Movie 24

A couple of weeks ago I watched an old TV miniseries with my wife called Holocaust, originally shown on a broadcast network. As I mentioned when I posted about The Devil's Arithmetic, one of my boys had to watch a WWII movie for school. Knowing nothing about this one, I piked it up at the library as an option. Only when I got home and found 3 DVDs in the case did I realize it was a miniseries from the 70s.

While we didn't make the kids watch it for school, we decided to put it in to see how it was. I think I miss miniseries. They were a good way to tell an involved, dramatic story without needing to commit to a whole season of TV shows. Holocaust tells the story of a German Jewish family in WWII. I thought it was a good look at the atrocities committed in that time, even if it was unrealistic that one family would have all this happen to them. I have read that the show was criticized for this, basically making everything happen to one family for dramatic purposes. But overlooking that, it wasn't a bad miniseries, at least for the 70s.

It was pretty graphic for broadcast TV, with the violence and even some nudity. Probably realistic, but I'm glad we didn't have the kids watch it. Some images were very disturbing, which you would expect with the subject matter. There were even some photographs shown which looked like they were actually from the concentration camps.

I was surprised at the names involved with it, namely Meryl Streep and James Woods as the mixed marriage couple. Michael Moriarty was also good as an SS officer. The whole cast put on a good show over the 7.5 hours of the miniseries.

Afterward, I hesitated about including this as a fiftyfifty movie, since it wasn't really a movie. I had already decided I wouldn't count TV series, but would count cable movies or direct to DVD releases. Made for TV movies are more of a grey area, as are miniseries. But in the end I figured I was on pace to reach about 100 movies this year, so why not count this?