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Uprising

Uprising

List Price: $19.98
Your Price: $13.99
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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A good primer--the best we can expect from network tv
Review: Holocaust movies will never satisfy everyone, and this is. Survivors and/or historians will inevitably find flaws; war mongers would rather watch Normandy battle scenes; drama aficionados won't see enough heartache. This movie is no exception. As someone with a deep interest in the Holocaust, I can say that nothing, even touring the remaining camps in Poland, can adequately relate the experience to a layperson. What impresses me most about Uprising is that it tells a story rarely told. The Jewish resistance in Warsaw is one of World War II's ultimate tales of bravery, yet few people are even aware. Kudos to Avenet for breaking the silence.

Mordechai Anielewitz was a hero, and this movie sufficiently portrays that. His rallying call, taken straight from actual correspondance, breaks my heart: "All we have is how we die." It's important to understand that none of the brave Jews in Warsaw thought for a moment that they would survive German aggression and rage; their decision was simply to march passively to their deaths in Treblinka or to go out fighting. A few chose the latter. Even though there's no doubt after viewing this account that Anielewitz was selfless and care more about the perpetuance of Jewish honor than about his own life, I I wish this film portrayed his extreme youth--he was only 23 years old when he died in a bunker in Warsaw after holding off German advances and deportation threats for a month.

The acting in this film is only so-so. Hank Azaria is decent; David Schwimmer's accent is laughably bad (why bother?). But it still has merit as a sample of the incredible stories stemming from the Holocaust and related angst--one of my favorites is the story of Dr. Yanush Korczak, a Jewish physician so esteemed by Germans that he was given a chance to escape certain death at Treblinka. He declined, opting instead to accompany the dozens of orphans who had been under his care at a Warsaw orphanage. He died with them in the gas chamber.

Holocaust legacies are fading fast, and it's up to people like director Jon Avenet to aide in the preservation of history. If this movie piqued the interest of even one apathetic person, I say his work is worthwhile.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Too Much Fiction, Too Little Fact
Review: An event as solemn as the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising needs a much more dignified portrayal than afformed by this film. The few good points of this movie are: A factual description of the life and ultimate suicide of Adam Czerniakow, the use of the term German instead of the amorphous term "Nazi",the role of the Jewish ghetto police in assisting the Germans (very seldom shown in Holocaust films, but even here greatly under-rated). The remainder of the content is, frankly, schlock. The heroism of the Jewish ghetto fighters stands alone without falsely diminishing the duration of actions by the Poles in fighting the German invaders, as is done by this film. There is no need to embellish the courage of the Jewish ghetto fighters by inventing tales about the manner of fleeing the ghetto, or of completely omitting the role of Polish Catholic fighters coming to the assistance of the Jewish Warsaw ghetto fighters. The events are shown in a vacuum: No mention is made of the 3 million Polish Catholics who were murdered along with the 6 million Jews other nationalities. Polish assistance to Jews is greatly under-rated in the film. Giving the film-maker, Avnet, the benefit of the doubt, one must seriously ask why he showed the scene with the Catholic religious service. Are we supposed to infer that the Jewish fighters and victims of the Germans were supposed to be helped somehow by leaving the church window open so that smoke from the burning Jewish ghetto could fill it completely? If not, then what?

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Better than "THE PIANIST"
Review: 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...

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Numerous Anti-Polish Misrepresentations of History
Review: Some of the action in this film is good, but the historical worth of the film is quite low. To begin with, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising lasted LESS than the Polish armed resistance to the Germans (20-28 days versus 36). No mention is made of the fact that Polish gentile guerillas (Iwanski's unit) fought alongside the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and played a major role in making the Uprising a relative success. The scene of the Polish guides having to be forced at gunpoint (to lead the Jewish resisters to safety through the sewers) is absurd and untrue. Fact is, the Poles willingly helped the Jews evacuate the ghetto. The hijacking of the Polish truck is pure fiction. No mention is made of the fact Polish gentiles got the automatic death penalty for the slightest assistance to Jews, and that 3 million Polish gentiles were ALSO victims of the Holocaust. Despite this, starvation of the Jews in the ghetto had been somewhat alleviated by the considerable amounts of food smuggled into the ghetto by Polish gentiles. None of this is shown in the film. The scene in the Catholic Church is, let's say this diplomatically, questionable. What was the priest supposed to do: Condemn the killing of Jews by the Germans, and get himself shot for opening his mouth? The scene showing the Polish blackmailers should be balanced by the fact that there were just about as many Jewish blackmailers as Polish ones (according to Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the Jewish resistance fighters) Many more departures from historical facts in this film could be mentioned. All things considered, it is a shame that such a historically-distorted film has gotten so much hype.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Better than "THE PIANIST"
Review: 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...

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: A truly excellent movie
Review: 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.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Holocaust and Umvolkung
Review: ...

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.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: An Excellent Movie (I'm So Good With Titles...)
Review: 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.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It's about time
Review: This film to me is amazingly brilliant. As someone who has studied this topic since I was ten, it was amazing to see the Uprising portrayed like that. Some people I've spoken to about the movie found some of the jokes humourless. I soon found out that was because they didn't realize that the characters in the film were actually only teenagers or people in their mid 20's during the uprising. Once they found that out they found it acceptable that these poor kids were allowed to be kids sometimes.

I was surpirised at the level of inaccuracies in the film. There weren't that many. The mistakes were important, as they were to do with Bund activity, and other related topics, but the rest of the film was very accurate.

If you get the chance, sit down and watch the movie, and don't see thirty year old actors, see 18-24 year old kids, and then consider how truely amazing these peoples feats actually were. Even though they knew that most of them would die, they fought for Jewish honour, and helf out for longer then the Polish and French armies. If that doesn't prove that their uprising achieved in proving that the Jews did fight back, I don't know what could.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: It did happen
Review: The point of the movie, is to point out, that all that amazing stuff REALLY DID HAPPEN. The Warsaw ghetto uprising did happen like that, that's why it was so amazing. A bunch of teenagers (Mordechai Aneilewicz was only 24 at the time) managed to hold off the most powerful army in the world for longer then Poland and France did. It was a turely amazing feat, and it DID HAPPEN. Nothing, in regards to the actual fighting was over exagerated. If you have seen the documentaries on the DVD, or, if like myself you have spoken to people like Kazik or Marek Edelman, you would know that this is all true.

The only problem is a few details concerning the Bund. Other then that, it was about time a movie came about, that showed the world that the Jews DID fight back.


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