If you take Hollywood conventions as undeniable facts, then you'd be under the impression that in Europe between the years 1939 and 1945, it was overcast every single day. It rained upwards of 65% of the time, summer didn't exist, and trees didn't opt to sprout leaves. It was as if Hitler gassed Mother Nature.
But seriously. This popped into my head when I was watching the opening scene of X-Men the other day, where a young Magneto loses his parents in the Holocaust. I got to thinking: Valkyrie, Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List, Downfall, The Counterfeiters, Defiance, The Pianist, Sophie's Choice... Where the fuck did the sun go? It's gotten to the point where this chronically-dusk image of the Holocaust and WWII is so ingrained that movies that try to stray from the trend, such as Life is Beautiful, invariably come off as cheesy pieces of trash. (Yes, LiB is simply awful.)
I'm no meteorologist, but it seems fishy.
On a related note, this is a pretty good piece of Holocaust film cliches. I liked this:
5. The Morally Ambiguous Nazi Supporter
Even more prevalent lately than the good Nazi is the morally ambiguous or ambivalent character who is either a Nazi or working for the Nazis in order to survive and/or because he or she will later claim ignorance to the evils being committed. Examples include Kate Winslet’s character in The Reader, to an extent, as well as Ronnie (Halina Reijn, pictured above) in Black Book and the protagonist of The Counterfeiters, Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics). Again, it might have been a common reality for such persons to exist, but they shouldn’t be so populous in every Holocaust film made nowadays, because then it seems more excusable to believe that a good percentage of opportunist Nazi supporters weren’t all that bad.
