can a movie review make you cry?

[lcohen]

i just read roger ebert's review of "shoah." he periodically reviews great movies, so this review was written just a week ago, of a movie that was released in 1985--apparently they showed it downtown last week and i wish i had known. here's the review

Comments

[catya]

Wow :(

[pantryslut]

I have...mixed feelings about Shoah, which I tried to see when it was released, and once after.

[lcohen]

can you talk about how they are mixed?

i don't recall having mixed feelings, but i saw it so long ago that as i said, i just have some vague recollections. though actually, there is one scene that i remember one exchange from, vividly. but just one.

[pantryslut]

Ebert (inadvertently) nails it with the bit about the questions asked -- so much banal detail, and yes I understand why, but nine hours of "you cut their hair with scissors?" I just couldn't do it. I found it dreadfully, numbingly boring. Static talking heads and fields of Polish wheat. That's my memory of Shoah.

So: I'm glad it was made, I understand some of the choices made in presenting the material, but I find it unwatchable. And if it's supposed to stand as a testament, an act of witness, then that's a problem.

(But thank you for the review link, as it helped me clarify and articulate some of this for the first time.)

[marydell]

I saw it when it was shown at my college 20 or so years ago. Amazing film, and I do remember a lot of it but the review brings back more. One thing Ebert doesnt mention is the bits with the historian kind of framing the holocaust within the long European tradition of anti-semitism. That guys explanations made it even more horrifying, because instead of being about simple inhumanity or hate, it also is about creating an industry of death--the modernization of old evils and hatreds.