Holocaust Day 1

I don't know guys, I'm really not sure I'm going to make it through this. Watching this is sort of like watching people kill puppies. And after almost three hours I'm only half way done.

From the DVD menu I could tell this was going to be an unpleasant experience. Gritty colors, images of people who look in severe pain, barbed wire slashing through the center. Generally unpleasant.

I was right. This movie is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Not a bad movie, but it's about a Jewish family living in Berlin during World War II. How can it possibly go well? The movie follows their lives from 1935 to where we have left them in 1941. I don't want to spoil everything, but let me just say they're not all still alive. Meryl plays a Christian woman who marries a Jewish man before the Nazis went nuts and she continues to try and help her in-laws after it is made illegal to associate with Jews.

A subplot includes this young lawyer named Erik Dorf (Michale Moriarty) who joins the SS to make a living and slowly rationalizes his way to being truly evil. The scenes with him and Heydrich (who in the credits is too creepy for a first name) are some of the more well written and terrifying I've seen so far. They talk about "reading the Fuhrer" and his policies and what is "practical" for German as it tries to talk over the world. Seeing on what level they are conscious of what they are doing and how they are swept up in the idea. It is bizarrely comforting that the creators of this series made the Nazi officials as creepy as possible. It's also interesting to see how the Jewish people believe what is happening is for political reasons, because at the time that's how it seemed. Now, looking back, we're so dominated by Hitler's grand master plan we forget how it appeared at the time. The family's utter faith in the system is a little heartbreaking.

The cast is very good. There's an young Rosemary Harris, aka Peter Parker's aunt in Spiderman. Michael Moriarty, who was on Law and Order for a while and reminds me a little of Peter Sarsgaard, wins for creepiest person ever. They have a bunch of British actors playing these German people living in Berlin, but I'll ignore that.

Overall Cool Scale: 9. This is amazing movie, just extremely difficult to watch.

Action Scale: 2. Not really an action movie. Lots of death, but no car chases or martial arts battles.

Script Scale: 9. The way they're developing the Dorf character is fascinating and I'm curious to see what will become of him. His wife is also interesting and evil and manipulative.

Other Creative-y Stuff Scale: 7. Looks very period, but it's one of those movies where everyone is ridiculously clean and you actually believe people looked that good in the middle of a war. Also having some lighting issues where people enter a building in daylight, it's dark out when they're in the room, and leave in the sun again. But minor stuff.

Nerdy Bits Scale: 8. My knowledge of WWII history is only decent, so I can't say how accurate this is. They reenact Kristallnacht and mention the Munich Pact and the murder of Ernst Rohm. It looks like they've done their homework. The whole thing is over seven hours long, I'd hope so. I do know enough to predict most of the things that happen. At one point I found myself muttering, "Oh don't go to Poland, really bad plan."

Streep Scale: 8. She's incredible in here. There's this one scene where she has to do something she really doesn't want to do, and I really didn't want her to do, to save her husband. The look on her face was so heartbreaking it was difficult to watch.

If this sounds at all interesting, I also recommend "Judgment at Nuremberg," "Sophie Scholl, the Final Days," and "Life is Beautiful." After those I highly recommend some Marx brothers movies, "Dumb and Dumber," "Pirates of the Caribbean," and whatever else silly and light is around just to cheer yourself up.

Hope to finish the series tomorrow and get on to "The Deer Hunter." That one better be slightly cheerier or I might not make it.