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cobysdad
Reviews
La vita è bella (1997)
Allegory? Fantasy? Bullshit!
Judging by Holocaust movies I've seen it's extremely difficult to recreate concentration-camp life. The best I've seen in that respect is PLAYING FOR TIME which showed, inter alia, the effects of malnutrition & brutality. SCHINDLER'S LIST gets "E" for Effort but doesn't come close to verisimilitude. LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL is pure bullshit! You didn't get to volunteer to go to a concentration camp like the wife did. She would have been arrested and maybe deported later but the Germans were meticulous about record-keeping and had to account for every deportee. The idea that a little kid could be kept secret in a barracks is beyond ludicrous. The guards would launch inspections at all hours, usually the wee hours, and would dump all the bedding in the process. Violations of camp rules were punished with torture and death. This movie is an insult to the intelligence of anyone who knows anything about the camps. It amounts to a feel-good vision of the Holocaust! The only people who love this movie must know less than nothing about life in the camps!
Control (2004)
CONTROL (caution -- some wispy spoilers)
I agree with most other reviewers that this is a movie that was on the verge of profound resonance until its hackneyed end, and I don't understand why the obvious intelligence of the people involved degenerated into irrelevant clichés. Maybe there were financial constraints that kept them from developing the ironies the screenplay presented. But I wish they'd let the Liotta character live in the end, severely wounded perhaps but much much wiser about who he'd been and what he'd become. (His placebo pills reminded me of Dumbo's magic feather). The clumsy end cut off any hope of a satisfying catharsis -- not a happy ending maybe but one that left him to conjure with the implications of his emotional evolution.