Life wasn't really beautiful...

Rating: 1/10 (25 May 2000)

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. Not only is it appallingly badly directed and boring; not only is the humor and so-called acting amateurish at best; this film is trying to make some points about the Holocaust that are utter lies!
Anyone with even a minimal understanding of the Holocaust would have to first of all discount ANY movie which purports to make the subject into a comedy, of all things. I hated the Chaplin movie, "The Great Dictator," for the same reason.
But that's not the only problem here. The distortion of reality presented in this movie is abominable. Concentration camps were not sleepaway camps where you could just hide your kids in safety if you were clever enough. I really don't want to go into the horrific details of what concentration camps were really like; I don't think that is appropriate in this forum.
Even if it were possible to keep your child hidden away in a camp, I question the legitimacy of making an obviously murderous regime into a silly game of "points" to win a tank, just to shield your child from the cruel truth. I am sure that any child in a concentration camp (who would have survived, which was virtually impossible) would have been all too aware of what was really happening. I see the hero's attempt at shielding his child as lying, plain and simple.
The thinly-veiled insult contained in this movie is: if only all those poor victims of the Holocaust had only had a sense of humor! Then of course many wouldn't have died, and there would have been so much less suffering. I really hope that anyone reading these lines gets my sarcasm here.
But the worst thing about this atrocious movie is the way it has rewritten history. The only other people who are doing that on the subject of World War II are neo-Nazis, I'm afraid.