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to comment on your second point, i think even in its un-speilberg/"dark" ending, it was done in a speilberg way. heavy handed, overstated, force-fed. i mean, the twin towers in the last frame of the film? unnecessary and i think it was very unclear what he was trying to convey. we are watching a movie about israeli assasins in the 70's, no part of which is in the US until the last 5 minutes of the film, and he jumps to the twin towers? i think he's relying on the sensation and sentiment to fill VERY large gaps.
i, like you, love when a film gives everyone their own reactions. werner herzog is a great example of this. or even harmony korine's "julien donkey boy". i think this film gives people different reactions because it is convoluted and misleading not because it is constructed well (i actually think the abduction scene in the dorms is great, technically).
>
>Talk to any Jewish person who saw Munich. They did NOT see
>Munich as Zionist. In fact, I know a lot of Jewish people who
>thought it disgraced the state of Israel and made it look
>terrible.
>
from this (correct me if i'm off base) you are saying that if it makes jewish people mad then it isn't biased or doesn't reaffirm the polticial/social power structure that frames the debate on israel/palestine? i can't accept that. why should the sentiment of a jewish movie-goer be the yardstick or barometer of bias and fairness in film?
in fact, i think this is what is most bullshit about this film. that is even suggests or is critical of israel gives it legitimacy. it warms us up to assasins with a conscience. at the end of the film i found the film asking me to feel sorry or understand an assasin's moral crisis (an assasin working for an occupying power, no less), which is just comedic at best.
the film should be retitled "sensitive sweet killers".
for your reference i am attaching a pretty good read of the film by a professor at Columbia. (to be clear, from the first post i am admitting my bias towards justice, equality, and human rights....and the concept that you cannot divorce content from construct):
------------------
>Baking the cake
>
>Steven Spielberg's Munich, writes Joseph Massad*, legitimises
>Israeli policy towards Palestinians while nodding away any moral
>qualms
>
>"The best baklava is made by the Arabs in Jaffa," insists the Mossad
>case officer to his chief agent in charge of assassinating those
>Palestinians Israel claims planned the Munich operation of 1972.
>Besides being excellent baklava-makers, we learn little else in
>Steven Spielberg's film Munich about Jaffa's Palestinians, the
>majority of whom were pushed into the sea by Zionist forces in May
>1948. Many drowned while the rest escaped on boats to Lebanon never
>to be allowed to return. But Munich is not about these Palestinians;
>it is, emphatically, about
Israeli Jews and Israeli terrorism.
>
>In the context of Hollywood's cinematic history, Munich is not the
>first film to discuss Israeli terror. Otto Preminger's 1960 film
>Exodus was in essence a celebration of Jewish terrorism. Like
>Exodus, Munich poses moral questions about terrorist methods, about
>whether the end justifies the means as it chronicles the pangs of
>conscience troubling Israeli terrorists as they murder Palestinian
>poets, writers, and politicians across Europe and in Lebanon. To a
>considerable extent Munich is having the same impact on American
>audiences, and is playing the same role, as Exod us did in
>legitimising Israeli policies and the Zionist project.
>
>Exodus was the major cinematic achievement of the Zionist movement.
>The film popularised the Zionist cause and continues to inspire
>young American and European Zionists. The film was most effective
>in
staging the determination and desperation of the Zionist
>leadership, depicted as having no choice but to conquer Palestine
>and make it the Jewish State. Exodus tells the story of the Zionist
>hijacking of a ship from Cyprus to Palestine by Haganah commander
>Ari Ben Canaan, who then threatens to blow it apart, and the 611
>Jewish passengers it is carrying, with 200 pounds of dynamite. The
>film depicts the Jewish refugee passengers voting in favour of the
>plan, transforming the terrorist threat into a suicide bombing.
>Indeed, Jewish mothers refuse to let their children disembark when
>Ben Canaan asks them to, insisting that their children should die
>with them should they carry out the suicide bombing.
>
>Exodus insists that Ben Canaan's threat of suicide bombing is not an
>idle one. In the extra- fictional world the film references, the
>Zionists had blown up a similar ship in November 1940
killing 242
>Jewish refugees. When questioned by a young American widow about
>the purpose of sacrificing so many lives, Ben Canaan tells her
>"call it publicity, a stunt to attract attention". He avers that
>"each person aboard this ship is a soldier. The only weapon we have
>to fight with is our willingness to die."
>
>Haganah, shown in the film as engaging in suicide bombings to
>achieve its goals, is contrasted with the terrorist Irgun which in
>the film targets the British -- but not Arabs! -- in non-suicide
>operations. Exodus finally reconciles whatever misgivings it has
>about Irgun-style terrorism with its approved version of
>Haganah-style suicide- bombings, in the interest of unifying both
>forces for the purpose of establishing the Jewish State. The
>Israeli national anthem Hatikvah, stolen from gentile Czech
>composer Bedrich Smetana's symphonic poems M Vlast, is played
ad
>nauseam in the film to drive the message home. The major
>achievement of Exodus, besides disseminating the Zionist story, was
>to eliminate the Palestinian people, whose lands and lives were
>being stolen by the Zionist project, from the equation. Munich need
>not dabble with such existential questions, as the matter of
>Israel's existence on stolen Palestinian land and at the expense of
>Palestinian lives had been settled in Exodus. Munich simply wants to
>update the story. Script co-writer Tony Kushner was clear on this
>point in a recent article written for the Los Angeles Times : "My
>criticism of Israel has always been accompanied by declarations of
>unconditional support of Israel's right to exist, and I believe
>that the global community has a responsibility to defend that
>right. I have written and spoken of my love for Israel."
>
>Only one Palestinian, Taha, is allowed to speak in
Exodus, and then
>only in order to praise Zionism. Taha in fact drinks a toast to the
>Zionist conquest of his people's land and lives. Exodus depicts
>Jewish colonists as ultra-civilised compared to the Palestinians,
>shown throughout the film in Bedouin garb, parading as village and
>city apparel, as a measure of their backwardness. Munich employs
>similar cinematic tactics, even though when it shows Palestinians
>in "civilised" Western garb it reminds viewers they are no
>different from the inhabitants of Arab villages. If Ari Ben Canaan
>is a cultured man who knows his way around a French menu and wine
>list, so Munich 's Avner Kaufman is a gourmet cook and a sensual
>lover, though his taste in erotic fantasies is questionable. Unlike
>Exodus 's more protracted focus on a number of characters, Munich
>focuses exclusively on the character of Avner, exploring his inner
>conflict, his love for his
wife and yearning for his newborn child,
>as well as his troubled relationship with his parents -- the
>generational connections it makes are illustrative of an
>established past for Jewish colonists in Israel and an uncertain
>future for their grandchildren.
>
>The film also describes the moral conflicts of the other members of
>Avner's terrorist cell, inspired by what Robert, the explosives
>expert, presents as Jewish ethics. Robert, who learned his
>expertise at the hands of the Israeli secret police, the Shin Bet,
>is unable to reconcile his Jewish ethics with his Israeli training
>and finally quits the killing spree. He is reminiscent of Dov
>Landau, the young Irgun explosives expert in Exodus who learned his
>skills from the Nazis in Auschwitz when he had to dynamite the
>ground to make trenches for the burial of exterminated Jews. Unlike
>Munich 's Robert, Landau had no qualms about
killing Jews, Arabs and
>Britons when he blew up the King David Hotel. Landau's major trauma,
>as presented in the film, was not his internment in Auschwitz or his
>witnessing of the gassing of Jews and participation in their burial.
>The only thing that made him cry was his rape by the Nazis ("they
>used me as you would use a woman") which impelled him to join the
>Irgun as a restorative act of lost manhood. Robert, in contrast,
>has little problem sharing a homoerotic moment of dancing with
>Steve to celebrate the murder of Wa'il Zu'aytar in Rome. The sexual
>politics of Zionism have certainly progressed, or so we are led to
>believe watching Munich.
>
>The moral qualms that Robert and other members of the terrorist cell
>express strike the educated viewer as uncanny: documentary accounts
>of, and interviews with, Mossad agents show them to have a strong
>ideological commitment and
determination to kill enemy Palestinians
>with no moral questioning. It is diaspora Jewish supporters of
>Israel who -- infrequently -- feign moral dilemmas (and also, on
>occasion, those Israelis called upon to perform before the
>international media). Spielberg, being one of them, expressed his
>dilemmas in clear terms to the London Times : he and his family
>"love Israel, we support Israel, we have unqualified support for
>Israel, which has struggled, surrounded by enemies, ever since its
>statehood was declared... I feel very proud to stand right
>alongside all of my friends in Israel; and yet I can ask questions
>about these very, very sensitive issues between Israelis and
>Palestinians and the whole quest for a homeland."
>
>Munich is a film in which Spielberg, Kushner and similar-minded
>diaspora supporters, and not Israeli Mossad agents, may recognise
>themselves. The moral questions
that Munich poses have more to do
>with the souls of Israeli Jews. In that, the film does not deviate
>much from Zionist propaganda, which has always claimed that Jewish
>soldiers "shoot and cry". Golda Meir, who is depicted in the film
>as a righteous and lovable leader, once said, "We can forgive you
>for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us
>kill yours."
>
>It is this racist sentiment that structures the story Munich wants
>to tell. The fact that Palestinian violence was in response to
>Zionist conquest and murder is immaterial to Spielberg's reasoning,
>as is the fact that many Palestinians are willing to forgive Israeli
>Jews for the continued theft of their lands and livelihoods, the
>continued oppression the Israelis visit upon all Palestinian
>communities in Palestine and the diaspora, and for the major role
>Israeli and diaspora Jews play in the Israeli and
Western media in
>transforming Palestinians from victims of Israeli terror into
>perpetrators of it. Spielberg, an active participant in such media
>depictions, humanises Israeli terrorists in Munich but not
>Palestinian terrorists, who are portrayed as having no conscience.
>It seems that unlike their Israeli counterparts, Palestinians shoot
>but do not cry! We see the Israeli murderers laugh, cry, make love,
>cook, eat, kill, regret, question authority, but we also see them
>lose their souls. While Munich wonders whether the policy of
>terrorism that Golda Meir unleashed out of anguish at the murder of
>Israeli athletes might have been misguided, the film insists that it
>is the Palestinians who forced the choice of terror on Israel.
>Munich 's point of contention with Meir's policy rests on its claim
>that because Jews have a morally superior code Israel need not
>respond to the Palestinians in
kind, a sentiment articulated by
>Robert, the explosives-expert.
>
>Some of the legitimacy that Spielberg and Kushner hope the film will
>receive comes from Zionist dissatisfaction with it, which to the US
>media confirms Munich 's "objectivity". In the same manner,
>Sharon's policies have been presented as "fair" when opposed by
>Palestinians, and by Israelis to the right of Sharon. While this
>simple-minded tactic works with nave US audiences, it has a harder
>time persuading more savvy audiences outside the country.
>
>As in Exodus, Palestinians in Munich ventriloquise the worst that
>Zionist propaganda says they say. If the good Palestinian in Exodus
>was the collaborator Taha, killed by the Palestinians for his
>treason, Munich offers the terrorist Ali who, in being killed by
>the Israelis for not being like Taha, confirms that the only good
>Palestinian is a dead Palestinian. As
for the rest of the
>Palestinian people, Munich, like the Israeli authorities, hopes
>that they stick to making baklava and stop the resistance to
>Israeli oppression that forces Israel to kill them and, in so
>doing, forces moral dilemmas on Spielberg, Kushner and some of
>Israel's other supporters in the diaspora.
>
>* The writer is associate professor of modern Arab politics and
>intellectual history at Columbia University. His book The
>Persistence of the Palestinian Question will be published by
>Routledge in February.
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