Apr. 16th, 2013 10:52 am
Terrorism begins at home
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muckefuckSo far I've been doing a good job of avoiding coverage of the events in Boston. Maybe every couple of hours I'll check the headlines, see that we haven't learned anything more of value, and go back to whatever I was doing. Facebook has become an orgy of handwringing and warm tea (I thought about telling everyone that they can't stop reposting that Mister Rogers quote, we've all seen it now, but thought better of it), so it's even easier to disregard than ever.
I ascribe at least part of this jaded reaction to a belated acceptance of the loss of American exceptionalism in this regard. Walking home the other night, thinking about how pissed I'd be if someone bombed my city, I had a moment of, "I guess this was what it was to be British during the heyday of the IRA." The more I learn about Europe during the 70s, the more I accept that we're just coming around to dealing with what my counterparts there have been living with all their lives.
So it was peculiarly appropriate that the movie I watched last night was Munich. Once again, NetFlix fucked up and sent us a defective copy of Bodhidharma (for those of you keeping track, bad discs come in threes)--possibly even the same defective copy if I'm not wrong about the ID number on it. They compensated us for this by sending the next couple discs on our list, which unfortunately were Devdas and Munich because I hadn't had a chance to make revisions.
I say "unfortunately" because these are both three hours long, which is more than I can typically fit comfortably into a school night. But I said "screw the family, screw work tomorrow" and played it while I was catching up on the laundry that didn't get done over the weekend. At least there was no bonus material, just an abnormally long credit sequence, and I managed to keep my follow-up reading on Wikipedia afterwards to a minimum. Just enough, really, to see how thoroughly bolloxed the German police reaction was, something which was not brought out in the film at all.
As you'd expect from Spielberg, it's viscerally effective but ideologically undernourished. Ciaran Hinds has the best character, a stony-faced fixer who occasionally pauses to remind everyone how morally compromised and completely in the dark they all are, so I was genuinely upset when he was offed. (But not surprised: it soon becomes clear that expressing moral qualms is the tropic equivalent of talking about the girl you're going to marry back home.) There are occasionally attempts to humanise a Palestinian character or remind us of Israeli army atrocities back home, but the filmmakers accept at face value the claims made at the time that all those targeted for assassination were guilty even though prominent Israeli officials have long since acknowledged that the case against some was at best faulty and at worse faked.
Unexpectedly, there was a dearth of dramatic tension to many of the sequences. The missions felt slack, perhaps because they've become overly familiar (and more imaginatively embellished) in the post-Mission Impossible era. The intercutting was an interesting device, though Spielberg seemed to forget about it for much of the movie. (I imagine though that the reprise at the end was much talked about when the movie came out.) Budapest stood in beautifully for Paris, and the scenes with Michael Lonsdale were just ravishing.
I ascribe at least part of this jaded reaction to a belated acceptance of the loss of American exceptionalism in this regard. Walking home the other night, thinking about how pissed I'd be if someone bombed my city, I had a moment of, "I guess this was what it was to be British during the heyday of the IRA." The more I learn about Europe during the 70s, the more I accept that we're just coming around to dealing with what my counterparts there have been living with all their lives.
So it was peculiarly appropriate that the movie I watched last night was Munich. Once again, NetFlix fucked up and sent us a defective copy of Bodhidharma (for those of you keeping track, bad discs come in threes)--possibly even the same defective copy if I'm not wrong about the ID number on it. They compensated us for this by sending the next couple discs on our list, which unfortunately were Devdas and Munich because I hadn't had a chance to make revisions.
I say "unfortunately" because these are both three hours long, which is more than I can typically fit comfortably into a school night. But I said "screw the family, screw work tomorrow" and played it while I was catching up on the laundry that didn't get done over the weekend. At least there was no bonus material, just an abnormally long credit sequence, and I managed to keep my follow-up reading on Wikipedia afterwards to a minimum. Just enough, really, to see how thoroughly bolloxed the German police reaction was, something which was not brought out in the film at all.
As you'd expect from Spielberg, it's viscerally effective but ideologically undernourished. Ciaran Hinds has the best character, a stony-faced fixer who occasionally pauses to remind everyone how morally compromised and completely in the dark they all are, so I was genuinely upset when he was offed. (But not surprised: it soon becomes clear that expressing moral qualms is the tropic equivalent of talking about the girl you're going to marry back home.) There are occasionally attempts to humanise a Palestinian character or remind us of Israeli army atrocities back home, but the filmmakers accept at face value the claims made at the time that all those targeted for assassination were guilty even though prominent Israeli officials have long since acknowledged that the case against some was at best faulty and at worse faked.
Unexpectedly, there was a dearth of dramatic tension to many of the sequences. The missions felt slack, perhaps because they've become overly familiar (and more imaginatively embellished) in the post-Mission Impossible era. The intercutting was an interesting device, though Spielberg seemed to forget about it for much of the movie. (I imagine though that the reprise at the end was much talked about when the movie came out.) Budapest stood in beautifully for Paris, and the scenes with Michael Lonsdale were just ravishing.