Al Qaeda texting her handler. Shows at Majestic City, 1/3:30/7, methinks
Went to see Munich on Friday and (sans the last half-hour) it’s great. Munich, to me, captures terrorism better than anything else because everyone involved looks shit scared. Most movies choreograph violence to the point that the conclusion seems foregone and obvious, the moral victor clear. In Munich the scenes of violence are an absolute scramble of asses, elbows and AK-47s. Everyone looks very normal and their depravity is done for distant reasons that disappear in the heat of the moment. I think it captures terrorism because people are killed while they sleep, make love, shop for groceries, or answer the phone. In between the terrorists/assassins do the same human things, and slowly the paranoia seeps in as every mundane moment becomes infused with deadly potential. Munich, in particular the hollowed out eyes of Eric Bana, humanizes terrorism to a point beyond idealogy. It is a simply a bunch of people dead and a bunch of people scared.
Portrayal of the Massacre
The first scenes of the movie are some of the most interesting, to me, cinematically. I think Spielberg cobbled together actual news footage from the time, but what I found most interesting was the weird meta-experience of watching TV screens on a movie screens, literally a screen within a screen. Our experience of the fictionalized event was partly mediated through the media, with occasional glimpses on the inside. Rather than a simple chain of facts, it’s a confusing and disorienting jumble of intepretation and reintepretation. It reminded me of September 11th in that my immediate experience was a compulsive and repetive checking of electronic media for some way to understand what the fuck was going on.
Later there were more first-hand images of the massacre, the most memorable being an Israeli athelete, shot clean through the mouth, his cheek red and open. These images were seen as flashbacks Avner (Eric Bana) was having, or nightmares even. They were horrific, the athletes running away in their underwear, being shot through the chest.
I saw the movie with an Al Qaeda operative who was like ‘but they kill Palestinians everyday’ but I still think it’s just awful that atheletes were killed at the one time nations of the world are supposed to get together and act civilized. Terrorism just isn’t cool and I don’t think it is ever justified. Of course, the film doesn’t get into that.
Real Violence
Most movies portray violence as something that makes sense, whereas the reality is much more confused and messy. The logistical work of planning an actual hit is painstaking and dull and the killings are quite obviously murder. It’s interesting how the overarching moral justifications disappear in that moment. All the killers seem very normal and they’re all following orders they don’t really understand. Avner, more than anything, portrays the brutal normalcy of violence, as he doesn’t look or act like a soldier. He’s a father and a cook, but by the end he’s a broken man.
Intelligence Intrigue
The ‘fun’ parts of the film would be the meetings and setting up of the original assassinations, though it mostly boils down to a lot of waiting. Near the end the small band of Israeli operatives finds themselves hunted as well, and sharing a safehouse with PLO operatives and bumping into wily CIA and KGB agents. They inhabit a strange universe where the ordinary facts of life – housing, walking the street – are their battlefield and that imbues everything with a deep sense of paranoia. At one point Avner strips everything electrical in his room and ends up sleeping in the closet. They are the worst sort of soldiers who ‘shit where they eat’, if you will. They stay in the same hotels as their targets, walk the same streets and leave in constant fear of a death that will come at the most mundane moment.
That is, in many ways, the greatest threat of terrorism. Not the quantity of death, but the fact that there is nothing holy and no place safe. The last half-hour was, IMHO, expendable, but there was one scene where Avner’s face was the absolute picture of terrorism. He was sleeping with his wife, but he can’t get the images out of his head. He just looks all hollow and helpless, drenched in a cold, impotent sweat.
Attractive Men
The smell of man makes me angry so I can’t see myself sleeping with them, but on a purely aesthetic level, Eric Bana is a kind of hot, and the playboy terrorist Ali Hassan Salameh is a motherfucking pimp. For one thing he’s like 8 feet tall in the movie and he wears aviators at night. In real life he was apparently married to the Lebanese Miss Universe until he died in a car bomb.
Cinematography and Costumes
I really liked how the movie looked old, though that may’ve been the MC projectors. Also, Eric Bana’s tie was perpetually short and everybody dressed like 1970s geeks, that is, modern hipsters. I always think that 70s gear makes everyone look hapless, as I can’t take seriously a man who wears pants that tight. All in all, however, the scenes look absolutely convincing and are deeply situated in a time and place.
The only downside of the film was that it was a bit too long, and the last scenes were kinda unnecessary. I was also really hungry, so that might got in the way. I highly recommend watching it though. They also serve booze at the theatre, which is great. Not in an alcoholic sense, just aesthetically.
It was a fabulous film. As you said it was too long. Most of the great buggers just don’t know when the stop sometimes. Kubrick, Spielberg, Samarajiva. Some of the last clips deviated from the reality of the precding violence. Also Bana’s wife was stunning.
What I really liked about it was the unashamed real and shocking hatred he brought out between the Jews and the Palestines. As long as these two communities (this hatred is real – me being an innocent bystander nearly punched a Palestinian once because he was being such a cock) continue to have absolutely no regard for the other a compromise can never be reached. Camp David all you want. What matters is the ground situation. My President can sign all the treaties he wants, but if I hate the bugger who lives across the road I will kill him.
Is there a lesson for the Tamils and Sinhalese? I think so.
holy shit, I think there was a compliment in there. And yes, Bana’s wife is a profound bird.
As you say, I think the only solution is for the two sides to not hate each other so much. As the election of Hamas sorta indicates, there’s still alotta extremism on the street. And, despite his pragmatism, Sharon was no dove. Personally, I used to side with the Palestinians on the Israel question, just knee jerk. In fact, I was almost borderline anti-semitic in that I thought the Jews were being dicks about the whole thing. I could feel myself getting anti-semitic but I still had Jewish friends (Montreal being what it is) and they invited me out to Shul, which is their Sabbath dinner thing. I was fucking hungry so I went. It kinda opened my eyes breaking bread with them, I mean, they’d all been to Israel and they had a personal attachment that I understood better. Also, having those personal contacts just made me put everything in a human context rather than a purely political one. I think, on a fundamental level, it’s simply harder to hate people you know. I think hatred and ignorance are bound together, and it’s hard to have one without the other.
That is to say, if Palestinians and Israelis (or Sinhala and Tamils) simply mixed, we’d have less problems.
One example of that in Munich is where Mossad and the PLO inadvertently end up sharing the same safe house. They end up hanging out and smoking together, and they were almost cool. These are sworn assassins too, not even average citizens. You could see that Avner even hestitated killing the bugger (though he/they did).
I almost think there’s nothing better for peace that a program of sports or quiz nights or something that would simply shuffle the races together so that had to develop some human connection to the other.
True machan. But the hatred is so deep seated sometimes that the Jews and the Palestinians don’t even want to sit at the same table. I’ve had personal connections with both sides. Nice people in their own right although I liked the Israeli better. But they wouldn’t hesitate to do the nasty if they had to.
The Mossad/PLO thing is correct, but if they hadn’t shouted ‘ETA, ETA!’ at the outset and been believed, then there would have been a massive firefight and the movie would have ended. The initial layer of the ‘other’ needs to be broken down. Until that happens and we all learn to literally speak each other’s languages we have a huge huge problem.
And hanging out with Naz is not a good enough reason to ditch the Bush you dirty, selfish bastard!
Sophist: I was urging begging him to leave, he stayed. we watched a teaser of a potentially very good film.
Then Dom asked if he’d like a drink and that was it.
Nope !!! I think the situation with Tamils and Sinhalese is rather diffrent. I hate the LTTE and think that they will pay for all the bad karma but my best friend and my neighbour are tamils and we get on fine. Far better that if I had a sinhala neighbour.
My parents lived amongst tamil poeple all their lives and speak tamil very fluently and their best friends happen to be tamils. Tamils and Sinhalese CAN LIVE in peace. It is the LTTE and the JVP that we hate not tamils or sinhalese.
Although both my parents are sinhalease , majority of their friends are tamils. We enjoy their company , we do have agreements and disagreements but never to feel “I hate the bugger who live accross the road and I will kill him ”
WE MUST LEARN TO IDENTIFY THE TAMILS AND LTTE AS TWO SEPERATE ENTITIES . AFTER ALL WE KNOW THAT JVP DOES NOT REPRESENT THE SINHALESE PEOPLE.
munich (for me) was good, but not exceptionally so. it wasn’t what it could have been, given the grounds of the issues it discussed. very simply put, i liked it a lot, but it didn’t change me.
eric bana was very, very good, though. intense.
-the scenes look absolutely convincing and are deeply situated in a time and place- this i agree on and is one of the things i loved about munich. it was very dramatically ’70s, in a way that even the actual ’70s might not have been! but there was clearly a lot of effort put into creating every dynamic detail, and that’s always admirable.
i thought some scenes were unnecessary, for instance, the one in which avner and his wife are making love, at the end. it was very out of place in that movie, the slow-motion and the music and all that, very dramatic in a way that most of munich wasn’t. i liked that munich wasn’t that ‘spectacular’, it felt very ‘normal’ and day-to-day, which heightened many of the emotions and issues of how these guys were essentially normal people.
Munich was better than I thought it would be- special mentions to Tony Kushner’s wonderful screenplay, Michael Kahn’s precise and succinct editing and, especially, Janus Kaminski’s brilliant work making a story that took place in the most average locations look breathtaking. Spielberg deserves credit too for handling the issue fairly- I never felt like he was rooting for the Jews, instead the story was told rather even-handedly. I had a big problem with the last sex scene intercut with the action- it was completely uneccesary. The whole sex/violence comparison is hardly new, so why do it? It was already clear that what had happened was going to seep into every area of Avner’s life which made the scene utterly obvious. Overall, the film was very good- it was well told, intense and powerful. Kudos to Mathieu Almaric and Lynn Cohen’s performances as Louis and Golda Meir, respectively. Bana left a little to be desired- especially with that wobbly accent. Oh, and what was with the first sex scene being cut out when all the other nudity was kept intact??
I’d give the film a B-
Stop talkin about Bloody Munich indi…
THE WAR HAS STARTED!!!!!!!!!!
PEOPLE ARE GETTING KILLED!
NOW HET DOWN FROM YOUR FANTASYS AND FEELO THE REALITY…
Cheers!
Yo indi… Ltte Bitch!
You got nothin to say eh..? you have to realise that you are a PARAYA….
Now the war is mounting and where are you ??? HaHa…
Got no balls to say something??
Where’s your Big Mouth, with wit and all eh?
Go to CANADA… RUN RUN RUN you Bitch.
Fuck off!
I have to say some of these arguments and comments are as heated as Munich, but I have to ask, did everyone get a good crowd in the hall? I got the worst crowd. At one point 5 cell phones went off and you could hear people trying to talk over the movie saying “Machang I’m at a movie”. It seems no one knows how to put their phones on silent mode. I nearly started war with the chinese. Some chinese pimp daddy decided to sit in our row and yell into his phone until he was joind by this hideous female casino camper. I think corporal punishment should be administered to the offenders at the end of the show so that we can scream and jeer the same way uncivilized fools do when they see nudity on screen.