Munich

On Saturday went with Rullsenberg to see Munich. To quote someone "Don't believe the hype".

Some critics have accused it of showing moral equivalence between Israeli actions and Palestinian actions. I just didn't see that at all. I did see the film asking questions like is there such a thing as a just vengeance?

Neal Ascherson describes a moving section where

[a]fter one particularly horrible killing, the bomb-maker, Robert, (perfectly played by matthie Kassowitz) breaks down and protests to Avner: 'We're Jews, we are supposed to be righteous, and that's beautiful.'

As Andrew Anthony puts it

as a decent Hollywood liberal, [Spielberg] has made an action thriller that is also something of a morality tale: what happens to a good man, it asks, when he is asked to do bad things for a good cause.

To the question of whether being a Jew in any way skewed or hindered his approach to the subject, Spielberg responds: 'It would have been much more problematic had I been Steven Smith. I made this picture as a committed Jew, a pro-Israeli Jew and yet a human Jew. I made this movie out of love for both of my countries, USA and Israel. It was a struggle to make this picture. I tried to avoid making it and yet I feel that my filmography would not have been complete without this story in some fashion being realised on film.'

Go see.