Word: municher
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...Munich begins and ends with, and frequently reverts to, an account of an especially heinous historical act: the capture and eventual murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games by a Palestinian terrorist group calling itself Black September. Because television was omnipresent at the Games, the entire world was witness to that awful event. Indeed, it's not too much to say that most of us for the first time perceived the face of modern terrorism in the images that ABC and the other networks broadcast of those frightful 24 hours. Or, in fact, did not fully perceive...
...first and most important thing to say about Munich, Steven Spielberg's new film, is that it is a very good movie--good in a particularly Spielbergian way. By which one means that it has all the virtues we've come to expect when he is working at his highest levels. It's narratively clean, clear and perfectly punctuated by suspenseful and expertly staged action sequences. It's full of sympathetic (and in this case, anguished) characters, and it is, morally speaking, infinitely more complex than the action films it superficially resembles--pictures that simply pit terrorists against counterterrorists without...
...this is why Munich works so well -- the movie is not primarily about that Munich. It is about the aftermath, in which the Israeli government, with Prime Minister Golda Meir's full endorsement, mounted a secret war of revenge against the murderers. In one of the movie's most crucial lines, she says, "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." That negotiation--also carried out in the increasingly troubled mind of Avner Kauffman, leader of the Israeli hit squad on which the movie concentrates (there were several)--raises Spielberg's film above the thriller level...
...almost did not make this picture, which he thrice denied. It was Kathleen Kennedy, his longtime friend and frequent producing partner, who acquired the book on which Munich is based, George Jonas' Vengeance, in 1998. But Spielberg shied away from it, in part, he says, because he had learned at his parents' knees that Middle East politics is such a difficult, passionately argued and unresolvable topic. "I'll leave it to somebody else," he recalls saying, "somebody braver than me." Then, in 1999, the persistent Kennedy prevailed on him to at least reconsider the matter. But two years later, 9/11...
...with stopovers in London, Beirut, Israel, Spain (or their geographical stand-ins), and it is full of derring-do and suspense. (Best such sequence: a child innocently answers a call on an explosive-laden phone meant to blow her father to kingdom come.) At more than 2 1/2 hours, Munich allows itself time to efficiently develop character, particularly among Avner's team, which is run--mostly from afar--by Geoffrey Rush's hard-assed executive spook. The assassins include a hot-blooded South African hit man played by Daniel Craig, who is the next James Bond; Ciaran Hinds...