Re-watching
Munich recently, two things came to mind. The first was that this was the best Spielberg movie since Poltergeist; right up there with the best of the Eurospy genre, he fashioned a nimble, exciting film from what could have been a nearly 3 hour didactic go around of the old ‘violence begets violence’ argument. There were elements of that, of course; the giddy kid that spent all his early capital on
1941 is long gone, replaced by someone far too at home on the political fundraising circuit, but they never were allowed to overwhelm the corking game of cloak & dagger that tweaked Spielberg’s creative juices. If you listened closely, you could almost hear the footsteps of Harry Palmer or The Jackal echoing through the twisting, rain slicked streets, laid out hundreds of years ago for the apparent convenience of spies.
The second was an odd feeling of déjà vu during the Mossad’s first “hit” on a Black September associate. Shot through a just-purchased bag of groceries, we see an explosion of milk, which is soon mixed with the victim’s blood – it’s a potent image, but not a new one.
Perhaps he was paying a long overdue tribute to Richard Donner’s original Lethal Weapon?
Or John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate?
I say that it’s time the National Dairy Council threw its milkfat-infused weight around and get an indefinite moratorium declared on any use of the white as part of an ironic visual metaphor. Please, folks, let’s preserve this one precious resource for our children.
