This video was brought to you by my Patreons. Thanks. Back in 2020 when I made my Jojo Rabbit video, I quoted a Holocaust films scholar named Rich Brownstein about the prevalence of Righteous Gentile films. The quote was from an article I found, but I did do a little research on the guy since it sounded like he was writing a book on Holocaust films and that would be more comprehensive than Wikipedia. The book was not yet published at the time, so I went about my business. Then by happenstance this year, somebody sent that video to Mr. Rich Brownstein himself. He reached out to me, and now I'm going to interview him. I know it's a heavy subject matter, but I am going to avoid using graphic footage, so we shouldn't be too visually upsetting. Also, stick around until after the interview for a little update on the channel. [Me] Hello, Rich Brownstein, can you tell viewers
a little bit about who you are and what you do? [Rich] Hi, LK. [Me] Hello. [Rich] I--uh...I'm a lecturer. Supposedly I'm an expert in a very solemn subject, the Holocaust. I lecture...I have lectured at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the world center for Holocaust remembrance, since 2014. My specialty is Holocaust films and how to use them and the history of them. And I've written a lot of articles about Holocaust films and speak a lot about....
[Me] And a whole book. [Rich] Oh, yeah I wrote a book, funny, thanks for asking. [Me] You wrote a whole book.
[Rich] I have a whole book, Holocaust Cinema. [Me] Literally, you wrote the book on Holocaust cinema.
[Rich] I did Just published. Just, 2021, 400 films, 443. And of course, my greatest honor was that somebody sent me one of your videos and I ended up in your video. I had no idea that you knew who I was, and I had no idea who you were, but it's been a wonderful journey since then. [Me] Now I was going to ask as well, how did you end up with the very specific expertise of Holocaust cinema, like how did this become your oeuvre? [Rich] It was a backdoor thing. I've been studying the Holocaust since I was a kid, since I was say 15-16 years old, and got really interested in it. And was on the board of the Oregon Holocaust Center when I was in my 20s, taught the Holocaust to a religious school, continued to learn about, even when I went to Hollywood and had a company there. I was always learning about the Holocaust. And I moved to Isreal. Sold my company, and moved to Israel in 2003, and eventually I had a student who was on a gap year program. She was 18. And my cousin told me that she was taking a Jewish Film course and I asked her what the film was, and she said, 'Private Benjamin,' and I was aghast because it's not a Jewish film. And so I went to the educational director of a program and I told them I will teach, for free, a class about Holocaust film. So the kids have an alternative to this silly other class. So they accepted it and So I was teaching a college course accredited by American Jewish University in Los Angeles and developed my entire method, the categories that I use and reviewing films and how I feel about them. And then Yad Vashem saw my work and thought it was a wonderful thing for educators who come to Israel for three weeks that they should have an hour-and-a-half class about what to do with films. So I...uh... Then one day decided I would write a book. Fortunately, there was a pandemic, so I had time. [Me] Woof
[Laughter] Alright well, I think with that, let's get into the movies, and we're going to start with some of the worst movies made about the Holocaust. And we're going to make jokes about them because they're bad. [Laughter] So let's start with 'Getting Away with Murder.' [Murder Mystery Music] [Rich] 'Getting Away with Murder' was part of a spree that Dan Aykroyd was on in the 1990s where he made, from 1994-1996, he made 13 films with an average IMDB rating of 5.3. And this was one of them. This film, it has Dan Aykroyd who's a ethicist. And he finds out that there's an ex Nazi, a retired Nazi living in his American town. That's played by Jack Lemmon from 'The Apartment.' Jack Lemmon, the great Jack Lemmon,
[Me] Yes [Rich] at the end of his career, defiled himself in this film by playing a Nazi who was bad at everything, a bad actor, a bad everything, bad German accent. [Jack Lemmon in a spotty German accent]
"Hellooooo I wonder if I might bother you for an easy favor." His daughter with a bad German accent is Lily Tomlin. [Lily Tomlin in an equally spotty German accent]
"Thank you. We're very pleased that so many of you showed up today." "They say that Mr. Brunelle is one of the top immigration lawyers in the country." And Dan Aykroyd goes to kill Jack Lemmon, believes it was the wrong person. He marries Lily Tomlin As some sort of uh....uh... to get the money and the thing back to where it should be to set the record straight. Then he finds out that he really wasn't. And the highlight is they're on their honeymoon they're on a cruise or something, and she says with this horrible German accent, "So you kill the father and then you fornicate the daughter. " [Lily Tomlin] "You kill the father."
[Dan Akroyd] "Now Inga please." [Tomlin] "Then you fornicate the daughter?"
[Akroyd] "No." [Rich] It's just bad film making all around. But there is a good thing about it, which is, I then went to see who could have made this horrible movie. The director of it was a guy who I'd never heard of. He was friends with Gary Marshall and Penny Marshall and that whole thing. Then I saw that he was the HR person in 'Big.' 'Getting Away With Murder' is a great film because it got me to see 'Big' again. That's the best I can say about it.
[Me laughing] Next, let's talk about 'The Devil's Arithmetic.' [Hip Hop(?) music playing over the radio] [Rich] There was a book that was really well-received, called 'the Devil's Arithmetic.' [Me] Yeah, from 1980 by Jane Yolen. [Rich] Good. People loved it.
[Me] Yeah. [Rich] One person in particular who loved more than anybody else was Benjamin Braddock, otherwise known as Dustin Hoffman. He bought the rights, executive produced with Mimi Rogers. This time travel film. [Me] Okay I'm going to say because you have a thing about the cheeseburgers scene. I have a thing about 'The Wizard of Oz' in that scene because this movie took place in the 40s and 'Wizard of Oz,' a movie from the 30s. [Rich] Thirty nine. [Me] Yeah. The book is even older than that, and I'm like, I don't know exactly about film distribution in Eastern Europe. [Rich] In Poland. [Me] In Poland. But I feel like they might know 'The Wizard of Oz' at this point. [Rich] Well, let's clue them in as to why we're talking about 'The Wizard of Oz.'
[Me] Okay yes [Rich] So he gets Kirsten Dunst and Brittany Murphy, right after.
[Me] Oh Brittany Murphy. [Rich] Aaw Yeah So they were in a film called Drop Dead Gorgeous, Brittany Murphy and Kristin Dunst. And Dustin Hoffman grabs them with Mimi Rogers. And so here is the plot. Kirsten Dunst does not want to go to her family's Seder. She's at a tattoo parlor and at the last second decides, I'm not going to go. I'm not going to actually get my tattoo. I'm going to go to the Seder, and I have holocaust survivors who were at the Seder, and she doesn't care about any of it. For those who aren't familiar with it, at a Passover Seder, we drink wine, we're supposed to have four glasses of wine. There's a part in the Seder near the end, after you're good and intoxicated where a child gets up and opens up the door for the prophet Elijah to come in and drink his cup of wine. [Me] We invite a ghost to our Seder. Anyway. [Rich] He's going to bless the table and he's going to drink a bottle and everybody shakes the table so they can see him drinking it. [Me] I know my parents used to do that too! [Rich] She goes to open the door for Elijah, and she walks into 1943, Poland. [Me] And then she just experiences the entire Holocaust basically. [Rich] She does and everybody knows that she's there and everybody knows she's from the future and everybody. [Me] Ok here's the thing, they don't know she's from the future. They keep going 'Oh Hannah, you have such an imagination.' She keeps saying things about the future and everyone would be like, 'Oh, that's so interesting please.' 'This is fascinating. You're such a storyteller Hannah.' [Rich] Such a storyteller. Tell us more about the future, Hannah, who hasn't been there, and then she starts the babble. And I just have to say from a Holocaust standpoint, she's in a labor camp that they're trying to make ambiguous like a death camp. [Me] Yeah. [Rich] And so they're sitting around in the barracks and she's trying to comfort these girls, and they say, tell us what will happen in the future, and the first thing she says is, 'well, after the Holocaust, the Jews will go to America.' [Me] What will they eat? [Rich] What will they eat? Then you go ahead. [Me] First she tells them about pizza, and she has to explain the concept of pizza to them. Then she tells them about cheeseburgers and then she says, Oh, but if you're Jewish, that probably wouldn't be kosher, they would be veggie burgers. Then she begins to tell them the entire story of the 'Wizard of Oz.' [Rich] Tell us just one more story, just one more. [Hannah] "Once upon a time there was a girl named Dorothy." "She lived with her dog Toto in Kansas." [Me] So the thing that bothers me about this movie conceptually is that the universe decides to punish a child because she wanted to get a tattoo and she was a little bit uninterested in TWO of her elderly relatives, not all of because she's interested in her aunt or cousin, Eva, ...Rivka, the one who she meets, who is Brittany Murphy in the past. She's interested in her history. She asked her a question and the answer is like, not now I can't unload my trauma right now. [Hannah] "Why don't you tell me more about her." [Aunt Eva] "You wouldn't understand." [Me] It's literally just those two older relatives of hers who she's like, I'm a little bit distracted right now. I don't have time to sit and have you tell me the story right now. It's that and a tattoo, and the cosmos decides to punish a child than make her experience the entire Holocaust because of these crimes. [Rich] Well, but she's not really punished because she makes it back alive. She wakes up like Dorothy at the end.
[Me] Yeah. [Rich] Spoiler alert. She wakes up surrounded by everybody who is at the sesed [Me] In full black and white for a second, and she does the whole 'And you were there.'
[Rich] 'Scarecrow I missed you the most' [Me] Oh my God, it's terrible, but then they have a gall to go back to color, and then do the whole, oh my aunts... [Rich] So she wasn't punished by anything except for redemption, except for knowledge. You could say she was tormented a little bit.
[Me] But like...she... I mean she experienced being gassed!
[Rich] they show... [Me] That girl should be traumatized. The way they handled it, it's very unclear.
[Rich] You're right [Me] She experienced being gassed.
[Rich] That part of its... That Dustin Hoffman makes an educational video about the Holocaust for young kids, and the penultimate scene is in a gas chamber with [Zyklon B] pellets dropping It is such an example of people who get out of their lane and don't know anything about what they're doing, [Me] At the end of the movie...At the end of the movie there's singing 'Cha Gadya' and she's smiling, and I'm like that girl should be a puddle.
[Rich] Yeah [Me] That girl was not okay. [Rich] All you needed was to sit in a gas chamber and she's... [Me] I'm just...I cannot, with the movies central thing of being a little bit childish and not having a full attention span all the time. Because I remember being a child. I listened but also sometimes I didn't. It's just like basic levels of immaturity and considering getting a tattoo. [Rich] But you keep focusing on the plot and I keep focusing on the intent. I can't believe that thinking adults allowed this to happen. Alright. [Me] Alright, let's go to ''Forget Me Not: the Anne Frank Story.' [Sad opera music] [Me] Have you looked at the behind the scenes of this movie? Because I did. [Rich] Okay. Tell me behind the scenes. [Me] Because like...just the opening. I don't know if you saw the version where it has the opening for the 'In Search of Heroes' video series that these people made. The version I watched had that opening in front of it, which I can only describe as other cultures drama set to 'Back to the Future' music. [Upbeat Adventurous Music] [Me] It was produced by Grace Products. The name Grace Products really gave a vibe. It's written and directed by Fred Holmes, whose filmography is mostly episodes of Barney. [Laughter] But it was made as part of this series they did called ''In Search of Heroes,'' which like...they did Harriet Tubman. But they'd also did Buffalo Bill. They did one for Buffalo Bill!! and then they also did one called 'The Pioneer Spirit' about a sports guy from Texas. And I was like, what is this? So I looked into these people. After making these ''films'', these two, Greg Vaughn and Fred Holmes ran Grace Products company. Later, they wrote a book together called ''Letters To Dad'' about teaching their children to write to God or something. Greg is a contributor to the Christian website, Focus On The Family, which definitely hates abortion rights and probably hates gay people. Those are the people who made this movie, 'Forget Me Not: The Anne Frank Story.' [Rich] They probably don't know that in the unabridged Anne Frank Diary that she talks a lot about her body parts. [Me] Yeah. They probably don't know. Listen...listen the Nazi with the Party City eye patch that was so big, I was hoping it would get bigger in every scene with an accent that is so baffling. It's barely even an accent. It's just occasionally an intonation but [Doing a bad German accent]
he loves jam. It's his one weakness. [Party City Nazi] I love jam. It's a weakness of mine. I'm afraid. [Rich] Tell the nice folks what happens in this movie. [Me] Oh boy! OKAY So a young man intrigued by Neo-Nazism gets time-traveled back to Anne Frank to learn that Jews are people. And by the way, Intrigued he has a swastika tattoo on his arm. I kept yelling Intrigued while watching this movie. I watched it with a friend over Discord and every now and again he would do something. I'd be like 'intrigued.' 'INTRIGUED! Intrigued you say,' because like yeah...intrigued. He has a swastika on his arm, intrigued. he goes and defaces of fake museum. That's supposed to be the Simon Wiesenthal Center, but it was filmed in Plano, Texas. And I can't really imagine that the real Simon Wiesenthal Center would have displays that are this off-putting. I feel like this is just what white gentiles feel like when they enter a museum about bigotry, because it's all like yeah 'you're a bigot, you're a bigot!' [Echoey voices] "Prejudice...prejudice...prejudice..." "Racist...racist...racist..." "Bigot...bigot...bigot..." [Me] And then yeah he gets time traveled back to Anne Frank. There's a weird romance between him and Anne Frank, like Peter Van Pels gets jealous? At one point? It's...also the guy? the Neo-Nazi kid... I feel like he was directed to walk like a punk? I can only describe it that way, the way he walks? Just like....its the funniest thing I've ever seen. This movie is hilarious. It's a human rights violation. [Rich] The kid, walks into the end of the Simon Wiesenthal Center all ready to deface the place. [Me] He draw some swastikas. [Rich] Okay, and then he runs into this curator. [Me] There is this librarian character who I think might be a character in this whole series of films. I think he might be like a recurring character. This wacky old man who is like, [Weird old man voice] 'oh have you heard of Anne Frank? here's her diary' and he's like, 'No! I don't know about Anne Frank put me back!' and then he gets time travelled. [Rich] Abracadabra he ends up in Anne Frank's attic with Anne Frank.
[Me] Yeah oh my god [Rich] And then he gets taught a lesson about just like frankly, [Me] I guess Jews are people [Rich] but he gets taught a redemptive lesson just like Kirsten Dunst in the 'Devils Arithmetic.' [Me] I can't believe they went all the way to Bergen-Belsen [Rich] He comes back and he's a better person. [Me] Listen at least the jam came back, Chekov's jam, he loved jam, that was his one weakness! [Rich] They should've had Chekov's gun over the mantle, on the hearth. Because if we had started there, then we would've ended with him dead. But we didn't get.
[Me] I wish he had been [Laughter] This movie is an embarrassment. Everybody made this should feel embarrassed. [Rich] Just to be clear, if you send somebody who knows about the Holocaust back to Anne Frank's attic, you think he would warn her? [Me] Well he doesn't initially... [Rich] You think he would do something. You think that somehow.... [Me] But he doesn't seem to know Anne Frank story, That's the whole thing is he doesn't know who Anne Frank is. [Rich] But he knows what happens in the Holocaust. [Me] Yeah, he does. Oh my God, The Bergen-Belsen scene is really bad. He's a bad actor when it comes to crying. [Embarrassing attempts at acting sad] [Laughter] [Me] It's really bad anyway. [Rich] I think I wrote in my book about that that it was the film that you feel like you have to shower after watching. [Me] I'm just saying for me personally, I would need a shower after 'The Singing Forest.' [Old Timey Music] [Rich] You know, people ask me, what is the worst Holocaust film ever made? I'm reticent to say it publicly because I don't want people to watch it because it is so hideous. It is hideous in every possible way. [Me] On a basic craft level, it's barely a movie. [Rich] It makes 'The Room' look sophisticated. It does! There's nothing in it. [Me] Before we get deep into the plot, I have to tell you that I think there might be multiple edits of this movie circulating because the one that I watched on Tubi was an hour and nine minutes. But when I looked up a review of this movie, that length was listed as 90, somewhere else said an hour and 12 minutes. I suspect that what was cut was probably some sex scenes. But I don't know. I'm wondering if maybe some parts of it made more sense. If there was more movie that was cut because I didn't see a lot of the past stuff except for some very shaky-cam, nightmare sequences. [Rich] Well, first of all, it's like cutting gangrene. You're just...
[Me] I was just wondering like... I'm sure it didn't make the movie better, but I was wondering if it made parts of it make more sense because I felt like I was barely even able to follow what was happening at times... So the plot of 'the Singing Forest' is that this guy has been in touch with a psychic. He has a dead wife. Don't worry about it. But he's been in touch with a psychic who says that he was alive during World War II. His past self was alive during World War II. Apparently he was a resistance fighter or something and that he had a lover, a man, then his daughter whose name is Destiny. 'Destiny brought them together.' I'm not over that. His daughter named Destiny has a fiance named Ben, I think. Ben is apparently the reincarnation of the father's lover from World War II. [Rich] Male lover. [Me] Yeah. Now the part I'm not clear on, was one of them a Nazi because there are posters where one of them has a swastika armband and the movie I watched, I genuinely couldn't figure out if one of them was a Nazi in the past. [Rich] Well, let's read the IMDB summary. 'Two lovers are killed during the Holocaust.' 'One reincarnates first.' I did not know that that was a verb. 'He has a 22-year-old daughter who falls in love with' 'who her father believes is his past life lover.' [Me] So they don't specify. But the poster has a man with a swastika armband, and I spent half the movie being like, was one of them a Nazi is one of them a Nazi. Is the poster just stupid. [Rich] As long as we're on IMDB, IMDB lists it, this 2003 film, 'The Singing Forest' as an hour and 35 minutes, and it's rating is 1.9 out of 10,
[Me] What is the truth?! [Rich] and it has a Metacritic of one percent, which I'm sure is rounding up. So...and what would I have on my system, my copy of it is an hour, 35, and in my book, I list it at 72 minutes. So it's a shit show no matter how you look at it. [Me] Also, there's the plotline that apparently Destiny is like the reincarnated ghost of his wife's daughter. His wife was apparently assaulted...sexually assaulted. There is a scene of it. It's unclear if the husband assaulted her or if the husband rescued her from being assaulted. Because again, this movie is incomprehensible. But this...Destiny is like the ghost baby from that assault, apparently. [Rich] Wikipedia says 'The Singing Forest' has a rare zero percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. [Laughter]
[Me] Good. [Rich] It is on their list of worst-reviewed films. [Me] There are so many parts of it to me that are bizarre. I[Rich] t's not just that the plot is plotting. It's like it was shot as a student film with actors who can't act. It's physically unfocused. [Me] My favorite is actually the Destiny actress. I thought she was doing the best. But it's only because there's one line where she just very passive-aggressively says, 'What are we having for dinner?' 'Shit pie!' and I thought that was funny. [Destiny] "Fine, since there's nothing going on here," "how about dessert, does anyone want dessert?" "Were having shit pie." [Christopher] "I'll have some dessert." [Rich] Don't watch it. Ignore what we said. Don't go see it. [Me] I will show you clips to illustrate why it's-- [Rich] So you don't have to-- [Me] Yeah, these clips will be enough. Don't watch it. The part that made me angriest was when they said the Jews got the pink triangles in the camps. I was like this is basic shit! You're getting basic shit wrong! Because you get very particular in your book about some details of tattoo stuff and the numbering systems and things like that. This is basic shit! The pink triangle.
[Rich] Yeah. [Me] Was for arrested Queer people during the Holocaust and Jews got the yellow star. That's basic shit. I was enraged. [Rich] I got to say though, there was a 'Star Trek' episode where if you look at this inside the box, at this bright light thing, you'll go crazy. Don't do it. Don't look at this bright light, but that's this movie. Don't look at it. We looked at it for you.
[Laughter] [Me] Don't [Laughter] looking... [Me] It's the Gom Jabbar, the 'put your hand in the pain box' in 'Dune.' We put our hand in the pain box from 'Dune' so you don't have to. [Rich] We'll be scarred for life because we watched it for you. [Me] Not just us, my friend watched it with me because I needed somebody to scream with. I subjected my friend to this movie and I feel so bad for them Now tell me about the other movie that I feel like anybody who's seen it needs a shower, 'Auschwitz,' 2011 by Uwe Boll. [Children laughing and spooky music] [Rich] Well, you got the background on the guy, so you talk about him first. [Me] I just know he's one of those filmmakers like Neil Breen, like Tommy Wiseau, he's prolific and his movies are horrendous. He makes bad movies and I've not sat through a whole movie by him, but I know him, he's infamous and makes bad movies, so I turned on that trailer you sent me and he says, 'Hello, I'm Uwe Boll' and I went 'AAAAH.' It's Aus... it's called 'Auschwitz' and you've now shown me clips that are horrendous but apparently you sat through this whole movie. [Rich] Yeah I don't comment on movies without going through the whole thing. From a production standpoint, he starts it with kids, asks them...in German, asks them questions about what they know about the Holocaust and about Auschwitz and then he reenacts the creation of Auschwitz and then he reenacts the actual use of it. [Me] It's really graphic. Just the clips that I saw. If we show anything from it, I'm going to have to blur a lot because it is insanely graphic and very exploitatively so, not the purposeful kind where we're being thoughtful here. It's just shock value. [Rich] Bad exploitatively, not good exploitatively, although I don't know if critics...
[Me] I don't know but people could be purposeful about showing that imagery. [Rich] Yeah, but being exploitative in an artful way is just called being Andy Warhol. I mean, there's a purpose to what he does, to what Andy Warhol did. He was poking fun at that exploitativeness.
[Me] Yeah. [Rich] In this case, this guy, Uwe Boll, your buddy, he has 20, count them, 20 films that each are below a rating of four on IMDB. Who's funding this guy? He might just be independently wealthy. He's made 31 feature films. [Me] He might just be independently wealthy and nobody's been able to stop him yet. I don't know. But I have to say this, like Dustin Hoffman, he was trying to do something. They always are. He was really trying to help. I don't look at it as I look at 'The Singing Forest,' which was just plain grotesque in how it was trying to leverage co-opt, the story of the Holocaust. At least of the three films, 'The Devil's Arithmetic' and 'The Singing Forest' and... of all the films! Of all the bad films...
[Me] Yeah [Me] He's trying to make an almost documentary it's sounds like. [Rich] Yeah, and I 'll also say that more than a dozen Holocaust films that have documentary footage and reenactments and only one of them ever worked. It's a very hard...
[Me] It's that Anne Frank film that you like, right? [Rich] Right, 'My Daughter Anne Frank.'
[Me] Yeah. [Rich] But in this case, he doesn't even sniff it but still he tried and at the end of it, he goes back and tries to clean it up too with these kids. But the fact that you are super-duper graphic in a Holocaust film, if there was ever a question about whether or not as graphic as you are correlates to authenticity or to quality, this puts it to rest and the corollary to that is 'Schindler's List' [A man praying in Hebrew] [Rich] 'Schindler's List'... Also in a completely different way just in terms of that other film. He's graphic and he shows things. Just because you're showing things that are so hyper graphic doesn't make it good. It just makes it bone chilling. This stuff is put in there to make us watch it as opposed to tell a story. Just to upset us. Just like Indiana Jones in a pit with snakes, just for shock value. [Me] It sounds like a lot of your issue beyond just the film itself is how it's overshadowed because you call it 'the black hole of Holocaust cinema.' Because it has become the de facto movie that people think of when they think of Holocaust films. Do you want to explain why that is upsetting to you? [Rich] It's because everything in the Holocaust universe revolves, gets sucked into the 'Schindler's List' comparison and paradigm. That would be fine if it were a great film. But it's not. It's...first of all, a study of a Nazi saving Jews from Germans which is only...it wasn't done. He found one guy. It's true. The 'Schindler's List' is a true story. But Spielberg, who I respect a lot, and he has given all the profits, Schindler's List to the Shoah Foundation. He's never embarrassed the Jews. He's a good guy. But he's the only person who could have taken this guy who was a Nazi, who was active, who had been a spy, who didn't care when the first five million Jews were killed, 5.5 million Jews. He took this guy and turned him into a god. He had Jewish cutouts along the way to prop up this guy, this repulsive Nazi, who redeemed himself and good. There are at least 12 other films about Gentiles who saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler did. But their problem was Steven Spielberg didn't read their book. They didn't get all and they suffered. Many of them, some of them were killed, most of them were disgraced by their governments afterwards. That's the first thing. Claude Lanzmann has been who made the great Holocaust documentary called Shoah, said. 'What he's done is turn the Holocaust on its ear to make it about this German.' As Stanley Kubrick said, who was trying to make a Holocaust film at the same time 'Aryan Papers' which was never made. He said, 'The Holocaust was about six million Jews dying,' 'and not about 600 Jews being saved,' which was 1,100 Jews in 'Schindler's List.' But anyway, the other issues I have with 'Schindler's List' are part of what we judge when we review films is the economy with which they tell a story. Schindler's List is an hour and a half story which he schleps out for three and a quarter hours. It wasn't a more complicated story than any other, except that he made it more complicated. There's a shower fake-out scene. [Me] Yes you've talked about this [Rich] He takes these Jews off a train who would have no idea that what gas chambers are. Would have no idea how they're going to die. Maybe they know they're going to die. He puts 1,000 of them in a room. Apparently they all knew by the time they got in that room that those shower heads may be delivering gas. Which they didn't. The gas chambers had shower heads, but the gas didn't come out of the shower heads. These people were not in a gas chamber. You can see pictures of gas chambers and you can see what they had in 'Schindler's List' and it's not the same because the shower rooms were shower rooms, they weren't dual-purpose. Here you have 70 seconds of the audience. They can't believe they're about to see these people gassed. [Me] It's a scare film moment. [Rich] It's a scare. It's a Wes Craven scene. [Me] It is. I don't remember if you said this, but it was like the equivalent of basically going booed during the Holocaust film. It's that equivalent. [Rich] No, but I'll steal it. ...The scene at the end. As he's standing over... his shadow is over the grave of Oskar Schindler, and we have the fourth wall with the people who they portrayed or their family members, which is the most tear jerking scene. [Me] The craft is not the problem, he is a very talented filmmaker. [Rich] The craft is the problem. He's so talented that this bad witch has used his intense powers to make something that makes everybody think that it is the bomb, and it's not. [Me] I don't hate it as much as you do, but I definitely understand your viewpoints. [Rich] I don't hate it. I don't think that anything in it is malicious. I don't think that anything in it is, for the most part, aside from the shower scene, historically incorrect. He's certainly had the best intentions. There're films that I hate. I hate every film that we've mentioned up to now. And... ....This film, I just think, since it is essentially the standard bearer for the genre, it's unfortunate that it couldn't have been a better film. Go see it. Enjoy yourself. [Me] That's a movie you can watch, I just think you should watch some other ones while you're at it. [Rich] I think you should have some perspective about it. [Me] Yeah.
[Rich] That's all I'm saying. [Me] Yeah. [Rich] Again, God bless him. The testimonies of tens of the thousands of Holocaust survivors were made possible by his generous gifts. And I also should say that he's been very supportive of 'The Gray Zone,' which we'll talk about. [Me] Well next, let's knock out why The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a bad movie. [Ominous piano music] [Rich] So its about this really nice man, just a family man. This cool, wonderful guy in Berlin who happens to be a Nazi officer. He has this great family. He gets a new assignment, and they end up in this town in the middle of Poland with these smokestacks, and he's in charge of the place. His mother in law knows what he's doing and so does his mother, his wife doesn't really understand what he's doing, and his little boy, oh, so cute. [Me] Biggest little blue eyes on that kid. He's a very adorable little baby. [Rich with growing sarcasm] He wanders out, this little six year old, eight year old boy wanders out and he sees another boy on the other side of the high voltage barbed wire. He starts to dine with him. They play ball. [Me] Nobody gets accidentally electrocuted. [Rich] None of them would get near that thing. There guard towers, the guards don't quite see this and they can tunnel out. [Me] They're so little that the guards don't see them. [Rich] Of course, it assumes that you would have had a child who would have been an Auschwitz inmate, which the chances of that were diminimous. Pretty slim. You have the comandant's son who's bringing picnic to the destitute, starved.. And then he says, Well,' 'why don't you--' the commandant's kids says 'why don't you come over to join us for supper some time.' He says, 'well I can't' He says, 'Why'
he says 'Well I can't leave here.' He says, 'I thought that was just for animals' 'No, I can't leave'
'Why can't you?' 'because I'm Jewish." [Me] This is one of the most emotionally manipulative films I have ever seen. [Rich] The commandants' kid goes, 'Oh, I have to go now.' 'I have to...I gotta go now' And then at the end of the film, The only thing that could've happened, the only time I could ever be happy about someone dying in a gas chamber is that this comandant's kid walks into it. It's the only way it could've ended. [Me] The little Jewish boy says he can't find his father. Asa Butterfield says, I'll help you find your dad and somehow they smuggle him his own Auschwitz uniform, also baby sized. Again, how did they find it? But then the two of them, basically wander into the gas chambers [Rich] They just happen in. [Me] Yeah, they do. They just stumble into it and die and then his mother suddenly realizes, 'Oh my God, you've been running a death camp?' And there like the smokestack. You see the smoke and she's like [Gasp] Vera Farmiga jusr like 'oh my goodness gracious me!' Yeah, no, it's a very bad movie. [Rich] But I love the actor who plays the commandant, David...
[Me] David Thewlis? [Rich] he is a treasure.
[Me] Asa Butterfield is a good actor too! He's great in 'Hugo' and 'Sex Education.' All of these are talented actors. Unlike 'The Singing Forest' these are real movies. So all of the actors are talented. That's not the problem. [Rich] The production is beautiful. [Me] Yeah. [Rich] And...but...I'm The mechanics of the whole thing of thinking that the Sonderkommando would just walk this kid in. And that the Jewish kid thinks that this other boy is going to be able to help him find his father, who he wouldn't know what he looks like. How's he going to help you find it his father? [Rich] I'm more concerned about how Asa Butterfield thinks he's going to help find his dad. I'm like, little kids logic is a thing of its own. But how does Asa Butterfield think he's going to help find this kid's dad. Because he knows he doesn't know what he looks like.
[Laughter] [Rich] I don't know and the thing about the film that's so disheartening is that so many people love it. It drives me crazy. [Me] Again, this is one of the more infamous films that people have seen unfortunately. [Rich] There are certain countries that venerate it. I've heard that in New Zealand and in Australia, it's a BFD. I just know that it's a big deal in some countries. See Schindler's List before you see that. [Me] Yeah, I know Schindler's List is a better movie than this. Speaking of movies that Schindler's List is better than. Please tell me about 'The Reader?' [Hugh Jackman singing at the Oscars] "'The Reader.' I haven't seen 'The Reader'" [Crickets chirping] [Rich] 'The Reader is a curious' idea about payment and about skills. Here you have Kate Winslet at her most ravishing playing in East German woman 10 years after the war, who is illiterate. She makes this bargain, this deal, this commercial deal with a boy that he'll read to her, and in exchange he'll have sex with her. The commerce part of it I didn't get. [Me] Yeah, does seem like she's getting all of the bonuses from this situation. [Rich] Yeah. Then we find out that this East German woman was a Nazi guard who put 300 Jews in a barn, burned it down, and then she goes on trial. She can't defend herself because she's illiterate. We're supposed to feel sorry for her. [Me] Yes, this movie thinks that's very tragic [Rich] And Kate Winslet wins Oscar Award for Best Actress. [Kate Winslet in 'Extras'] "Because I've noticed if you do a film about holocaust, you're guaranteed an Oscar." [Rich] I don't know the point that they're trying to make. [Me] Yeah. I feel like it's supposed to be from the boy's perspective and he's like, 'Wow, I didn't realize I was having sex with a Nazi. Now, I have complicated emotions because she's hot.' [Rich] But then if she was an ugly Nazi, I wouldn't have complicated emotions. [Me] Yes, I think this movie is positing! She's Kate Winslet! Like...Yeah! Can you please explain 'The Day The Clown Cried?' [Rich] There was a really famous guy named Jerry Lewis who's born Joseph Levitch. He was just enormous, but he wasn't known for serious work. 'The Day The Clown Cried' was in 1972. He produced it, he wrote it. He directed it. It was about a clown in Auschwitz who tries to cheer up kids. In his words, it was bad, bad, bad He made sure that in his lifetime it would never be seen by the general public. [Audience Member] "Are we going to ever going to get to see 'The Day The Clown Cried?'"
[Jerry Lewis] "No" "Nope. You want to know why?" [Audience] "Yeah."
[Jerry Lewis Chuckles] [Audience laughter] [Jerry Lewis] "I was ashamed of the work and I was grateful that I" "had the power to contain it all and never let anybody see it." "It was bad, bad, bad." "But I slipped up." "I didn't quite get it." "I'll tell you how it ends."
[Audience laughter] [Rich] And when he died in 2014, he gave it to the National Archives in America with the proviso that it could not be seen for ten years. So in 2024, we all get to see this film that is infamous film where Jerry Lewis makes a fool of himself in Auschwitz. You can go on to YouTube and you can see clips of it. You can see things of it. You can see what he's trying to do. There's a Holocaust film that was made many years later called 'The Last Butterfly,' which I highly recommend, which is very similar to it, where the Nazis take an actor or a clown, a performer, and they get him to go to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp that the Germans used to fake out the Red Cross by pretending that the Jews were well taken care of. They forced him to do performance with these kids for the Red Cross and then afterwards he goes off with them to their death, to Treblinka. Whether or not 'The Last Butterfly' could have been made without the aborted 'The Day the Clown Cried,' I don't know. But just as allegorically to be able to compare two films that had the same intention, and one was able to do it and one wasn't, this is great example of it. [Me] Well, now let's talk about some good movies. Some actual good movies that we think you should see. And let's start with 'Conspiracy' from 2001. [Wind blowing and the sounds of crows] [Rich] The Germans had a meeting in Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin. It was in 1942. It was called by Heydrich, who was two steps below Hitler and by his assistant, Eichmann. Most people think that the Wannsee Conference was about the decision to build Auschwitz and for the final solution. It's not true. The Wannsee Conference was about these people at the top consolidating power and having the leaders of the military, the judiciary, the political Nazis, and the industry all in a room and say to them, 'We're doing it.' 'It's going to be done and either you're going to be helping' 'us do this and you're not going to give us any problems or you're going to be on the next train.' [Me] There's a lot about the mechanics of it because they're already doing it. There's a lot about the exact mechanics of how they're going to solve the "Jewish problem." [Rich] The conference itself was about an hour-and-a-half, which is the length of the movie. It stars Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, and Colin Firth. Their performances are impeccable. And apparently started a lifelong...they've had a bromance ever since. [Me] Oh that's amazing! [Rich] I've seen them interviewed and they say, 'Oh, we worked on this Nazi thing together.' But the most stark thing about the film, the reason it is such a potent film is because it's so clinical in the approach to what they're doing. [Me] They call it evacuations. They were all talking in code all the time. They're not saying, 'We're going to murder six million Jews.' They're saying, 'We're going evacuate.' They're going through the numbers of the different populations that they have to dispose off. They have to evacuate them. It's very calculated. [Rich] That you could do all this without any of the tricks. They went to the original place, they shot at there, they didn't screw around. [Me] One of the things that I thought was really good as well was the way the film focuses a lot on the luxury of it all. There's just a lot of focus on the beauty of the locale and how rich and gentrified. They get to sit in luxury and drink nice wine and smoke nice cigars while they discuss the systematic murder of six million Jewish people. The contrast of it is very startling. [Rich] The Germans had spent a lot of time since Nuremberg. They'd spent almost 10 years trying to justify through their laws and judiciary what a Jew was, and what a Jew wasn't and how are we going to utilize these people. It becomes irrelevant because they're not in Germany. They're not talking about the Jews of Germany anymore. They're talking about the Jews in everywhere but Germany. They're talking about the Jews in conquered lands who don't fall under the jurisdiction of these German laws. The judiciary is still trying to figure out why shouldn't our rules apply? What a half Jew is, what a quarter Jew is. [Me] They're so casual about the way they're discussing. Half of them want to sterilize the population, and half of them are concerned about just having a labor force. [Rich] Yeah. Half of them want a labor force, Well they want a sterilized labor force and half of them want them dead. You're sitting there saying...because anybody who even has a cursory knowledge of Holocaust knows that the Germans may have won the war if they had not screwed with the Jews. If they've not spent all of their energy trying to kill the Jews. [Me] I thought it was that they shouldnt have fucked with Russia. [Rich] They would've had the resources to win. But there's so many resources that they use to run the Holocaust. That's what a lot of people during this Wannsee conference are saying. We need that labor. We need them to do things. The answer was we need them dead. The epilogue to it in the film is just as brilliant as in this little conversation that they share. It's a great film. It's great movie making. [Me] It's a good movie. [Rich] I've fallen in love with Kenneth Briana because of it. He's a hero of mine, because of it and I was already in love with Stanley Tucci after he appeared in one of my favorite films, 'Lucky Number Slevin.' [Me] We are both Stanley Tucci fans So let us move on to another good movie that we want you to see. It's called '1945.' It was made in 2017. [Ambient Music] [Me] Now, can you give us a summary of '1945?' [Rich] I sure can. [Me] A serious movie. We're being serious now. [Rich] Very serious movie. So...just after the war in a Hungarian town, two Jews who lived there get off a train, returned from the camps with a trunk filled with something that we don't know, filled with a MacGuffin. We don't know what it is, we don't care. The town is centered on this pharmacy that the Jews used to own and everybody thinks that the Jews are coming back to reclaim their property. And during the next hour and a half, the town absolutely unravels as these guys just like 'High Noon,' just slowly make their way back to it. In every town in Eastern Europe, when the Jews disappeared, they could take a suitcase. They couldn't take their business, or their house, or their furniture or anything. Here you have all of these property and all of these businesses, and the town needs a pharmacy and somebody has to run the pharmacy. There's another great film from 1965, The Shop on Main Street, Czechoslovakian film, which shows this process. '1945' shows it after the Holocaust and the 'Shop on Main Street' shows it as the Jews are being deported and this old woman who has a thread shop, a fabric shop and the kid who's coming in to take it over, the gentile lives in there... So it's not the same despoilment that the Nazis...that you contemplate the Nazis doing because it wasn't the Nazis. The Nazis just took the Jews away and the locals...took what was... [Me] Took the stuff. [Rich] Took the stuff. [Me] The thing that I found really fascinating by this movie was the emphasis on objects. Again, on this luxury that they have. There's all of this beautiful silver and these beautiful houses, and they took all their stuff. They took all their stuff in this movie specifically, they outlined that it sounds they had some an auction where basically the towns people bought these homes that were then empty, just the guilt. Also the town mayor, whatever he is it sounds he's specifically turned in his friend who was Jewish. There was a specific thing that he did. He had the town drunk and some other people sign a piece of paper I guess, turning this guy in or something. Then we're just focusing on all of this stuff which is just the visual representation of their culpability. Then you just watch the town unwind. They just come apart at the seams because they know what they did. This is a movie made to make Gentiles uncomfortable. I loved it. [Laughter]
[Rich] God forbid. God forbid. Property doesn't get dealt with a lot in these films and this one. There's another film called 'The Birch-Tree Meadow' where a woman goes back to Poland and she goes back to her childhood home. The reaction of the woman at the door is, this is our place, it's always been our place don't bother. She says, 'Okay, do you mind if I come in a second?'
'Come in.' She shows the woman a picture of her father at a fireplace that's very clearly that. Then you see in the picture that there's a vase on the fireplace. Then you look at the fireplace and the same basis there. There's another story that I've heard, which is not a movie, although maybe it should be where grandkids of survivors go back to the place where their grandparents were hidden during the war, a Gentile Home in the basement. They knock on the door and the grandkids answer. These Jewish grandkids say who they are and the grandkids of the Polish people say, 'Hold on one second.' They go down into the basement and come back. What are those other things you're thinking that they would come out with? [Me] I'm assuming trunks of stuff. [Rich] Their stuff, their tallis, their whatever. He comes out basically with a bill and accounting of how much it cost to have hidden them and what they were owed. [Me] Woooooooow. Wowowowow. The thing I found really interesting about '1945' is because there's just this unspoken guilt underneath everything they're doing because these people know exactly what they did and right now they're living very comfortably. The worst thing that could happen to them is the Jews come back and take back their homes and their stuff. They're talking about them like they're Boogie men and it's just two dudes minding their own business, and everybody is losing their minds. It made me angry but it was great. [Rich] Well, they weren't minding their own business. [Me] They came there for a reason but they are not bothering. [Rich] They didn't say what the reason was. [Me] No, but they are not bothering anybody. They're just walking through town. They're not doing anything! [Rich] Their menacing as hell. [Me] Well, that's just the filming and it's because it feels like it's being shown to us from the Gentiles perspective and this is how they're viewing these on comers...that are just these strangers. Watch the movie, I'm not going to say what's in the case, what they were there to do. It's phenomenal. The last shot of the movie really, stuck with me. I thought it was great. People should go watch it. It's in Hungarian so watch it with subtitles. But it's available on Tubi. Tubi weirdly has...it's free with heinous ads. You'll have to sit through ads and they will interrupt scenes, and it's annoying. They have weirdly a pretty decent library of Holocaust films. The obscure ones, there's a lot of them on Tubi. That's where I watched most of the movies that we're talking about. [Rich] Okay. Fun fact, I didn't know this, but I learned this in the process of making this movie. You know what else is on Tubi? 'The Grey Zone'. Let's talk about your favorite holocaust film. [Subdued clarinet music] [Rich] Now let's talk about what I consider to be the greatest holocaust film ever made, which I should differentiate from being my favorite holocaust film. [Me] Really?
[Rich] Yeah. [Me] Do you have a different favorite or do you just not do favorites? [Rich] I totally do favorites except with my kids. Look, I can't watch 'The Grey Zone' every day. [Me] No. Can you watch any of these? Are any of these movies that you're just going to put on for a casual sit? [Rich] Did you see 'This Must Be The Place'? [Me] No. I did not get to that one. But is that one your favorite? [Rich] It's one of them. 'The Birch Tree Meadow' may be the one about this woman who goes back. 'Harold and Maude' very well could be. [Me] But 'The Grey Zone' is the greatest narrative holocaust film, in your opinion? [Rich] Ever made. Yes. By far. [Rosenthal] "We don't kill people." [Abramowics] "We don't? We put them in the rooms," "walk them in and strip them." "Look them in the face and say its safe. What hell is that?" [Rich] In Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Birkenau was part of Auschwitz. It was the part where most of the killing was done. It was the death factory part. There were groups of workers called sonderkommando who manned the entire crematoria operation. They were Jews who are given 12 weeks to live extra to lead the other Jews into the undressing rooms, into the gas chamber. Take them out afterwards, harvest there the gold and their hair, burn them. For doing all that, they got to eat better and they got to sleep better. [Rosenthal] "Do you want to look anyone on the face of any of your families is even alive?" "What you've done for a little more life?" "For Vodka and bed linens?" [Rich] None of them were ever allowed to escape. Other people could escape from Auschwitz who hadn't seen the process, and they wouldn't be necessarily tracked down. But if any Sonderkommando escaped, that was a big deal because they knew exactly what happened there. [Me] And they could tell people. [Abramowics] "You live to tell." [Rosenthal] "You're not going to live." "You won't make it to the Vistula." [Abramowics] "Others have made it." [Lowy] "Others from the camp, not from the Kommandos." "They'll give up on someone from Buna or the camp," "but not anyone who's been inside the crematorium." [Rich] This is a true story about the last group of them that decided that they're going to destroy two of the four crematorium. So you start with a story that most people don't know. That is about Jews trying to do something positive in an impossible situation. Then you have all of the things that are required to take a good story and make it into a great film. The film is directed by Tim Blake Nelson. [Me] Written by him too. [Rich] Written by him, edited by him. [Me] I didn't know he also...apparently its based on a play of same name that he did first. [Rich] Play...yes...researched, it's all Tim Blake Nelson who we know from Coen Brothers films like 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' 'The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.' He's in a film that he executive produced now called 'Old Henry,' which is in theaters now. It's very good. Tim, to get this made, he had to rope in his buddies because no bigger stars were going to be in it. He got David Arquette and Steve Buscemi and Mira Sorvino. [Me] Harvey Keitel? [Rich] Well, so Harvey Keitel came in, but he also came in as a producer. He wasn't just along for the ride. But there are guys who you'd recognize, a lot of the people from other things. [Me] Yeah. Natasha Lyonne from 'Russian Doll,' she's in this. [Rich] Mira Sorvino.
[Me] Yes. [Rich] Paul Sorvino's daughter. Tim then had learned all the lessons from other holocaust films. Don't put in crappy music. Don't put in music at all. [Me] Yeah. No violence, none of this stuff. Just hear what's going on around you. The dialogue is as if it had been written by David Mamet. [Me] Yeah. It's very overlapping, very stagy, which makes sense given its origins. [Rich] On several levels. They're saying more than one thing at once and we hear them all. [Rosenthal] "Our group is happy to remain here." [Muhsfeldt] "Happy?" [Rosenthal] "This is where we would like to remain." "Why kill us now? We the best commander you've had." [Muhsfeldt] "Did I say kill?" [Rosenthal] "We both know what we're saying." [Muhsfeldt] "So I'm a liar?" [Rosenthal] "You are what you are." [Rich] It's paced perfectly. It's edited perfectly. [Me] I really love the cinematography, the choice of what's being shown. It is surgically precise. Just the emphasis on the smokestacks of the crematorium. At all times you're always seeing this smoke, but sometimes it will just focus on the smokestacks and you know, what is coming out of that. There's a lot of also scenes of them shoveling ash that we know what that is. There's I think only one scene inside the gas chamber that's pretty brief but mostly you're seeing the before and after. [Rich] Steven Spielberg was making a movie called 'Minority Report' and Tim Blake Nelson was an actor in 'Minority Report' and friends with Steven Spielberg. He was acting while he was editing 'The Grey Zone.' [Me] That must have been a trip. [Rich] Tim Blake Nelson asked Steven Spielberg to look at the film. Spielberg came back over the weekend and he said, 'I love this film and I want to distribute this film through DreamWorks.' Tim Blake Nelson thought that was wonderful and Steven Spielberg took it to DreamWorks, and DreamWorks said, 'No,' 'we do not do small films.' 'This is a 400 theater film.' 'We do 3,000 theaters.' For better or worse, this film is always going to be compared to 'Schindler's List.' So it was distributed by other people. I'm reminded of this because if you recall, there's a scene where a woman is screaming, uncontrollably screaming.
[Me] Yes. [Rich] Screaming, screaming, screaming, and finally, a Nazi comes and just shoots her in the face and she falls. Spielberg said to Tim, because this is before digital effects. [Me] Yeah.
[Rich] 'How did you get that shot?' 'How were you able to get that?' He said, there was a person off screen with a peashooter and dye, and was able to just, right on there. [Me] Oh my God. That's ridiculous. Another great story is that Tim Blake Nelson took his son to the camps to tour, to Birkenau. And for those who haven't been there, there's a gift shop and it's by the parking lot. When I went there, I was so aghast by it. There's an article you can read that I wrote called, 'My Trip to Poland,' where I showed pictures of the matching refrigerator... [Me] Capitalism is hell. Oh my God. [Rich] The matching refrigerator magnets, Auschwitz Birkenau. If you can believe that they're selling this there. Nonetheless. [Me] Nonetheless. [Rich] Tim goes into the gift shop. And he points up to the shelf and he says, next to Schindler's List, that there's 'The Grey Zone.' The clerk there says it's the greatest Holocaust film ever made.
[Me] Aaaw [Rich] Tim didn't say it was his. He just walked out. When I was interviewing him about this, he said it's off the record. I said this is not why this is off the record. This is such a great story. It's on the record. He said, okay, but it doesn't sound very nice. I said, 'Yeah, but it happened, and you made this great film.' [Me] I was going to ask, how did you find this film? Did you know about it when it was coming out or did you find it after the fact? How did you find 'The Grey Zone?' [Rich] Well, nobody really knew about it because it came out the weekend of 9/11. [Me] Yeah, it came out September 13th, 2001. [Rich] No. It really came out, it was really September 11th. [Me] Oh really? [Rich] He was at the Toronto Film Festival. He was supposed to have breakfast with Roger Ebert. I mean it was really um... Ebert, by the way, loved the film. [Me] Yeah. [Rich] Loved it, reviewed it more than once and put it in his best pictures. When I started teaching about Holocaust films, I got a list of every film that could ever conceivably be all the guys filming I watched it. This was just on on a long list of movies. I bought DVDs of every Holocaust film that could conceivably be considered a Holocaust film. Sometimes 90 percent of the time you're sitting there going 'When is this going to end?' Ten percent of the time you're saying, 'How could I ever have not known about this?' [Me] I was so angry just that I had never heard of this movie before, because it is really, really good. It is definitely up there for movies I am going to recommend to people. I may or may not make a video about it. I don't know. I'm still deciding. I'm getting the DVD. I will listen to that Cast Creator commentary that's on the DVD. I'm very excited to get that, but I had to get it through eBay. It's not even in print on Amazon for our region, which still I don't know how the Criterion works. I still think that they could rescue this movie from obscurity. I don't know how they do it, but they do pick up weird little movies that nobody saw that didn't make money. They do it all the time. [Rich] I'll make sure to let Tim Blake Nelson know that. [Me] I'm just saying there's a suggestions email, people can bother them. [Rich] The other point I was going to make was in October, I wrote an article and a long interview about this for the JTA It was one of the top most read articles last year. For those who wanted to know more about it, first watch the movie and then read the interview. What else do you want to talk about? [Me] I think that this might be the end of it. Do you want to once again remind people about your book? [Rich] Why don't you remind them about my book because you're the one who's reading it, so you're more objective than I am. [Me] I will say I don't agree with all of your opinions, but I do think that it's interesting area of scholarship, and there's definitely a lot that I learned while reading it. And you wrote a book about like 400 plus Holocaust films, Rich Brownstein, Holocaust Cinema. For people trying to teach their students about the Holocaust, I would definitely recommend this book because I have seen some embarrassing attempts at teaching the Holocaust. I would recommend this book if you're a teacher who has to teach students about this subject matter. It's pretty comprehensive, so yeah. [Rich] I just wanted to say one more thing, two more things. First, you do a great job and I love your style. You're talent and thoughtful, and if you are the product of Holocaust education, even bad Holocaust education, you should be very proud. [Me] Listen, I did my own education. The education I got in school was not particularly useful. [Rich] You are a gem. You are absolutely a gem and your video about 'Jojo Rabbit' was tremendous. Even though I don't like 'Jojo Rabbit,' you're so thoughtful as I wrote to you originally, and so beautifully made. It makes me feel secure knowing that people like you are out there and care about this, so that's the first thing. The second thing is self-serving. If you want to find me, you can go to holocaustfilms.com and you can see everything you want to know about my book and interviews that I've done and written and mailing address, well, email and there you are.
[Me] Good! Okay. [Me] I couldn't figure out a chill way to end the interview wheeeee But thank you Rich for taking the time. It was great. For my viewers, go watch 'The Gray Zone.' It's easy to find digitally at least and it's GOOD But for those who want to hear the news, that is, for those who didn't see the news on my community tab or Twitter, I got a proper post-production job. That is a big deal for my long-term career goals. That doesn't mean I'll stop making videos, but it means production of them will slow down and I don't know how much yet. The Rise of the Guardians video is almost three-quarters of the way done, but my mic crapped out last month. That's why this audio sounds garbage. I'm using the same headset might get used in the interview, and I'm still waiting for the new microphone to arrive, so I'm sorry. It's coming soon. The video will be done soon, I promise. Thank you all for watching. You've been great. I'll see you on the next one.
I wonder if this video touches on "Life is Beautiful". Haven't felt that conflicted on a movie ever in my life.
Oh god, this made me realize that in a few decades they're gonna start making revisionist history films about the Holocaust, the same way they did about the Civil War and slavery. They'll have people laughing and joking around in literal death camps to show "it wasn't all bad".
I haven’t watched the video yet, but I saw the color scheme and really hoped this would be ladyknightthebrave. I love this channel. Thank you for sharing!
Generation War, isn't about the Holocaust but it shows a different side of the war. Its not your standard "America was good Germany was bad" WW2 movie.
Spot on about Schindler's List. I feel the exact same way about Saving Private Ryan. I may even have more problems with that one since it has a really improbable premise.
Just tell the damned story! Don't frame it around some savior.
An hour and 20 minutes and so little content. Very little analysis, just two people shooting the shit about movies.
It would have been good to hear from the expert about the representation in each movie. But it was just fluff for an hour.
Enjoyed this a lot, agree with a lot of their conclusions. It’s a shame they didn’t discuss Son of Saul which in my opinion is one of the most superb holocaust movies ever made