9/3/23
Newsletter #447
The Crack of Dawn
I noticed a long time ago that the people around me seemed to think that any new movie was automatically good. New equals good. Six months or a year later, you can say anything you want about a film and nobody will argue with you, but when it’s new, and particularly if they’ve just seen it, it’s holy. Say anything negative to soon and you are a blasphemer.
Here’s an extreme example. I saw Schindler’s List (1993) right before I went down to New Zealand for the first time to make those Hercules movies. I was appalled. In my estimation, Steven Spielberg got everything wrong. Oscar Schindler is a bad man who becomes a good man? A guy who joined the Nazi Party as soon as they took power in 1933? Who, as soon as it was possible, began using Jewish slave labor in his factories? Schindler didn’t save a trainload of Jews from going to Auschwitz until 1945. The man used slave labor for twelve years, then he saved some people and became a good guy? Had Oscar Schindler not saved the Jews on that train, right near the end of a war that Germany was obviously and rapidly losing, he would have been tried and hung at the Nuremburg trials. I really like Liam Neeson, but the scene near the end of him receiving a thank you card and him breaking down in tears is an embarrassment. He begins sobbing and says something along the lines of, “This ring on my finger here could have saved another Jew.” The next day I bought the book, and guess what? That bullshit never happened. They did give him a card, which he took and wordlessly drove away.
Anyway, saying that I did not like Schindler’s List in 1993 not only made me a bad person – a pathetic person, really – it also made me an Antisemite. Christians were accusing me, a Jew, of being an Antisemite because I didn’t like that movie. I assure you that I only saw the movie once in the theater when it came out. But some part of me – my tuchus perhaps – is still sitting there watching old Jews put stones on Schindler’s grave. After the third stone was slowly and reverently placed on the headstone, the camera tilts up and there’s a long line of old Jews waiting their turn, I thought, “I’m going to die here.”
It’s been 30 years since I saw the film, but I vaguely recall that Schindler befriends Mohandas Gandhi along the way. Obviously, I must be mistaken.
Just as the film was shot in gorgeous black and white (accolades to Spielberg’s long-time cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski), Mr. Spielberg sees issues in black and white. Oscar Schindler is a bad man who miraculously becomes a good man. That he may actually have been nothing more than a heartless opportunist who saved some lives at just the moment it also saved his miserable life is unthinkable. On the Oscars about five or six years ago, there was a montage of “The Great Heroes of Cinema” and Schindler was included. Oscar Schindler was the best Nazi ever.
While I’m on it, would General George C. Marshall, the Head of the Joint Chiefs of staff during World War II, really take the time to reassure a mother that her last remaining son would be given special treatment during the D-Day invasion? In the movie Saving Private Ryan there is a scene with General Marshall, with a superimposed title stating that it’s him, calming the mother, and making promises. That never happened. The whole concept is idiotic on a grand scale. I remember thinking at the time, “If I were a member of George Marshall’s family I’d sue.”
I haven’t seen Barbie, nor do I intend to. Barbie is a two-hour commercial for a toy. Since the film made money, you should brace yourselves for an onslaught of movies based on toys. Not that Hollywood wasn’t already making them, like Super Mario Brothers or The Lego Movie, but now that will be their primary motivation for at least a year. Production of movies based on toys will slow down when they cease making money, as they inevitably must. Toys are a bad impetus for making movies. If you can get toys out of your movie afterward, that’s swell, but if you’re making a movie based on a toy, you’re not in the film business, you’re in the toy business.
Some part of me – possibly my tuchus again – hopes that they never settle the writer’s strike. Since the writing particularly these days is so awful, they should just replace all of the writers with AI, which I have no doubt will do a better job. If people will buy movies and TV written by AI, that’s what they deserve.
And another thing . . .