SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)

Country: USA
Language: English | Hebrew | German | Polish
Director: Steven Spielberg

Schindler’s List is a film about Oskar Schindler, a German businessman established in Poland. It is directed by Steven Spielberg and, in my opinion, is his best work ever.

The film revolves around the Holocaust as Schindler struggles to wit it out in the beginning and later on tries hard to save each life he can. This is probably the most graphic film on the subject and at times you feel grateful that it is shot in black and white.

It kind of works as a documentary that takes you inside the Nazi occupied Jewish ghetto, Auschwitz and other such places, you see the live telecast of atrocities with very profound background music.

Spielberg has surpassed himself and directed one of the best pictures on the subject. He really makes you feel the pain of so many innocent people and you wonder how and why did it happen at all…

I, personally, never judged Nazis and even praised them subtly as they were the real reason that weakened the English and forced them to abandon their colonies, and hence, India became independent. But Schindler’s List made me realize what I had done and made me feel guilty for even having pronounced the word “human” in a sentence that carries the word “Nazi”. So, if a film can change one heart, I think it is successful.

Liam Neeson is a very talented actor but he is too underrated. He really deserved an Oscar for this performance. Precisely, Liam Neeson is Oskar Schindler.

Ralph Fiennes is so good an actor that you don’t even want to praise him for his role of Amon Göth. Fiennes is also much underrated.

The use of color in the filming is so precise that you sometimes wonder if it is a film or a painting trying to communicate something to you.

QUENTIN TARANTINO

If I say that Quentin Tarantino is God’s greatest gift to movie-making, I will not be exaggerating.

He is an angel sent to save so many things and to give a new form to many older faces. Tarantino is not just a director, he is a writer as well and an excellent one at that. His films have a strong visual appeal and at the same time his dialogs are nothing less than literature.

Tarantino has made us remember the B-Class that has always entertained us and has always gone unacknowledged. He has given us not only immortal characters but different immortal worlds that one desperately wants to visit.

There is no other man in film-making business that is so open to new ideas and presents them so well.

He is coherent in his own way but when you oblige him to be coherent, he says “Coherence, What’s that shit?” But in the end once again what you get is a masterpiece.

The cinematography of his films is such that you get hypnotized just as you get hypnotized by McDonald’s logo when you are really hungry. It gives his films a tasty feeling as if you were not watching a movie but eating the “Big Kahuna Burger”.

Just like his films are homage to older genres, he is homage to Hollywood itself.

OLIVER STONE

The films that we see are the works of directors just like the novels we read are the works of writers. So, it is not possible to speak of cinema without speaking about the directors who created it. Hence, I started these write-ups on directors of feature films starting with the ones I like most.

And to begin with, Oliver Stone is a well deserving candidate. I consider Stone one of the best directors of Hollywood because he is capable of keeping a storyline coherent mixing reality and drama just in the right measurements and then he has his own subtle style coming through.

With films so different from each other like U-Turn and Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July and Natural Born Killers, all well directed and great in their own way, Stone has proved again and again that he is able to direct different actors as well as scripts.

What makes a director really good is the viewers’ faith in him that if his name associated with a project there is no idiocy expected. I think Oliver Stone qualifies that test and you don’t expect a mediocre film if he is the director.