Munich (the new Spielberg)

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

http://www.munichmovie.com/

The trailer is finally up!
Looks very promising!

(this comes from a Spielberg fan, so know that I'm very subjective towards him ;-))

BTW: does anybody know if the music is from the movie itself?
Beautiful music too.

[Keith Loh]

Good subject. It was done once before as a TV movie called "Vengeance" with Steven Bauer and Michael York. I believe that Spielberg acquired the rights to the original George Jonas book to clear the rights.

Dunno about the music but I read earlier this week that Spielberg was rushing to finish a rough edit so he could hand it off to John Williams for scoring.

[Keith Loh]

If I may say more.

What I like about this trailer is how it tells a story very well (without the ending, of course).

First act: The Black September attack. The setting is portrayed. We are introduced to the problem. We are introduced to the protagonists.

Second act: The protagonists begin their mission. They face small challenges. Operational challenges. The main challenge is hinted at. Their feelings of loyalty versus their personal morality and their families.

The trailer ends with the major complication. How much is too much? Are they fighting the good fight? Will it ever end? How will they get out?

It absolutely begs me to see the movie so that these questions are answered. A lesson here for those of us who are making trailers for our projects.

[Yi Fong Yu]

i thought it was an OK trailer. not kingdom of heaven good, but just ok enough. i dunno anything about the munich situation, so for me, i had no idea what the trailer was talking about. just a bunch of people talking about hostage situation.

[Matthew Wauhkonen]

This movie is intense. See it. You may not enjoy it, you may be frustrated by it, and it has tons of problems (ideological, political, narrative, and stylistic) but you will get your money's worth. Much better than Kong for sure.

[Karl Heiner]

the movie comes out mid jan. in my area. selected theaters only, east bay, ca

greetings

[Matthew Wauhkonen]

Why isn't this opening with saturation booking? Weird.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

What is saturated booking?

[Yi Fong Yu]

it's out in limited release.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Yes, I believe the movie only opened in 500 screens?

In january it will be worldwide released.
Only the end of january in Belgium :-(

[Raji Barbir]

well i'll try not to give anything away for those who haven't seen it but i do have a potential spoiler at the end.

I liked the movie. It was, as usual from any Spielberg movie, very well directed. The characters were very interesting. Overall, the movie was very good.

The only real thing i didn't like was the story's lack of complexity. Spielberg is approaching a very complex issue and should have focused on one or two specific issues IMO so that he could more carefully examine the issues at hand and still leave room for some emotion. Maybe this feeling was influenced from the fact that the night before, i went to see Syriana, which had a monstrously complicated storyline, so by comparison, Munich felt dumbed down for mass audiences. It didn't dig in as deep into the political and human issues that exist between arabs and israelis as it could have. Also by comparison, Munich had whad Syriana didn't: an emotionally rich story. Finally, and maybe this is because i'm arab myself, i really knew where the story's "moral" was going.

*****POSSIBLE SPOILER*****
*****POSSIBLE SPOILER*****

What i mean by that is that all you have to do is look at the middle-east and how after years and years of mindless fighting, killing and a constant need for both sides to retaliate, it's fairly obvious what Spielberg is trying to say about the two sides. Nobody ever wins in the middle-east unless both sides agree to a permanent truce (it's usually only temporary) and that's just not going to happen.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Tomorrow it'll get released in Belgium, I hope to see it as soon as possible.

As I suspected the movie gets much better reviews in Europe then in America, I already read 4 Dutch Reviews, they all gave Munich their maximum number of stars!

[Keith Loh]

I'm going to copy the notes I posted on the CeltX forum because what I would have to say here is the same.

Up until the pivotal character scene with Eric Bana character reuniting with his wife, "Munich" was a gripping, very enjoyable espionage thriller with betrayals, mysteries, operations, very much like a good 'realistic' 70s spy thriller. Indeed, it is filmed like one with grainy film and the world-trotting locales. The actual spy operation narrative is superb.

However, the writers and Spielberg himself have tried to weave the two themes: the need of everyone for a home, and the vengeance-Munich parallels together. This is unsuccessful. I found myself scratching my head at the decision to intercut the love-making scene with the final windup of the Munich flashback. I found it thematically confusing. Perhaps it's because of that that I tend to dismiss the political criticism of the movie. I don't think Spielberg or the editor or the writer's execution was clear enough to even invite being taken to task on the political level.

Other stuff like the machinations of the Bana character's peripheral contacts like the French information merchants and his own handler (the Geoffrey Rush character) again are not as well defined. I can see the reason for their placement but the French characters, while interesting characters in their own right, could still have been pruned while Rush's character's importance to the "needing a home" theme could have been expanded upon.

I'm mystified actually by the political rhetoric about the movie. It seems like much of the criticisms is the inclusion of the Palestinian viewpoint. As if it is a shock that the PLO or Black September actually have a motivation for what they do. Of course they do. One can disagree with that viewpoint or in the methods or in their reasoning but just merely putting in that viewpoint is not an intellectual or political crime. The one scene that at all applies to this is when Bana's character has an extended motivation dump with his PLO counterpart in the safehouse they both share. One thing viewers must keep in mind is that the PLO character is on the same level of understanding as Bana's character. Both are meant to represent the foot soldier motivation, not any high level leadership. So it is not right to equate the PLO character's motivation with say Yasser Arafat or the leadership of Black September at the time. Both Bana's character and his counterpart only know the simple motivations and don't know the tip of the iceberg.

Seen in this light the actual politics of Munich are not at all complex or controversial. The fact that warring on a stateless organization or terrorists just ebbs and flows without 'victory' is something any police organization can attest to. Have the police ever won the 'war on drugs', for example? No, they just put pressure on certain purveyors and others pop up. It becomes a matter of control. In the war on terrorism that the western world is engaged in there always seems to be another #3 in al Qaeda or yet another group popping up. In "Munich" the one successful theme, that of a soldier becoming tired and disillusioned because his posting keeps on getting extended and the goals no longer clear, is nothing new. We see it in lots of movies: war movies, police movies. The simplicity of this theme doesn't harm the movie and if Spielberg had stuck to it, then it would have remained a solid espionage thriller without encumbrances.

As for Janusz Kaminski I don't know what he said outside of the film, only that his cinematography is simply wonderful in the film. I don't know why anyone would attack the film Munich because of something he might have said outside of it.

In my last paragraph I was responding to another poster who started the thread in CeltX who was attacking Janusz Kaminski. If you're interested, the thread is here.

By the way, if anyone wants to see a better film on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict currently in release, please make an effort to see "Paradise Now". In every way a better movie and with a more sound conclusion ('sound', as in dramatically satisfying).

[Michael Carter]

All through Munich, I kept thinking (regarding Spielberg), "6 months ago this guy had Tom Cruise sucked into an alien anus..."

I agree to some extent with the criticism above, but not even "Schindler" pointed to this film. A remarkable step for Spielberg IMHO. But yes, the intercutting of the "climax" of the kidnapping with the sex scene felt off. Spielberg is a master of the set-piece -- the appearance of the tripods in WOTW was beyond stunning, for instance -- and moments in Munich (like the Phosphorus grenades in the hotel) were equally gripping. But where WOTW felt like a bunch of coolness stuck together with duct tape, Munich for me was a very cohesive whole.

I had recently seen the Documentary on the Olympic kidnapping (can't recall the title, that damn early onset alzheimer's I seem to have), but it was a disturbing, tragic story and a remarkble piece (the opening day of competition with Led Zep's "Immigrant Song" just gave me a big rush). Funny, I'm halfway through Robert Fisk's massive "The Great War for Civilisation", and saw Syriana while in the midst of Fisk's Iran/Iraq section, and then saw Munich while reading the Israel/Palestine section. Amazed at how little I know about the region that's shaping our world & future; shocked as usual by the politicians on all sides who seem so unaffected by the massive human loss & suffering, and how little Britain and the US have learned from a century of mistakes & failures over there.

[Mathieu Ghekiere]

Saw it this afternoon.

Well, what to think?
It's really a hard, heavy movie, that leaves you stunned. The first minutes after seeing it I thought: well, good movie...
But a half hour afterwards, the themes and moral questions that the movie calles for really begin to get in your head, and you are feeling very down, well I did at least.

I think this is one of Spielberg's first movies where I really don't want to talk a lot about the technical side of the movie, just because the script and thematics were soo good.