Archive | Film Matters
‘Schindler’s List’ in Trump’s America
The first time I saw Schindler’s List, it enraged me.
Admittedly, this was not a typical response. Upon its release 25 years ago, the film was touted as the crowning glory of director Steven Spielberg’s career and 1993’s greatest cinematic achievement. At the Oscars that year, the adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s historical novel about true-life figure Oskar Schindler won seven Academy Awards, including Spielberg’s first for best director.
It wasn’t just that the 3-hour-and-16-minute film was expertly crafted. Though documentaries like “Night and Fog” (1955) and “Shoah” (1985) had already catalogued the ravages of the Third Reich, Spielberg’s feature about a German industrialist who saved more than a thousand Polish Jews ignited younger generations’ commitment to “never again” just as Holocaust survivors and witnesses were beginning to die out. In a 2013 interview, the director said, “The shelf life of ‘Schindler’s List’ has renewed my faith that films can do good work in the world.”
Really, as an introduction to both the horror and the goodness of which humans are capable, it was the ultimate Spielberg vehicle. And that was my problem in a nutshell. As the film’s credits rolled and people around me sniffed, I stormed out of the theater, saying, “Leave it to Spielberg to find the feel-good story of the Holocaust.” Continue Reading →
Why ‘The Exorcist’ Haunts Us Still
I first saw “The Exorcist” when I was 13 and home alone. This, of course, was a mistake. By the time Mike Oldfield’s iconic “Tubular Bells” ran over the credits, I knew I’d never sleep that night, or possibly ever again. But it was not just the circumstances in which I viewed this film that made it so terrifying. Forty-five years after its release, the adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s 1971 eponymous novel is still the most horrific of all horror movies, complete with a tween whose head spins backward.
It’s a dark miracle that it was even made. At the time of publication, the book seemed unlikely to ever achieve a mass audience, let alone be adapted into the ninth highest grossing film of all time (when adjusted for inflation). Until then, Blatty, who also authored the screenplay, was best known as the comedy screenwriter who’d given us the Inspector Clouseau mystery “A Shot in the Dark.” A devout Catholic, he’d fictionalized a Jesuit priest’s account of a 1949 exorcism, but even his fancy Hollywood credentials couldn’t save it from being sent back to the publisher in droves. Only when a mysterious set of flukes landed him on the Dick Cavett Show for a full 45 minutes did the “The Exorcist” catapult to the New York Times best-seller list. It remained there for 57 weeks. Continue Reading →