I want Raiders Spielberg back.

Rating: 5/10 (14 January 2006)

This must just be the year of me being damn hard to impress. That's my story for Film 2005: Bored. (and yet my favorite film of the year, one that I have seen three times and still want to see again, is yet another adaptation of one of the most well trod stories in the English language. Go figure.) For starters, it's way too long. Way, way, way too long and ended about half and hour before it ended. Spielberg, Kushner and Roth went out on what felt like 1001 tangents, striking out with random thoughts and moments that just add to the jumble of thoughts and ideas that lead to my next point.
What the hell was the point of this movie? I suppose at the end, I'm meant to take it for a statement of the impotence of violence, but I found it almost impossible to hold on to that feeling. It was a little 'too little too late'...too weakly expressed at the end of a very, very long, bland and violent (amazing how it can be both) morality tale. Paradise Now did a much better job with this idea, I think.
Yeah, it's Spielberg, so it's well crafted, and there were a few moments that I really enjoyed - during the Beirut mission, the staccato of the rapid gunfire matched with the clanging footsteps running down metal stairs was especially striking. I did hate the sequence with 'threatening to blow up the little girl'...hated with a passion. Cheap, cheap, cheap.
I have a question about the languages used in Munich. Now, I've never really experienced a multi-lingual society, so I don't know in a practical situation how much English would come into play. When dealing with characters of several different nationalities (one of which is a native English speaker), it makes sense to me for the group to be speaking English. But when it comes to scenes of just Israelis, would they be speaking English? Or is the English to make it more understandable to the audience, to not bog down a major expositional scene with subtitles? And if this is the case, how is that any better than Rob Marshall's use of English in Memoirs (which in the end only bugged me because of a). the way it negatively affected the performances and b). the way that they pulled out Japanese whenever they felt like they wanted to be mysterious or exotic)? Just a question.
In short, Boo. I want Raiders Spielberg back.