Tonight I saw Munich before eating on some Argentinian dinner schedule (11pm). I went into this movie knowing full well that it was going to achieve something spectacular and left reassured that with all of the hype and press, Munich came out on top, unlike say Brokeback Mountain that left a good amount of viewers dumbfounded. In fact, if you need to see one movie of 2005, I might just say that this is it. I honestly knew the bare essentials about the Munich story (given that I wasn't alive and that it isn't something they teach in rural high school American history) so the entire story was entirely riveting to me from start to three hour finish. The movie basically drains you. It is raw, emotional, depressing, worldy, powerful, spectacular, angry, and beautiful. There are scenes that leave you in absolute fear. It is clearly Spielbergs (who I bad mouth all of the time, but you know...) pent up masterpiece so far. It clearly shows his thoughts, his strengths, his weaknesses, and his unfathomable interest in the story. You leave the movie speechless after seeing imagery of Munich and New York City and with the idea that he is neither pro-Isreali or pro-Palestinian. He has just shown how volatile and utterly confusing the situation is and how the events of Munich should just leave you, the viewer, with a sense of, "What are we doing in the world? He asks the questions but never answers leaving the viewer to wonder, which I did, if there are any answers. And more importantly, why?" I am not going to get into the details of what actually happens in the movie but it cleary is going to win Best Picture and even possibly Best Actor for Eric Bana. Each character in the story from Golda Meir was incredibly developed and you had a real sense of understanding their reasoning, their emotions, and ultimately their hardships, like losing ones mind in paranoia.
Slate.com: The coldness of this universe is reinforced by Spielberg's uninflected
storytelling. His tone is flat and his visual texture rough; the film
is full of unobtrusive hand-held camerawork and quick zooms. The
exceptions are the flashbacks to the Munich murders, the events
revealed gradually, in fragments, through Avner's daydreams and
nightmares. Those flashbacks accelerate—hurtling toward the actual
Munich bloodbath—as ambivalence and then revulsion seep into the
present action. The men Avner kills don't seem like monsters.
They're presented as cranky poets and loving fathers and fierce
idealists, and they regard their cause as righteous. (It is a powerful
irony that the Palestinian who is said to be the Munich mastermind, who
looks and acts like your garden-variety terrorist scumbag, is forever
evading assassination.)
Rogert Eperts review takes on an international debate tone but it points out some seriously great points about the movie.
Chicago Sun Times: “Jews don't do wrong because our enemies do wrong,” he argues, and
“if these people committed crimes we should have arrested them.” To
which he is told, “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate
compromises with its own values.”
The same debate is going on
right now in America. If it is true that civilizations must sometimes
compromise their values, the questions remain: What is the cost, and
what is the benefit? Spielberg clearly asks if Israel has risked more
than it has gained. The stalemate in the Middle East will continue
indefinitely, his film argues, unless brave men on both sides decide to
break with the pattern of the past. Certainly in Israel itself it is
significant that old enemies Ariel Sharon, from the right, and Shimon
Peres, from the left, are now astonishingly both in the same new party
and seeking a new path to peace. For the Palestinians, it may be
crucial that the PLO's corrupt Arafat no longer has a personal stake in
the status quo, and a new generation of leaders has moved into place.
Spielberg’s film is well-timed in view of these unexpected political
developments, which he could not have foreseen (Sharon left his Likud
Party on Nov. 21, 2005, and Peres left his Labour Party a week later).
Far from being “no friend of Israel,” he may be an invaluable friend,
and for that very reason a friend of the Palestinians as well.
Spielberg
is using the effective form of a thriller to argue that loops of mutual
reprisal have led to endless violence in the Middle East, Ireland,
India and Pakistan, the former Yugoslavia, the former Soviet Union,
Africa, and on and on. Miraculous, that the pariah nation of South
Africa was the one place where irreconcilable enemies found a way to
peacefully share the same land together.
At crucial times in a
nation’s history, its best friends may be its critics. Spielberg did
not have to make “Munich,” but he needed to. With this film he has
dramatically opened a wider dialogue, helping to make the inarguable
into the debatable. As a thriller, “Munich” is efficient, absorbing,
effective. As an ethical argument, it is haunting. And its questions
are not only for Israel but for any nation that believes it must
compromise its values to defend them.
I am currently in Los Angeles enjoying a small little break from shitty cold weather, enjoying a very fabulous city with some hot restaurants and bars, celebrating a very wild and crazy Last Dance (with OMG Offer Nissim) and then New Years (Manny Lehman is spinning for NYears) at some big circuit party thing (my first REAL one), and resting up (not really) for the slump of January/February back in Boston. I will be back and blogging with hot new 8mb pics when I return on Monday night, the 2nd. Have a great New Years and I will see you all in 2006. :) Hysterically enough Manny will be in Rio for Carnivale. 
