MINOR MUNICH SPOILERS



I was also troubled by the first part of your paragraph, for the same reasons. Avner's flashbacks seemed more like a continuity problem since he was remembering events he'd never witnessed. But, okay, I'll take the leap and grant him some access to what happened via news reports and his inside contacts.

Your last sentence goes a long way toward explaining his almost constant referencing of the massacre - while having sex, while sleeping, while trying to live his life. He is using the killing of the athletes as his moral anchor, keeping himself centered with the only justification he can use for his actions.

Joe Vitus: What billyweeds and lady w. said about the admirable articulation of your viewpoint, and what ehle said about not being surprised by it.

Meghan Daum's LAT op-ed on women responding to Brokeback:

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum7jan07,0,3054088.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Not being a woman, I can't speak to the veracity of her point of view. I can say that, being someone who read E. Annie Proulx's short story in the New Yorker when it came out in 1997, and never forgot it, that what moved me beyond all other considerations about the film, by which I was fully prepared to be let down, was precisely the imploding, internalized passion and environs that the movie, for me, conveyed, by cinematically reconceiving and subtly expanding Proulx's prose without betraying or distorting it. It moves me still.

Then again, I love Larry David's take on it, so who knows.

Objectively, it is a fantastic piece of flimmaking.

No it isn't. The movie is very uneven. There are a number of very well executed scenes, visually and dramatically, but there are many that don't escape Spielberg's weakness for trying to say something instead of showing us something. Most all of the very good stuff is the action stuff. The Olympic stuff that ended up sprinkled through the movie after having been introduced largely in the beginning, was effectively done and painful, but once again when Speilberg is filming the finale of that gruesome event he takes out the trowel and starts slathering on the extended shots and soaring music and all the crap that insults the viewers' intelligence by force feeding him.
The scene yountalk aboput above of when he is flashing on the Olympic tragedy while being occupied by something else, was in a word, 'obscene'.

I'm not saying that Munich isn't a good movie, it is good. It has enough good parts that give it a respectable grade, but 'great'? Give me a break.

I wasn't bowled over by the lead actor either. He was good, that's it. I thought some of the supporting actors were very good.

The movie is blatantly dishonest, but why quibble.

.....Munich is one of the best films I've seen in my life.

Plus she has that, to me, totally implausible speech about Ledger's never bringing back fish and putting the note in the tacklebox. (Someone as terrified of being outed as Ledger would be so stupid as to make such obvious mistakes?)