The BEST Movies Nobody Has Heard Of? - Page 14

A few days ago, I watched one of the best WWII movies I've ever seen and I'm not sure many have heard of it.

The Grey Zone: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0252480/


Other than combining a couple events (the true uprising with the girl surviving) it's pretty accurate from what I know. There is a lot going on, and it's just one powerful scene after another...truckloads of ashes of bodies being removed, burning babies, shoveling coal into the furnaces, shoving bodies into the ovens, etc...all being done by fellow Jews to buy themselves a little longer to live. The only movie I've ever seen that really focuses on what it took to actually run the massive "final solution" operation and how people will do anything to ensure their own survival or convince themselves that everything is going to be ok (how else can you willfully walk into a gassing chamber?)

Very horrifying. Watched it a couple days ago and several scenes still haunt me.

The movie's not perfect. There is some bad dialogue here and there, and I think using well known actors is kindof a distraction. They employ American actors (Harvey Keitel, Steve Buscemi, David Arquette, and Mira Sorvino...who i didn't even recognize). As such, they all speak English and the accents aren't the best. Also it is implied in several scenes that they are not speaking English: At one point Harvey Keitel (a German officer) yells at the Jews for speaking Hungarian cause he can't understand it, even though everyone is speaking English (to us, the viewer). Same with another scene where he asks if the girl can understand German. Probably would have rather had it subtitled, but I guess having known names was more important.

Anyways, I highly recommend it. I still can't get over how much I am still thinking about it and I suspect it will stay with me for a long time.

mproper -- Thanks for the heads up about The Grey Zone. I just put it in my Blockbuster queue. It was directed by the actor, Tim Blake Nelson, who is a nice Jewish boy from Tulsa. He doesn't work a lot as a director but has a new one coming out later this year, Leaves of Grass. It certainly has a promising cast, including Susan Sarandon, Richard Dreyfuss, and Edward Norton.

If you have to watch one movie about the Holocaust, just watch Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), and believe me, that will be enough.

Concur

Death at a Funeral

Although I understand that Dave is not recommending that we limit ourselves to just one, I certainly would not limit myself to just one Holocaust film. I have not seen Night and Fog. It is apparently a French film, which was released in 1955. Since then, however. there have been a number of excellent films about the Holocaust, some of them great. A couple that come immediately to mind are Spielberg's multiple Oscar winning Schindler's List (1993) and Daniel Mann's, Playing for Time (1980). Both are gut wrenching masterpieces in my estimation.

Thanks for the heads up. Added to my queue and bumped to #1.

Be warned- it is not for the faint of heart. It is a well known movie and used in many HS and college history classes to teach the sheer brutality of the Nazis. You might not want to watch more than a few minutes of it. That said, it is generally known as the best documentary of the Holocaust documentary and I highly recommend you watching the whole thing (if you can).

Another good Holocaust documentary is Shoah, which unlike Night and Fog does not have graphic imagery, just people retelling their personal experience about escaping Nazi imprisonment, which is scarier than many fictional films I've seen (Oh, it's also 9 1/2hrs long).

It shipped today. Oddly I haven't heard of it, even though I'm pretty interested in the subject. Always been fascinated by not only the evil-ness, but how they got so many people to go along with them.

Also, I've always been interested in the "system" that it must've took to gather, exterminate, and dispose of so many. Which is probably why I was fascinated with The Grey Zone, because it touched upon that.

Looking forward to it. I have my box of kleenex ready, and my punching bag (because I'm sure it will both make me cry and get angry).

Mumsy, Nanny, Sonny and Girly (also known as Girly).

As Wikipedia says: "Directed by British horror veteran Freddie Francis, the film is arguably one of the great lost films of British horror cinema. Poorly marketed but received with open arms by critics (including a glowing review in Variety), the film (retitled simply Girly during a limited United States release) suffered poor ticket sales, and the distributor didn't see enough promise to try and bring in a larger audience. The result was that hardly anyone knew that the film existed, preventing even a cult following. The movie vanished from theatres on both sides of the Atlantic, received a VHS release that was even more limited than either of its theatrical releases, and quickly slipped into obscurity; during a 2004 Freddie Francis film festival in England, the organizers struggled to find a VHS copy of the film to screen, but couldn't come up with one, and it was briefly thought to be lost to the public, until copies began to surface on the internet in 2004."

World in My Corner
To Hell and Back

Two of Audie Murphy's best works.

House of Sand http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373747/

To Hell and Back, starring Audie Murphy was, indeed, a good movie. It was based on Murphy's WW-II exploits, which were remarkable. Because he became a movie star and was a little tiny guy, who looked like someone's kid brother, people tended to forget what a great fighting soldier Murphy had been. Medals of Honor do not come in cereal boxes.

Just to add to that.. one of the most gripping scenes on the Holocaust that I've seen was actually in a well-known TV series.. Band of Brothers. I believe it is in episode 9 where they stumble upon a death camp. The way the scene is crafted, the long drawn-out takes, the chilling performances by the Jewish\\Polish actors all make for an experience. The perspective that is presented from the Army soliders and on the scene in general is different than most things I've ever seen on this atrocity. I highly recommend the whole series of course, but this episode in particular stands out to me in it's emotional fortitude and presentation.

The other incredible viewing experience on this same topic is also very well-known.. The Pianist.

You make a good point.
His greatest work was indeed his work in WWII.
Being on the cover of "Life" magazine was his key into Hollywood.
I don't believe any single individual was ever awarded more medals.

I have a lot of respect for that "little guy" from Texas.
Not so much for his acting, but for his heroics.

Watched this last night. As you said, very powerful imagery and footage. Sad, heartbreaking and horrific. Was surprise it was only 30 minutes. I had also seen much of this footage before over the years, but it still is horrible to watch. Too bad we still haven't learned any lessons, and genocides continue to happen while the world turns a blind eye.

Thanks again for the recommendation.

If you haven't seen this all ready you should now watch "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas"

Caught this on Starz On Demand channel and don't think it's been mentioned. I really liked it.

Dean Spanley

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1135968/

Cornel Wilde's Beach Red. If you haven't seen it, look for it, so you will know, where films like Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line got their concepts from (partly, at least). The paintings in the opening credits are some of the best I have ever seen.

Yesterday, I tripped and fell over Romance & Cigarettes, a musical (no kidding) starring James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon, and Kate Winslet. It was available for streaming from Netflix and I watched it last night. It is far from the most approachable movie ever made but I loved it, nonetheless. It was directed and co-written by John Turturro. The weakness of Romance & Cigarettes was that it didn't seem to know what it wanted to do when it grew up. It's strength, though, was that the silly singing and dancing were usually great fun and its more serious moments were moving, indeed. The problem is to get your mind in the right place as you are wildly jerked from broad comedy to tragedy and back again.

Love & Cigarettes explores what happens to Nick and Kitty Merder's (played by Gandolfini and Sarandon) marriage when Kitty discovers that Nick has been cheating on her. He has been having an affair with an English bimbo named Tula, played wonderfully by Kate Winslet. Tula talks in a weirdly funny stream of consciousness pornographic profanity. But she is vulnerable and gets hurt, as everyone else in the piece does, too, to one degree or another. Inarticulate though these lower middle class characters from Queens may be, they express their feelings in song, many of them old standards.

I cannot imagine that anyone who has been married for a long time won't find something both funny and moving in Nick and Kitty's unhappy but ultimately loyal story. Highly recommended. 8 out of 10 stars.

Agree on Night and Fog. We bought a copy and watched it with my sons. Then, we donated to the HS so others can view it. Most people have never heard of it.

Saw this a couple of months ago. I agree with many of your points.
Winslet was great in her role.

-t

You and I may be he only folks around here who have seen Romance & Cigarettes or, indeed, even heard of it. United Artists had so little faith in it that they refused to release it in the US. Turturro finally had to make arrangements for himself and got it into limited release in the US in 2007, although it had been completed in 2005. I am generally not much of an indie film fan but, as noted earlier, I liked Romance & Cigarettes a lot.

make that 3 for romance and cigarettes... was mindlessly searching through netflix one day and added it to my queue since kate was in it...

i agree with you two, it's a pretty good movie and i enjoyed it, although there are some parts that are hard to watch...

Make that 4, bought this when the DVD was released in Feb 2008. I'm a sucker for anything Mary-Louise Parker is in.

Dean Roddy wrote a review on this back in Oct 2008.

I bought this movie in DVD for like 5 bucks. I was very pleased in the value I got. Very good movie, I thought the Sargent was the best actor in it (he should have won an award or something), the others are decent actors, except the British Pilot guy - IMO he kinda sucked, but oh well.

...............

here are a few more (even better than Saint/Soldiers).

1. Arranged
2. The Visitor
3. The Bridge

Saw Black Robe in the theater in late 80's. excellent movie.

there is also the other Indian movie, Smoke Signals, which is also excellent

I think the "hard to watch" parts were what turned off a lot of viewers. The movie jerks from wildly funny and genuinely lighthearted to painful sadness, and back again in the twinkling of an eye. I can certainly understand how some viewers were put off by it.

Airboss -- Parker was, as always, terrific. Although she was already in her 40s when she made Romance & Cigarettes, she sold me completely on her young slacker persona. The lady is a chameleon! Thanks for the Dean Roddy review. As I noted in my own review, the end of the movie hit me pretty hard, too. The film was both a funny and painful exploration of things many of us who have been married for many years have gone through. It turned out to be one of the greatest near misses I can recall seeing.

agreed... if all someone likes is "happy happy happy", then they certainly aren't going to like parts of it... and would probably turn it off...

not that there's anything wrong with "happy happy happy", but sometimes painful to watch is a good thing...