on—for a certain awkwardness about how best to strike the celebratory note. The package is also notably stingy with the undignified extras that usually tempt consumers to repurchase a beloved classic, but what were you expecting, a blooper reel?
That crack isn’t meant to be gratuitous, believe me. Call it a reminder that Schindler’s List is every bit as much a Hollywood product as Groundhog Day, which came out the same year. Unlike Groundhog Day, it’s got the Academy Awards—seven of them—to prove it. In my book, nothing that wins that many Oscars can be altogether holy.
However ennobled by its topic, the movie was nonetheless conceived as entertainment—of a very somber sort, to be sure—by one of the most gifted of all crowd-pleasing directors. That is, it was meant to be accessible and popular as well as impressive. Still, my fellow oldsters may recall how some African American high-school students in Oakland who got sent to see the thing a month or so after its premiere—on MLK Day, no less—stirred up nationwide consternation by laughing at some scenes. They’d committed what was already the sin of treating Schindler as just another afternoon at the multiplex.