Sergio's Fall Movie Countdown--#1

UNIVERSAL REMOTE

In the last entry of his epic series, Sergio reveals the film he is most looking forward to this fall.

1. Munich
directed by Steven Spielberg
opens 12/23

War of the Worlds was the first Hollywood movie about the 9/11 attacks. Sure, they dressed it up like it was another piece of Steven Spielberg summer escapism, but in reality it reenacted how we all felt on that most tragic of days. Sudden, devastating attacks on civilian rather than the military targets, complete uncertainty of where to go to safety, the very real possibility of other more dangerous attacks; these were all the things we went through on September 11th. Star Tom Cruise even went on to play the role of a deranged nutjob ("Matt, Matt, Matt...you're glib.") intent on changing the world through religious fundamentalism, just like Osama. And the ending was ending was a letdown and just as phony as our "War on Terror" is destined to be. Spielberg very much made a 9/11 movie. On December 23rd, exactly six months after the release of War of the Worlds, he tackles Israeli/Palestinian relations head on.

Munich focusses not on the abduction and eventual killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics at the hands of the Palentinian terrorist group Black September, but rather on how Israel reacted in the aftermath. (For a great primer on the massacre, see Kevin McDonald's riviting, Oscar-winning documentary One Day in September.) Israel was going to play hardball.

Eric Bana plays a Mossad officer Mike Harrari who is charged by a high-ranking group of Israeli officials known as "Committee-X," lead by Israeli premiere Golda Meir and Defense Minister Mosha Dayan, to lead a secret team of agents on an assassination campaign against every strategist and supporter known to have supported Black September's Munich operation. It was known as Operation Wrath of God. It's goal was to strike fear in the hearts of those that would attack Israel. Harrari was committed to keep collateral damage to a minimum, but along the way more than a few innocent lives were taken either by mistake or miscalculation.

Obviously this is highly-charged material. Is Spielberg the right director for the job? Perhaps a provacatuer like Oliver Stone would have been better, someone a little less interested in maintaining a populist reputation. But then again, Speilberg is perhaps the only filmmaker alive who could have gotten the movie made. (He literally has carte blanche to make whatever movies he wants.) And he has continually delivered the goods with this kind of material. I'm thinking of Saving Private Ryan and, in particular, Schindler's List. (He won the Oscar for Best Director for each of these films.) They could very easily could have turned into maudlin mush. While having moments of overt sentimentality, in the end they became powerful pieces of popular art that both recreated their times and commented on them. Munich will have to walk a very fine line. It can't have these men gleefully pursuing vengeance, nor can it soft-peddle the reality that Israel made a morally questionable choice to sanction murder. This film will inhabit and a very, very gray area of morality. These are not Red State/Blue State, black-and-white issues. Spielberg knows this. Some films have more riding on them than others. Spielberg knows Munich will be compared to Schindler's List so there is no way he's going to try to create something other than a complex, morally probing masterpiece.

Which is why it is very encouraging that Spielberg hired Tony Kushner to write the screenplay. Kushner won the Pulitzer Prize for his play Angel in America and is no stranger to controversy. That play, which was later made into a terrific mini-series for HBO, fanned the fires of the culture wars without compunction. All the characters, from the heroes to the so-called villains were completely three-dimensional and all highly flawed. That is why they were so arresting. I can't see Kushner writing a by-the-numbers, payback procedural. He's too much of a humanist for that. Nor can I see him writing something that, on its face, seems like such black-and-white material. A you-killed-us so we'll-kill-you mentality is way too simpleminded for a talent like Kushner.

Movies set in the past are often more interested in telling truths about the times they were made rather than the times they recreate. Robert Altman's brilliant MASH was set in Korea but was about Vietnam. This year's Good Night, and Good Luck is about the press standing up to McCarthyism but is really a critique about the current media's lapses in covering the Bush administration. By going back to the past, you can shine a brighter light on the present. Israel responded to the Olympic massacre with assassination. We responded to 9/11 by going to war with Iraq. Both are highly troubling responses. Spielberg has said in his only public comments about the film so far:

"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific episode that we usually think about only in political or military terms. By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today."

Mark my words, as with any Spielberg film, this movie is going to be all over the media. It's going to be on magazine covers and on television and everywhere in between. There will be countless interviews with the filmmakers and the real-life participants. They will all be trying to sort out the lessons of the "Munich" retaliations and if any of those lessons apply to today's world.

To me, the biggest thing impeding the artistic success of Munich is Spielberg's tendency to lapse into sentimentality. The teaser shows a few flashes of this (as Bana talks to his young daughter on the phone), but seeing it out of context makes it it is impossible to tell how offending it may be. I hope he keeps the emotional underlining to a minimum. I hope he not only has us relishing the vengeance of Israel, but also feeling the guilt of everyone involved. If Spielberg pulls his punches and has everyone hugging at the end, he's dead. The best filmmaking delivers contradictory emotions. The rides are never smooth. The outcomes are never certain. No one has seen this film yet so who knows if it deserves the top ranking. But if Spielberg challenges viewers and our (mis)conceptions, he may add another essential film to his canon. And that is what makes it my number one movie of the fall.

RECAP:

1. Munich
2. Syriana
3. Brokeback Mountain
4. Walk the Line
5. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
   
6. The New World
   
7. The Family Stone
   
8. Match Point
   
9. Bubble
10. King Kong/Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (tie)
    

These aren't even all the movies I want to see. Some that didn't make the list include (in no particular order) The Producers, Memoirs of a Geisha, Jarhead, Shopgirl, Rent, Freedomland, Aeon Flux, Rumor Has It, Fun with Dick and Jane, The Matador and Cache. I could only pick ten for the list. (Okay, eleven.)

I've enjoyed writing this series and hope everyone has liked it. It turned out to be a lot more work than I thought but was all worth it since I was able to refer to myself in the third person. Sergio will follow up with reviews/thoughts about all the movies on the list as he sees them. It will be interesting to see where they fall come January.