Spielberg & Kushner's Munich '72 / Israeli vengeance film

I didn't think this while I was watching it. The criticisms listed above aren't convincing enough to me, and I suspect they're at least somewhat rooted in anti-Israeli and/or anti-Spielberg stances.

I thought that this film presented its point quite vividly.

The only thing that bugged me was the ott orgasm/airport carnage scene near the end

Now, I don't doubt that the people they chose weren't prone to feeling bad about killing - but everything about the Munich reaction is shrouded in secrecy and this isn't the 'true story' of what happened.

So, even if the real-life mindset were relevant to a fictional film (which it's not, as slocki said - it never makes any kind of truth-claim about the events), we have little or no evidence to contradict Spielberg's portrayal.

And Mossad people might know cuz uh most of the people in the film are Mossad people and might either through interaction or general experience be able to speak to their mindset.
Except the people involved were not involved with Mossad during the operation, nor has any similar operation been undertaken by Mossad (that we know of).

If you want to say it 'rang patently false,' fine - but the problem comes in pretending that Spielberg 'lied' to make the Israelis more palatable.

http://www.calendarlive.com/movies/cl-op-kushner22jan22,0,7266356.story

Pretty good film but it made me a bit uneasy how we were supposed to sympathize with the Mossad agents(and I did!).

And the goal of the much-maligned sex / airport slaughter crosscutting seems obvious, whether it works or not. Avner continually identifies his wife as "home" (who sez this is atypical Spielberg?) as opposed to Israel, but he's done his killing for his other home (and taken his wedding ring off before he starts his assassination tour). Or as Nathan Lee writes in Film Comment, "Avner begins as an efficient, unfeeling tool. He ends so half-mad with grief that visions of dead Olympians play out while he's banging his wife."

Alex, my adversary on all things Spielberg, art is "lies," especially when you have to boil an eternal conflict down to 164 minutes on celluloid.

the fact that the assasins frantically tried to prevent the little girl from being collateral damage is meant to reinforced their humanity i think--all the better to contrast with the inhumane things they end up doing anyway. compare that moment to women on the boat, etc.

No shit it is obvious and yeah it doesn't work.

"Alex, my adversary on all things Spielberg, art is "lies," especially when you have to boil an eternal conflict down to 164 minutes on celluloid."

He should tell better lies then cuz I've heard these ones before.

Right, and there's no reason to reinforce their humanity. They're more attractive -- more ruthless -- as ciphers. This is one of the few films in which I'd accept a protagonist's realization that he's morally damned without "clues" and "foreshadowing," which Spielberg has never been able to film without getting hamhanded. Eric Bana is a canny actor, and he suggested that he could have played an assassin as cheerfully malevolent as the woman he offs.

I'd forgotten Mich(a)el Lonsdale is in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses, and in Malle, Bunuel and Duras films too. The one I always recall his face from is The Day of the Jackal where's he's the cop trying to thwart deGaulle's assassination.

Alex, do you think you would've been able to ID this as a Spielberg film if his name wasn't on it? cuz I think it's clearly much more mature than his previous 'grownup' films like Color Purple (egad) or Schindler.

I still think this is the most logically defensible interpretation, but it's not the first one I thought of. My first reaction, based on how the scene felt when I first saw it, was that the crosscutting is an expression of self-doubt on the part of the filmmakers. Ie., they worry that they have made a film in which the payoff/"money shot"/release/climax/orgasm is killing. In other words the way the film is structured, tension builds as they attempt to assassinate each terrorist, and it's released each time they succeed. So the crosscutting is intended as a brief wormhole into an alternate film in which the terrorist/Mossad roles are reversed and the emotional payoff occurs when the athletes are killed rather than when the terrorists die. But this is just a passing nightmare - not a statement of equivalence, as the films right-wing critics would have it - a moment of self-doubt.

No I wouldn't have, but I could make that claim about most Spielberg films (this is to his credit--the fact that he's always visual interesting despite not having much of cinematic signature is as well.) That said the feeling of disappointment I get from his projects is very consistent. At the same time, I won't deny that a large reason why I find Spielberg so disappointing is that he consistently takes ideas and projects that I am very interested/invested in and does far far less with them than I would have hoped.

Did you like Angels in America? I forget. I wonder why the moral rhetoric of the movie is being exclusively discussed as Spielberg's, when Kushner's is unmistakeable in many of the dialogue-heavy scenes.

David Edelstein in the Slate roundtable:

I'm ... endlessly fascinated by vigilantism and its discontents... Torturers frequently regard themselves as vigilantes, acting outside the pansified Geneva Conventions—-and they're abetted by movies and TV shows like 24, which this year presented the unintentionally hilarious spectacle of a battery of ACLU types pouncing within 30 minutes on a super-secret government agency holding a terrorist with knowledge of the whereabouts of a nuclear missile en route to a major American city. (Somewhere around his third year of incarceration, Jose Padilla must have regretted he didn't have Kiefer Sutherland zapping his privates—-he'd have been out in an hour.) ...I grew up with movies about throwing away the manual and doing worse to your enemies than they did to you ("the Chicago way," as David Mamet called it memorably in The Untouchables). I welcome its corollary, "the Munich way." I welcome anything that shifts the cultural dialogue away from "axes of evil."

Wait isn't that what I said?

I like Angels in America (liked it a lot more when I saw it fifteen years ago than I did the HBO version though, sadly.) And yeah the heavy-handedness is very clearly at least as much the screenplay as it is Spielberg (Kushner's quote above about "sociopaths" very indicative.) But auteur theory and all that it's not surprising that Spielberg is gonna get the majority of the blame.

I didn't think so... early State of the Union cocktails? ;)

Eric, I knew you had it in you.

http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/02/stain-on-mind_113955479003282498.html

http://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wireditems/2006/03/seriouslyfuck_y.php

Really, get a load of that guy. "Ooooh, I TOOK DOWN Munich!" That's pathetic even for a showbiz blogger.

Lots of subtlties. The last exchange b/w Bana and Londsdale when the former is leaving the country house: ("You could be my son. But you're not") and its agonzing payoff later, when Papa seems to sell Avner and his gang out.

Welcome to the converts' tent, Alfred! Today's Village Voice digs in its heels: "a paragon of moral and political incoherence."

They wouldn't be me, tho.

Good attention to detail recreating 70s urban Europe I guess. That's about it. Or if making The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion look like the instruction pamphlet included with Candy Land is your thing, I guess it was pretty good at that too.

Filth. Good to know that human beings are all basically savages though, I hadn't ever thought about that before.

Spielberg's not got a tenth of the cynical chops of his idol. And yes I mean ...Capra.