The DVD features take this the extra mile to make it a truly memorable experience. The documentaries, as well as two audio-commentaries (provided by the director and the cast respectively), are full of insights, and only enhanced my appreciation and enjoyment of Avnet's film. This deservedly belongs alongside Schindler's List, and in fact in some ways surpasses it.


Better than "THE PIANIST"   July 15, 2003
 4 out of 13 found this review helpful

This film is simply wonderful!
I can't see why people talk so much about "THE PIANIST" and do not talk too much about this film. UPRISING is deeper, more human, more everything!!
Seeing is believing...


A truly excellent movie   July 13, 2003
 5 out of 9 found this review helpful

This is a film about the tragic Uprising of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto. Although, I am not an expert on exactly that topic the film seems to cover the story fairly well. The heroic struggle of people who were outgunned and desperate against an enemy that would actually use the worst of mankind to terminate the uprising.

A film covering both, German atrocities against Jewish AND Polish people together would not have been possible. The two hours normal length cinema movies would not allow a proper coverage of those two related and complicated topics.

Some of the reviewers do not seem to grasp what this film and other movies such as The Pianist like to show: the human and inhuman dimensions. If people think that they can just point to the Germans as the bad guys, they did not get the point.

Plus: some scenes showing German troops marching into the Ghetto were clearly over the top. If you like to see an excellent movie that portrays the Nazis' mentality, watch "The Wannsee Conference".

What some people here forget to mention are all the Jews who served as "Kapos", policemen, that helped the Germans to gather all the Jews to be transported to the camps. Those "Kapos" are also shown in the movie. The element of survival plays a major part here and if you want to see how various people react to that problem, go watch and buy it as it is worthwhile.


Holocaust and Umvolkung   April 6, 2003
 8 out of 27 found this review helpful

...

The Nazis had a well-defined plan of genocide against Poles specifically and Slavs in general. This type of genocide is called Umvolkung (population supplantation). Weinreich talks about it in detail in Hitler's Professors.... Lemkin crafted his definition of genocide to include Umvolkung.

The reluctance of most English-speaking historians to acknowledge the Umvolkung program seems to lie in the reluctance to admit that Zionists from the 1890s and probably earlier planned Umvolkung/genocide against the native population of Palestine. The term Umvolkung is used in German Zionist literature with exactly the same intent and connotations that one finds in German racist and Nazi literature.

The movie is quite good, but I must downgrade the rating of the film because of the exceptionalist treatment of genocide against the Jews and because of the complete obliviousness to German genocidal action and intent against Poles.

I can only suspect some desire to be Zionistically correct because addressing the fact of Nazi genocide against both Jews and also Poles makes the evil of the Nazis even more obvious than simply highlighting the fact of Nazi genocide against Jews.


An Excellent Movie (I'm So Good With Titles...)   January 18, 2003
 10 out of 16 found this review helpful

When I first saw this movie on NBC last winter, I was absolutely transfixed. A hail of atom bombs falling in my backyard could not have moved me from my spot on the sofa while I was watching this movie. Okay, maybe I *would* have moved for atom bombs, but you get my point.

Hank Azaria and David Schwimmer are brilliant in their portrayals of Mordechai Anielewicz, the leader of the revolt, and Yitzach (spelling?) Zuckerman, the second-in-command. Considering that these two actors are mainly comedy stars, it was amazing to see them in a role that was so far removed from their typical idiom. The cast encompasses a wide range of nationalities - many of the other actors and actresses are from Europe, and the set design and costume departments are also quite diverse.

After seeing this movie, I was inspired to do some research of my own. The movie is quite historically accurate, right down to the design of the set. The character portrayals are also very true to form.

Anyway, this is an excellent movie. It is a definite must-see for anyone interested in Holocaust history, but I reccomend it to just about everyone else as well.

The movie is unrated, but I would not reccomend showing it to children under 13 - there is one scene that could qualify as partial nudity and many other scenes in the book are quite...graphic.