Stupid

Rating: 3/10 (21 August 2005)

It's really unbelievable that a movie as stupid as "The Pianist" can win major prizes and make the IMDb top fifty. (Whenever I catch myself thinking that big no-no, that there must be a Jewish conspiracy in the entertainment industry--as depicted in "The Protocols of the Morons of Sodom"--I must remind myself that plenty of awful gentile movies have also won Oscars and palmes d'or and whatnot.)
It's not so much that "The Pianist" is boring or unwatchable. In fact, it's entertaining enough as you watch it--those actors who look more like schoolboys from some prestigious English boarding school than starving Polish Jews, the mean Nazis, those duplicitous, red-cheeked Polacks. Among the many other stupid things about this movie that I've forgotten since I saw it is that everybody is always speaking in English. Now there must be hundreds of holocaust/evil-German movies out there and in most of them all the Germans and their victims speak English! Come on! It's just ridiculous. Let's have a little authenticity, Roman.
In short, if you've read Primo Levi's subtle and very readable memoirs about life in the camps in Poland, "The Pianist" will seem one-dimensional, banal, and even as evil as the occupation and persecution it purports to denounce.