The Pianist | 
| Director: Roman Polanski
Actors: Adrien Brody, Thomas Kretschmann, Frank Finlay, Maureen Lipman, Emilia Fox
Studio: Universal Studios
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy Used: $2.90
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Rating:  394 reviews
Sales Rank: 9525
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dts Surround Sound, Dubbed, Dvd, Subtitled, Widescreen, Ntsc
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Subtitled), French (Subtitled), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Dubbed), Spanish (Dubbed)
Rating: R (Restricted)
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 150 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 7.5 x 5.3 x 0.6
MPN: D22766D
ISBN: 078327856X
UPC: 025192276620
EAN: 9780783278568
ASIN: B00005JLT5
Theatrical Release Date: 2002
Release Date: May 27, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com
Winner of the prestigious Golden Palm award at the 2002 Cannes film festival, The Pianist is the film that Roman Polanski was born to direct. A childhood survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Polanski was uniquely suited to tell the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish Jew and concert pianist (played by Adrien Brody) who witnessed the Nazi invasion of Warsaw, miraculously eluded the Nazi death camps, and survived throughout World War II by hiding among the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. Unlike any previous dramatization of the Nazi holocaust, The Pianist steadfastly maintains its protagonist's singular point of view, allowing Polanski to create an intimate odyssey on an epic wartime scale, drawing a direct parallel between Szpilman's tenacious, primitive existence and the wholesale destruction of the city he refuses to abandon. Uncompromising in its physical and emotional authenticity, The Pianist strikes an ultimate note of hope and soulful purity. As with Schindler's List, it's one of the greatest films ever made about humanity's darkest chapter. --Jeff Shannon
Product Description
Music was his passion survival was his masterpiece. Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 01/17/2006 Starring: Adrien Brody Run time: 150 minutes Rating: R Director: Roman Polanski
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| Customer Reviews: Read 389 more reviews...
 Holocaust for Beginners? June 24, 2009
Wendy L. Trimboli (the Pfalz)
I was expecting great things from this Triple-Academy-Award-winning picture. I hoped for a previously-untold perspective on the much-documented (and rightfully so)topic of the Holocaust. Sadly, this film brings nothing new to the mix. The extent of its power is limited by attempts to manipulate the emotions of the audience with depictions of meaningless brutality by cardboard "Nazi thugs" upon equally-cardboard "innocent Jews". If you've seen Schindler's List or The Hiding Place or the Anne Frank mini series, you'll recognize many revisited topics and cliches that have been portrayed better elsewhere.
Adrien Brody gives a decent, tortuous performance that has its moments. He is expressive in his silent observations of the world crumbling around him, and it's impossible not to care about his fate. Still, I'm embarrassed to admit that I was more deeply moved by his performance in Darjeeling Limited--the part where he tries to rescue a drowning child--than by his passive, anti-heroic lurking here.
I also spent entirely too much time during and after the film pondering the point--or pointlessness?--of it all. What is the bottom line here? That life was miserable for Polish Jews in the 40s? Was 2.5 hours of brutality, of watching a man gradually starve, frame by excruciating frame, really necessary, when other, better movies and documentaries have already hammered the point home? I suspected the director didn't trust the intelligence of his audience, especially when he whipped out well-worn lines from the Merchant of Venice and even displayed the title just in case we were unsure of the source of the quote. I had also expected some sort of theme regarding the redemptive quality of music, but even the gorgeous piano playing is restricted to a few scenes and ignored for most of the film.
The best scene in which the unlikely sympathy of a German officer saves Brody's pianist's life is truly touching, but the much-needed pathos is only partially developed. Based on the depictions of all the Nazi characters up until this point, the officer is an unexplainable anomaly whose motivations, background, and psychology are completely ignored. What makes this one man good, and the rest of them evil? Coming so late in the game, the addition of this sole non-stereotyped character with an appreciation for fine music feels tacked on. It's also hard to ignore the fact that minutes before, Brody had been fumbling with frost-bitten fingers to open a can of pickles. Suddenly, he launches into a "Shine"-worthy musical performance...
Overall, a simplistic and overly moralizing--though historically accurate--depiction of one man's survival of the Holocaust that inspires horror, if not pathos, in the audience. The Big Issues--the gradual whittling away of Jewish rights that eventually lead to mass extermination--are chronologically well depicted, but a meaningful discussion on the source of the hatred in all its complexity is absent here.
 Raw and Unflinching... An appropriate depiction of the disasterous Holocaust June 21, 2009
Filmbuff-reads stuff (Brooklyn, NY)
There is a lot to be said about the Holocaust by almost everyone, so whatever I can add will be a fraction of a much contemplated and discussed event of the abject inhumanity and abhorrence of this time period. The victim is the Jew, but the important lesson of the Holocaust extends far beyond the Jewish race because those who chose to look away and appease were not able to do so for long. The Nazis hunted everyone... the all-mighty power of France was occupied, and many of them acted as the Poles and gave away their Jews with pleasure; Great Britain, the most powerful nation for centuries before, had their very survival on the edge of extinction; the Nazis had even declared war on our beloved United States. So the identity of the Jew is not the focus; humanity was beaten, brutalized, gassed, demeaned, and raped of its dignity by allowing this to happen, and as the film shows when Hosenfeld and the other Nazis are jailed in Soviet Union prison camps, in any given situation, the twist of power and conceit can make what was once the victorious and all-powerful become the defeated and victimized.
Brody's acting is perfectly suited for the role, and there could not have been any better director than Roman Polanski telling this story. All the other details of the film are exquisite, and the written screenplay, as an adaption of the book (which I haven't read), is masterful and treated with the realism that only a skilled writer could evoke by research and contact with those who were there. Naturally Roman Polanski's own Holocaust survival plays an important contribution to the story, and the little details he adds-- such as when Szpilman is saved by a Jewish guard just before he is about to join his family on the deportation train to Auschwitz-- deliver a shuddering, nuanced drama to the story that is not formalized, but raw and honest to the reality surrounding this event. The guard yells, "Don't run," and in the documentary special feature on the DVD, Polanski intimates that this was not Spzilman's experience, but his very own when he escaped from the Krakow ghetto.
The film is a huge undertaking and is unbelievably sobering. It leaves me with the unsettling and cold realization that humanity can be unspeakably, monstrously, disgustingly evil. It is important to understand the enemy, to not appease with relative morality and pontification. In matters such as these, military action on the part of the allies was the only answer.
I add this as something to learn from this period, not as a supporter of war and the current situation we are put in now. The message of art and hope and peace and good people on all sides, even German, is not lost on me. But the distinction that should be made clear on this subject is that the atrocity and inhumanity of the period is the core of the event and the hope and individual survival is the heart of this story-- a beautiful story at that. Not everyone was strong enough or lucky enough to survive, so the story of hope is important, but understanding the bigger picture is paramount. This is Roman Polanksi's masterpiece and it is so much more than a film because it is based on real life. It is absolutely unforgettable; one of my top films of all time.
Memoirs of a Pianist June 17, 2009
Acute Observer (N. Jersey Shore)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The film begins with an old film of a street in 1939 Warsaw. Next a man plays a piano for a radio program. Explosions interrupt his performance. At home his family packs clothes (September 3, 1939). German troops march into town. How to hide their money? Oppressive regulations follow. All Jews must move into a district of Warsaw. Goods are sold cheap. A wall restricts access. Misery follows, the film shows the hardships. A man tests coins by bouncing them on marble (silver rings true). Underground newspapers are distributed to the people. Smugglers throw bags over the wall. Some are caught and killed. People die from hunger. A raid by German troops kills people. Hunger affects people. The lucky get Certificates of Employment. Others are sent east to resettlement camps.
People are rounded up into the courtyard and selected for transportation in 1942. They are loaded into cattle cars. Someone pulls Wladek out of the crowd. Workers are marched out of the Ghetto to work. Some are shot in the street. People are sent to Treblinka but never food. Only young people are left in the Ghetto. Arms are smuggled into the Ghetto to prepare for resistance. Wladek slips out the gate. He finds a refuge with friends. A change of clothes is his disguise, he will be hidden at another flat. On April 19, 1943 the Jewish Resistance began their war against Nazi oppression. They hid in the empty apartments. The survivors were shot after it ended in May. Would the Poles rise next?
There is bad news: the Gestapo captured some of his friends and he must leave. There is more suspense. Wladek finds a new refuge. Will he be as quiet as possible? Wladek hears about the invasion of France and the Russian advance (1944). On August 1, 1944 the Warsaw uprising began. The water supply was turned off. Wladek finds another refuge. The film shows the destroyed buildings. Will someone discover hime? Wladek plays for the German officer, who brings him food. "`Spielman' is a good name for a pianist." A sound truck plays a Polish song, the Germans are gone. But there is drama at the end. "I'm cold." At the end Wladyslaw Szpilman plays the piano at a concert. He lived 88 years. The German officer who helped him died in a POW camp in 1952.
This story is about life in conquered Warsaw during WW II. It is educational as any true story can be. It skims over the events from 1939 to 1945 to present the highlights. Warsaw was completely destroyed after the 1944 rising, it was all rebuilt after the war. One suburb, Praga, remained undamaged and was used in filming. The ruins came from another country. One lesson is that disarming people is the first step on the path to oppression. They always claim this is done "for your own good" or for "national security". After the Caesars came to power they also disarmed the Romans, and you can find other examples in history.
[The book "On Both Sides of the Wall" will tell you more about life in occupied Warsaw.]
 Never received item. June 8, 2009
John Staubitz
I would not recommend buying from a private source through Amazon as I did with this used DVD. It never showed up.
D Hughes February 26, 2009
D. Hughes (New Mexico)
What a wonderful movie! Beautifully done, cast, crew, locations, story. The director, Roman Polanski though his own personal experiance,really captured Wladyslaw Szpilmans'story of survival and the hope his music gave him to keep going. Adrien Brody gave a preformace of a life time, never once did he seem like an actor playing a part, he was Szpilman.
A truely inspritional film for all humanity. The special features of Polanski talking about his own family experiance though WWII is also an inspiration. This is a movie made out of tears, love and will to survive.
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