Schindler's List
I recently came upon a video with Kate Moss being projected as a hologram at some technology event. Now that's fucking awesome that we can do that, but the music they picked for this? The theme from Schindler's List. Ok, whoever picked that music should be fired immediately for horrible taste and lack of respect.
Using Beethoven for ringtones is one thing, but when I think of showcasing some new technology, I'm thinking, lessee, Also Sprach Zarathustra. I don't think using music honouring those that were massacred and survived the Holocaust, the most tragic, senseless religiously motivated act in several centuries, is appropriate.
Let me tell you a bit about Schindler's List and the movie based on it.
It has been called one of the finest movies ever made. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, music by John Williams. It is based off of the true story of a man named Oskar Schindler, a businessman from Czechoslovakia who came to Krakow hoping to hire the slave labour of Jews and Poles who were held captive in a ghetto. Yeah that doesn't sound too honourable at first, but his manufacturing business was failing and he didn't have much other choice.
To make a very long and complicated story short, he makes a deal with the Nazis to label his workers (who live in the ghetto) as necessary and they aren't picked up by the Gestapo when the leave the ghetto. The key is, his administrator, Itzhak Stern, deems a lot of them "essential" even women, children, old men, the infirmed, in order to save them, to which Schindler does not stop, but he isn't too happy about it either.
Schindler watches and is horrified as a new Nazi guy comes and razes the ghetto turning it into a concentration camp. This is an epiphany to him and when an order is sent down from the SS to dismantle the camp and send them all off to Auschwitz, he pleads and pays a huge sum to move his workers on "the list" to his old home of Moravia, where his main factory is. He also goes practically bankrupt bribing Nazi officials to protect them until the war ends.
In the end, Schindler was able to save 1,100 people from the Holocaust, right under the Nazis' nose, and at the end of the movie, the real major characters line up hand-in-hand with the actors that portrayed them and they walk past his real grave in Israel, each placing a stone on it.
The population of Poland at the time was around 4000. It is amazing what a single man accomplished and including their descendants, the total number is 6,000 lives saved.
It is the most moving piece of music and movie I have ever witnessed, and I haven't even seen the movie all the way through at one, but in bits. If you are not moved by this movie and vicariously the tragedy that was the Holocaust, then you are a heartless, worthless human being. Probably a muslim, fundamentalist christian, or european.
Using Beethoven for ringtones is one thing, but when I think of showcasing some new technology, I'm thinking, lessee, Also Sprach Zarathustra. I don't think using music honouring those that were massacred and survived the Holocaust, the most tragic, senseless religiously motivated act in several centuries, is appropriate.
Let me tell you a bit about Schindler's List and the movie based on it.
It has been called one of the finest movies ever made. Directed by Stephen Spielberg, music by John Williams. It is based off of the true story of a man named Oskar Schindler, a businessman from Czechoslovakia who came to Krakow hoping to hire the slave labour of Jews and Poles who were held captive in a ghetto. Yeah that doesn't sound too honourable at first, but his manufacturing business was failing and he didn't have much other choice.
To make a very long and complicated story short, he makes a deal with the Nazis to label his workers (who live in the ghetto) as necessary and they aren't picked up by the Gestapo when the leave the ghetto. The key is, his administrator, Itzhak Stern, deems a lot of them "essential" even women, children, old men, the infirmed, in order to save them, to which Schindler does not stop, but he isn't too happy about it either.
Schindler watches and is horrified as a new Nazi guy comes and razes the ghetto turning it into a concentration camp. This is an epiphany to him and when an order is sent down from the SS to dismantle the camp and send them all off to Auschwitz, he pleads and pays a huge sum to move his workers on "the list" to his old home of Moravia, where his main factory is. He also goes practically bankrupt bribing Nazi officials to protect them until the war ends.
In the end, Schindler was able to save 1,100 people from the Holocaust, right under the Nazis' nose, and at the end of the movie, the real major characters line up hand-in-hand with the actors that portrayed them and they walk past his real grave in Israel, each placing a stone on it.
The population of Poland at the time was around 4000. It is amazing what a single man accomplished and including their descendants, the total number is 6,000 lives saved.
It is the most moving piece of music and movie I have ever witnessed, and I haven't even seen the movie all the way through at one, but in bits. If you are not moved by this movie and vicariously the tragedy that was the Holocaust, then you are a heartless, worthless human being. Probably a muslim, fundamentalist christian, or european.