find me guilty

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0419749

when a film is based on real life, that does not mean they are telling you a true story.  it just means that something that happened in real life inspired somebody to write a screenplay, which was later edited and rewritten and interpreted into a movie that may or may not bear resemblance to the thing that really happened.  find me guilty has a twist on the based-on-real-life thing in that it makes the claim that most of the courtroom dialogue is taken directly from the trial this movie was based on.  however, if you pay attention to which dialogue they are showing you, it is pretty clear that very little of it is the stuff that would have been entered into the court record.  opening and closing statements, sidebars, stuff in the judge's chambers, lunch conversations, running into the prosecutor in the hall, chatting before things get started for the day--all of that is off the record.  so really, when they tell you that it was based on real life, they are telling you that they fabricated the story out of whole cloth.  i find this annoying, and i would really like it if everybody would stop putting those "based on a true story" notices at the beginning of their movies, at least when the only point is to add some fake gravitas to the proceedings.

so there is that.  otherwise, i loved that vin diesel was the guy.  they did a great job of making him not look like a towering man-mountain, and he did a fabulous job of looking like the little boot-licking schmuck that the part called for.

find me guilty gets two sidebars and a your-honour-able mention for casting vin diesel as the schmuck.