Buckeye Road

Boys and Their Bombs

Also, I meant to say that the Spielberg movie Munich most reminds me of is Catch Me If You Can -- both for the great fun of the caper, and the daddy issues.

Ella Taylor's review in the L.A. Weekly is spot on on both these points, and also the similarities to Syriana:

Most of Avner’s information about the whereabouts of his scattered targets comes from a murky French group headed by a simultaneously sinister and avuncular paterfamilias (played by the terrific Michael Lonsdale) who, still smarting from French humiliation at the hands of the Nazis and its own Vichy collaborators, will do business only with individuals, not governments. (One senses that Spielberg, who never saw a father figure he didn’t like or a government he did, is with him all the way.) Like Gaghan in Syriana, Spielberg wants to invite us into the visceral, terrifying pleasures of the hunt while dutifully questioning whether it should ever have been mounted in the first place. Washed in Janusz Kaminski’s foggy, desaturated light, Munich would have us gorge on the romance of blood, which seeps sensuously from shot-out brains, smoking corpses, severed hands. Spielberg wants us to share in his amused delight at the rinky-dink telephone bombs used by 1970s assassins — quaint jokes compared to the long-range precision missiles used today, if just as deadly. And, of course, he can’t do without his avenging heroes. But he also wants us to feel his pain over the endless cycle of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, and as this three-hour drama wears on, with terrorists from both sides pleading their case (the screenplay, which was written by Eric Roth and worked over by playwright Tony Kushner, is Kushner at his most rhetorical and declamatory), there’s a gathering stench of bad faith in the tug between gory excitation and moral squeamishness.

OOPS! I just went back and read the whole Taylor review -- I had skipped the last part of it when I looked it over before.

Now I see that she had the same thought about Catch Me If You Can -- as evidenced by her title -- which I hadn't noticed till now.

posted by BT @ 1:03 PM