Word: spielbergism
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...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...
...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, granting it real, often poignant, distinction...
...assigned a mission, and you do it because you believe in the mission, but there is something about killing people at close range that is excruciating," says Spielberg. "Perhaps [your victims] are leading double lives. But they are, many of them, reasonable and civilized too." Killing them, he says, has unintended consequences. "It's bound to try a man's soul, so it was very important to me to show Avner struggling to keep his soul intact." (The moviemakers would not reveal the identity of the real Avner, whom they talked to at length during their research. In Spielberg...
...show; her name heads the crowded list of producers (15 individuals, three organizations), and on the marquee a banner proclaims: Oprah Winfrey Presents. She's the name journalists use to get readers' attention, as I have here. She also, you recall, played the earth-mothery Sofia in Steven Spielberg's 1985 movie version of The Color Purple. And there's a character in the book, film and show called Harpo, which as all know is Oprah spelled backward and the name of her production company...
...when Eastwood tried to buy the rights, he discovered that Steven Spielberg already had them, and so he moved on instead to Million Dollar Baby. Then, backstage at the 2004 Academy Awards (at which his Mystic River was a multiple nominee), Eastwood encountered Spielberg, and before the evening was out, they agreed to a Flags co-production, with Eastwood directing. Shortly thereafter, the project began to elicit an uncommon, almost obsessive, interest from its director. He has not often attempted fact-based movies, and he had never undertaken one that contained such huge combat scenes. He began to read more...