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I didn't want my memory of "Jakob der Luegner" to be contaminated by anything with Robin Williams in it, so I avoided the latter like the plague. One of the many brilliant points made by the original was that Jakob was if anything doing his people a disservice in getting their hopes up; his lies got people killed. "So many murderers," he lamented after his friend hanged himself, "did you have to make me one too?" There were so many scenes in the orginal that I doubt the remake had the nerve to do: the one where the guy who DID have a radio destroyed it, grumbling "dieser Jakob Heym ist ein Trottel"; the one where the Nazi guard "accidentally" dropped two cigarettes on the ground for Jakob and his friend to smoke; the one where a non-Hollywood child said that another had a "fart in the head," etc. All the more heartbreaking because it was so real. After this movie and Lina Wertmueller's "Seven Beauties," I didn't want to see anything else about the Holocaust, not even "Schindler's List"---ESPECIALLY not that one, from the mighty Steven the Manipulator....
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