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

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.

John Williams's score came from an old DAT he found in his basement and then shipped USPS Media Mail. Didn't even bother with the bubble envelope.

Trying to one-up DePalma & Peckinpah (after quoting them endlessly throughout the movie; I'm amazed none of the PLOers got hung from a chopper) by delving into pornographic snuff probably not the best idea our Stevie's ever had.

The Godfather schtick was cute but also just as pointless as 85% of the other things that happen in this movie.

The final scene with the fucking and the machineguns and the slow-motion sweat droplets is one of the worst things I've seen on film in a very long time in terms of painfully, painfully hackneyed nonsense, and I've sat through at least 30 minutes of Bulletproof Monk on cable.

One last thing and I'm out: I amused myself endlessly this weekend imagining Owen Wilson cast in Daniel Craig's inexplicable part, and saying "The only blood I care about is Jewish blood!" in his easygoing texan accent.

?!

Lately I just imagine Ian McKellen playing every part:

"The only blood I care about is mutant – er, JEWISH – blood!"

Daniel Craig is absolutely terrible in this movie, btw, why is he in it? Wasn't there anyone else? Like actual Israelis maybe? Or hell, Ian McKellen or Owen Wilson, I don't care. Made me very much not look forward to the Bond film, though I never really do.

But yeah, what's the consensus? Gets better on second viewing? Not subtle, but not an unholy sin against the art of filmmaking? Everyone I talk to blows trumpets about how Spielberg "humanizes the terrorists" and my reaction is kind of, "yeah, three-dimensional characters, WHAT AN ACCOMPLISHMENT."

i still like it, though! it's pretty tense and extremely well-made. i like daniel craig (i'm guessing it's possible that a south african jewish chap would throw his allegiance in with the israelis?)

and again the last shot of the film is nice.

The discussion well upthread about how the film is overlong and had seemingly 5 potential endings up thru the actual ending is pretty OTM, and the ending sex scene basically ruined the movie for me (I understand the "message" but I also wanna just quote s1ocki upthread: O RLY, Steven? RLY?). And everyone who claims the score to this is "subtle" is either a deaf person OR has such, such low expectations from John Williams at this point that anything seems subtle (the music in the sex scene finale, which hasn't been mentioned up to this point as far as I can tell, is absolutely the worst thing about it).

Eric Bana is surprisingly good in it, and his accent is excellent. The story itself is compelling. It has more in common with a couple of Baader-Meinhof inspired German films than it does with a lot of films referenced throughout this thread, and I guess ultimately I'd rather watch Bruno Ganz than Eric Bana. Overall kind of middling IMO, the last third of the film has a completely different pacing than the rest of it (a change for the worse), and some of the flaws become frustrating because you can see the point being made, but the execution kind of made me want to scream, "Yes, yes, we get it, v. clever, here's a pony ride."

It is, FWIW, much better than SPR or Amistad.

xpost possible but if that's what that accent is supposed to be he's going a bit Patsy Kensit isn't he.