FROM HELL a Film by The Hughes Bros.

A Scotland yard Detective is on the case of the notorious Jack the Ripper. Few names in history are as instantly recognizable. Fewer still evoke such vivid images: noisome courts and alleys, hansom cabs and gaslights, swirling fog, prostitutes decked out in the tawdriest of finery, the shrill cry of newsboys - and silent, cruel death personified in the cape-shrouded figure of a faceless prowler of the night, armed with a long knife and carrying a black Gladstone bag. (Philip Sugden, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper) The classic whodunit, Jack the Ripper stalked the dark London streets in 1888, killing prostitutes in increasing brutality and surgical precision before suddenly disappearing into the mists from which he came. His identity was never revealed. Hundreds, if not thousands of theories exist as to whom the Ripper was, a surgeon, possibly connected to the crown, but nothing has ever been proven. Even with 20th Century technology, we have been unable to solve the mystery of who Jack The Ripper was.

Horror movies are not my forte, and I was worried that this movie was going to indulge in the bloody nature of the subject. Other reviews I have read indicated that there was a large amount of gore in this film, but they couldn’t have been further from the truth. A few moments of the film made me wince and turn my head, however they have stayed true to the subject, without turning to gore. If you have ever read about Jack the Ripper, you will have seen photos of his victims, and other than the lobotomy you see performed, that’s about as gory as it got. 

I was incredibly impressed with the camera work and set work for this piece. Not only were the sets authentic, it was dirty- just like London really would have been in the 1880’s. The dresses and makeup for the prostitutes were also wonderful-rotten teeth, filthy nails. Unlike most Hollywood films, you don’t see a flash on white teeth, or manicures or anything else that’s not period. The only disappointing fact (in fact the only disappointing fact of the whole movie) is that Heather Graham was entirely too clean. 

As for the end of the movie, I will not spoil it for you. The writers have not only stayed true to the historic base of the subject, they have also explained why the murders were never solved. An intriguing end and one I never saw coming.

THE PIANIST a Film by Roman Polanski

I dreaded having to see this movie.  Oh, how I didn’t want to see this movie.  You don’t know how burned out I am with World War II era war/Holocaust movies.  In addition, this movie is almost two and a half hours long.  I almost considered just skipping it, but a couple of things made me go.  First, it won the Golden Palm, the top award at the Cannes Film Festival.  Second, the legendary Roman Polanski directed it.   

The Pianist starts out in Warsaw in 1939.  Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a gifted pianist who specialized in played Chopin pieces, which he did over Polish radio.  He played the last live music heard over Polish radio airwaves before Nazi artillery hit.  He and his family, including his father (Frank Finlay), his mother (Maureen Lipman), his older brother Henryk (Ed Stoppard), and his two sisters Regina (Julia Raynor) and Halina (Jessica Kate Meyer), are all captured and sent to the Warsaw ghetto.  The Nazis then decide to exterminate some of the Jews in the ghetto, so they begin deporting them to the concentration camps.  As he and his family are being loaded up on the trains to be shipped away to the camps, a former friend named Itzak Heller (Roy Smiles), now a Nazi collaborator working as an auxiliary police officer, saves him by pulling him out of the line.  He spends the next couple of years moving from hideout to hideout, helped by Jewish sympathizers, including a cellist he had met earlier named Dorota (Emilia Fox), and a singer named Janina (Ruth Platt) with her husband Bogucki (Ronan Vibert.)  He might have had a romance with Dorota, but the war got in the way.  After he can’t make it to any more safe houses, he spends the last part of the war in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto.  It is there he is confronted by a music-loving Nazi soldier named Captain Wilm Hosenfeld (Thomas Kretschmann), who helps Szpilman ride out the rest of the war after an impromptu performance given by the pianist. 

Why wasn’t this movie as boring as I thought it was going to be?  It’s mainly because they gave the main character some hope without getting sentimental.  Throughout his hiding, he witnesses some horrible things being done to his fellow Jews, but he manages to survive.  In fact, it seems he is in the safest place for most of the movie during all the carnage.  Brody plays Szpilman perfectly, making him look shocked at first to the things that were going around him, then desensitized.  He also pulls a Tom Hanks from Cast Away and gets more skeletal as the movie goes on.

In addition, like Cast Away, this is pretty much a one man show, which is one of its problems.  It’s not that I expected a lot of dialogue in a movie that is about a single man surviving the war (something I heard people complaining about Cast Away…the lack of dialogue, that is), but I wanted to see more development of some of the supporting characters.  I will say that the movie does basically start once he is separated from his family.  Speaking of his family…that brings up another problem.  I know it is an American critic trait to want closure, but I didn’t understand why the notes at the end say what happened to Szpilman, and even what the fate of Captain Hosenfeld, but what about his family and friends?  That kind of irked me.

The Pianist is definitely not for everyone.  I don’t think young kids should see it, because it is coldly brutal with its violence (I think some old people walked out of the screening after seeing some of it.)  Also, if you are tired of Holocaust movies, after seeing about a zillion of them since Schindler’s List, this movie explores little new ground.  If you want to see an uncensored, unapologetic movie about the reality of the Holocaust and how one man’s survival of it, then by all means, check it out.  It’s not one of my favorite movies of the year, but it is far from boring.