Sunday, April 15, 2012

Courtroom Drama #10 - Judgement at Nuremberg (1961)

This movie makes me kind of uncomfortable. It's cool - It's supposed to - But it's still not a pleasant watch. You see, Judgement at Nuremberg is about the trial of German judges involved with the Holocaust. It's largely about the accountability of the German people in the Holocaust. Whether they're responsible or not even though they didn't specifically kill anyone. It does raise a lot of questions - Are people responsible, Is convicting a judge different than convicting an average citizen, questions like that.

It's uncomfortable, though, because the Nazis are supposed to be sympathetic. If there's one thing that everyone's certain of, it's that the Nazis were unquestionably wrong. I don't like watching anything that suggests that maybe they weren't. It doesn't sit well with me. The movie does, ultimately, decide that the judges were guilty. The point of the whole movie, though, was that everyone's responsible for the tragedy in some way, because everyone just ignored it. I suppose that's a fair point.

The theme of the movie really overshadowed all of the rest of it for me. I suppose that the acting must have been good, because I didn't notice it at all. Spencer Tracy was in it, which was nice - Everyone likes Spencer Tracy. The cinematography was actually pretty weird - There was a lot of sudden zooms into people's faces. Sort of made me motion sick, actually. Really this movie's strength is it's content - that's what makes it stand out. Also, there's some footage of an actual concentration camp hidden in there, so be warned.

Genre #6 - Courtroom Dramas

This genre is the strangest to me. It seems, you know, oddly specific. Not that it isn't a legitimate type of movie or anything, but it seems weird that they have such a detailed division of film like this and not, say, war movies. That's right - No war movies list, and yet: Courtroom Drama. It's very strange to me.

I'm not going to lie - I'm slugging through this genre a little bit. The thing about Courtroom Dramas is that a lot of the action is just people talking to each other, which isn't all that interesting in film ten times in a row. So I'm hoping I'll be able to get some momentum going and get through this quickly, so I can move on to the ever so exciting Westerns. Woo hoo.