I had not known that the case was a big deal in the States: I think of our libel laws as peculiarly British.
It was very definitely a big deal at a majority-Jewish liberal arts university. My parents also remember the case, however, and from reading about it rather than just hearing me report, so I suspect it was in the news. (I saw the movie with them. They wanted to make it mandatory viewing for everyone who was about to vote in the November election. Waaah.) The fact that it was happening in the UK was secondary to the way it was confronting the legitimization of Holocaust denial.
Anyway, I agree that the film does a good job with the central facts.
Plus I have now seen Andrew Scott in two things that weren't BBC Sherlock and he's great.
[edit] Speaking to your original question of timeliness, it looks partly like just the number of years it took between asking a writer for a script and getting a script that could be filmed and production and post-production and distributing etc. and partly that the writer himself thought it was timely: "We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that's my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn't. And such charlatans need to learn it isn't. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
no subject
It was very definitely a big deal at a majority-Jewish liberal arts university. My parents also remember the case, however, and from reading about it rather than just hearing me report, so I suspect it was in the news. (I saw the movie with them. They wanted to make it mandatory viewing for everyone who was about to vote in the November election. Waaah.) The fact that it was happening in the UK was secondary to the way it was confronting the legitimization of Holocaust denial.
Anyway, I agree that the film does a good job with the central facts.
Plus I have now seen Andrew Scott in two things that weren't BBC Sherlock and he's great.
[edit] Speaking to your original question of timeliness, it looks partly like just the number of years it took between asking a writer for a script and getting a script that could be filmed and production and post-production and distributing etc. and partly that the writer himself thought it was timely: "We are entering, in politics especially, a post-factual era in which it is apparently permissible for public figures to assert things without evidence, and then to justify their assertions by adding 'Well, that's my opinion' – as though that in itself was some kind of justification. It isn't. And such charlatans need to learn it isn't. Contemplating the Lipstadt/Irving trial may help them to that end."
WAAAH.