Shindlers List (delete if tired of this debate)

[Brian D. McCary]

At the end of a *very* manipulative "Shindler's List", Oscar Shindler
sobs about how many more Jews he could have saved.  His erstwhile laborers
(or slaves, if you prefer) basically comfort him and tell him that he
did what he could.

The message here is that a few more by Shindler himself would not have
made a huge differance.  The tragedy is not that Shindler didn't save
more; the tragedy is that he was alone in trying.  If a hundered other
Nazi industrialists had been as shrewd, that would have been 100,000 lives.
Nothing he could have done would have made up for all the people who 
didn't even try as much as him.

Now, yes, I thought it was only a fair movie, with too many black hats,
(no real white ones) and not eoungh grey ones.  And I'm no Hollywood 
fan, or Spielberg fan.

But why castigate Spielberg, rather than Everyone Else in Hollywood who
haven't done jack in terms of telling the story of the Holocaust?  No
two hour movie can or will capture everything that happened in a twenty 
year political movement and a six year war which consumed so many millions
of lives, including the twelve million concentration camp victims.  It's
gonna have to be a group effort.  This is an elephant, and Spielberg is 
just 
one blind man doing his best.  In this sense, he is a brother of 
Oscar Shindler:  someone who makes a shrewdly calculated move to save his 
own skin (in this case, to get his long coveted Oscar, heh, heh, heh) 
which proves to be of real value to the rest of the world.



If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to base their entire perception of
WWII on SL, but if I was going to come up with a list of 20 WWII movies
to see for them, I suspect it would be on there.  And it would probably be
one of the few out of SoCal on the list.

Brian McCary