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11:45 PM - Munich After viewing portions of a television documentary on the Mossad's efforts to mete out vengeance (i.e. forcefully impose deterrence) upon those responsible for the Munich massacre, I was most eager to see such events fictionalized in feature film. I reasoned that such compelling events could not fail to produce a masterwork in the hands of a critically acclaimed director such as Spielberg. That said, my only reservation going into this movie was that the director might engage in some fairly contrived and heavy-handed moralizing, as he has been known to do in his previous efforts at serious film. Recall the Krakow ghetto liquidation scene in Schindler's List, during which as SS officer sits down at a piano and bangs out a few bars of Bach's Prelude to English Suite #2 in A Minor: "Ist das Bach?" "Nein. Mozart." Turns out SS officers are not quite so cultured as they pretend to be. Now, despite the incontrovertible grandeur of the work taken as a whole, I balked at scenes such as this where it seemed Spielberg was driving home a fine point (i.e. coexistence of lofty civilization and base barbarism in a single person and an entire people) with a railroad sledge. My fears were realized all too well, as the movie provides us with a fairly awkwardly contrived scene in which the Israeli protagonist and his Palestinian antagonist meet and talk in a stairwell between assassination attempts, each making the case for their respective causes. Matters of alleged moral equivalence aside (we utilitarians have every right to shove them aside when discussing a mere artifact of popular culture) this discussion has the feel of the sledge. If only Jews and Arabs could meet and dialogue, they would finally "give peace a chance" and thereby put an end to an intergenerational blood feud. I'm reaching for a tissue and tuning my guitar for another round of kum-bah-yah. (
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