Life is Beautiful
|
List Price: Our Price: $12.49 You Save: $7.50 (38%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $5.15 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Canada
Movie Reviews of Life is Beautiful
Movie Review: Awesome production
Summary: 5 Stars
I saw this movie for the first time some years ago. Up to now, I think there hasn't been any other movie that I had enjoyed more. Not only for its wonderful story but also for the great performances on it... Roberto Benigni and Nicoletta Braschi plays are really breathtaking... but how to forget that wonderful kid called Giorgio Cantarini (Giosue on the movie)
This story tells the nice and quite life of a Jewish man (Guido) who falls in love with a beautiful school teacher (Dora). His permanent and occurrent humor sense and persistence gets Dora's heart... movie goes softly with many humoristic scenes and situations. Some years later, Giosue appears in scene, having Guido and Dora already married. The unexpected comes with a Nazi guard arrives to this happy family. Guido and his very young child are taken by the force to a Nazi death camp. Dora's love is stronger than anything and she leaves everything to join her family at the same hell.
Then, the most dramatic (and unforgettable) situations are shown. Guido makes everything to make Giosue believe they are part of a game which will give to the winner a tank car. Even when Guido finishes his extremely-hard working days, he's still smily and full of imagination to make this white lie bigger. Although Guido's duties, he manages to get his sweetheart a love message, an operah play that Dora attented when they weren't together.
After many situations, Guido knows the war is finishing and hides his little boy from Nazis soldiers. He tries to rescue his wife but he's caught by a soldier... who has no mercy with him. After some silent moments, Giosue comes out and he realizes is in front of the game winner's price... a real tank car. An American soldier rescues him and during the way home he sees his mum... who had also escaped from that nightmare.
This movie has become a real classic of the film history, it's not a marketing product... it's a real masterpiece. For much, the best movie I've seen in many, many years... my all time favourite movie? I'd probably say: YES.
Now, you just should... Enjoy it!
Movie Review: Not for everyone, but damn close
Summary: 5 Stars
Okay, a few folks have said they did not like this film. Fair enough, I didn't like Good Will Hunting.But let's take a look here. If you know what this film is all about, then the first half of it will astound you. I mean, egg on faces? It comes startingly close to Benny Hill for 'want of a laugh track'.
Ahh, but the warmth grows on you, and then...
The second half.
Few scenes are as emotional as when Guido has to reassure his son that the Jews 'aren't going to be made into soap.' The film takes a turn for the harshness and doesn't let up.
Schindler's List was a phenomenal film, showing the utter horror of the holocaust, but it missed one thing: the notion of hope. No one in Spielberg's masterpiece continually believes that 'life is beautiful'. All we see is the horror, the downfall, the pain. And while that makes for a fantastic dramatic punch, it negates any humor or spirit the prisoners may have had to blanket themselves from the harshness, and this humor surely existed.
Guido knows very soon that he is going to die. But, the love for his son outweighs the need to DISPLAY hopelessness. If nothing else, he must protect his son. So he convinces him it's all a game. Simple, buffoonish...
and damn identifiable. Who here can honestly say they wouldn't do anything they could to protect their sons/daughters from knowing the biggest evil on Earth? Guido manages to keep his son involved in 'the game' while he himself knows it will most likely end according to an evil thought.
The end scene, where Guido realizes he is going to be killed, and yet does a goofy march to make his son laugh, is one of the most powerful sights to ever be associated with the trauma the Nazi's inflicted on the world.
If you didn't like this film, fine. But don't say it mocked the Holocaust. If anything, it's a tribute to the flame of life that wouldn't be blown out.
Laughter seeps into any tradegy, if the love for life is there. Anne Frank said something to the effect that 'in spite of all this, I still feel people are good in heart'. She had hope.
She knew life was beautiful.
-CS
Movie Review: The Triumph of the Human Spirit
Summary: 5 Stars
I loved this movie. I think this movie, more than any other movie I've ever seen, showcases the resilience of the human spirit and its ability to triumph over almost any adversity. I've read bitter criticism of this film from those who believe that it trivialized the horrors of the Holocaust. I can't fault people for feeling the way they do and if that's what they feel, then I respect that, but I didn't see that at all.
For me, "Life is Beautiful" humanized the Holocaust like nothing else ever could. For me, Roberto Benigni and his family were real (and no doubt, there were real people like them who were sent to the camps). For me, this movie made the Holocaust seem even more important than it had been before. It showed me that wonderful, innocent people died and that others gave their lives so the people they loved could live. Of course, I know that from history books, but no history book I've ever read has packed the emotional punch of "Life is Beautiful."
Benigni's performance in this film was so perfect I can't even think of a performance that comes close. Even Adrian Brody's beautiful performance in "The Pianist" wasn't the tour de force of Benigni's. Benigni gives us a tragicomic masterpiece that I don't think can ever be equalled. To those who did not like the comedic aspects of this film, let me just say this: for some of us, and I am one, the comedic touches only served to heighten the ensuing tragedy.
The ending of this film left me so emotionally shattered that I haven't been able to watch the film again, even though I want to do so. This is a beautiful film. The script is perfect, the acting is perfect and the story is so heartbreaking in its perfection that it will live forever in my being. I will never look at the Holocaust again in the same way, i.e., as a historical event. Instead, I will think of the Holocaust as something that happened to individual human lives.
I treasure this film. It's perfection and it does show me that life, even with all of its pain and tragedy, can indeed, be beautiful.
Movie Review: Life is Beautiful is Beautiful
Summary: 5 Stars
My entire family adored this charming tragicomedy about life in Italy just before and during World War II. Director and star Roberto Benigni has created a fairy tale with an edge. An irrepressible Jewish waiter falls in love with a socialite, winning her away from her Fascist fiance with a mix of humor, coincidence, opportunism and whimsy. They have a son and find themselves in the midst of a Jewish pogrom that transports them to an unnamed concentration camp. Father "Guido" uses the same skill set that he used to win his wife to protect his four-year old son from the brutality that surrounds him, convincing him that the camp is an elaborate holiday and game in which the winner will receive a new tank.
Benigni's performance (which won a Best Actor Academy Award--rare for a foreign language film) is a masterwork--manic, touching, hilarious and affecting in about every possible way. The scene where he translates a German soldier's camp instructions for the benefit of his son is priceless ("No lollipops! Don't even think about asking!") His wife Dora is beautiful and bemused in the first act and exists more symbolically, but still powerfully in the second. The very young actor who plays son Joshua is amazing--portraying the wide-eyed enthusiasm of his father combined with a mistrustful wisdom well beyond his years.
Like the recent French film "Amelie", "Beatiful" has a whimsical soul. The concentration camp sometimes seems a little too smooth, a feature that Spielberg films on serious subjects are sometimes accused of. Still, the Germans were known for the their organization and order, and the story doesn't really need grisly depictions of much of what went on during the Holocaust to make its point. The production design also fits with the fairy tale feeling of the tale.
My wife doesn't much care for foreign films, but said she felt like she'd learned some Italian watching this one. My daughter doesn't like foreign films or period movies. Both loved "Life is Beautiful." You will too.
Movie Review: 5 star comedy - not so sharp on the Holocaust
Summary: 5 Stars
There are very few films you can watch in a foreign language with subtitles which will make you laugh out loud. Life is Beautiful will do so from beginning to end. Benigni is a motor-mouthed genius, the script and screen play devilishly inventive and impishly funny all the way along.It's certainly no flat-out rib-tickler: The experiences of a Jewish Italian waiter and his family in a concentration camp could hardly be wall to wall slapstick. (Well, in Mel Brooks' capable hands, maybe - but Benigni has bigger fish to fry than Mel Brooks ever did.)
HOWEVER, I was not so taken with the Holocaust element. For one thing, the film is deliberately surreal and derives much of its humour from patently improbable situations: Benigni's character, a lovable wag, spends the entire film getting away with things which would throw any mortal into hospital, jail or a santitorium. So there's inevitably an element of Hogan's Heroes about the Concentration Camp scenes. This is fine on the comedy level, of course, but it does undermine any more serious a points Benigni might be trying to make. And Life is Beautiful unquestionably does stoop to collect some cheap gravitas.
[Warning: Controversial View coming up:]
As an exercise in harrowing film-making, depicting the Holocaust is easy pickings. You don't need to be Spielberg or Polanksi to create an emotional wrecking-ball out of Dachau: the Nazis did that by themselves. You only have to have seen "The World At War" to realise that pure reportage of the Holocaust is horrifying enough without any dramatic push.
And, like it or not, Benigni does collect on this front. I don't think that detracts from the excellence of this film - which is, after all about what a father will do for his family - but I think it considerably skews the Deep & Meaningful Index readout.
Which is to say is that Life is Beautiful is a standout piece of cinema because of its wit, not because of its treatment of the Holocaust. What's more, it's the better for that. Comedy is a much harder trick to pull off than high drama.