Yes and yes.
Casino Royale is just the vehicle for that.
The bitch is dead.
I think (hope) Brokeback Mountain is the one to beat. It and Munich are currently tied for first place on my Top 10 of the year. I’d be happy if either won Best Picture (though I’d be more happy if Brokeback Mountain won).
It hasn’t been a weak year in movies. Like every year, there are a wealth of good-to-great movies, but only a few of them get the attention they deserve.
Right, but our heros had little trouble hitting their targets but were apt at dodging bullets themselves. The Bond syndrome. For example:
Bad guy henchman can’t even manage to bring his gun up to shoot but our heros can turn and hit him in the forehead.
I have no problem with them using local resources and I expected them to. I just object to Louis as an omniscient type source that Avner could rely on. If you were a spy would you continously use the same person for all your information and not bother to corroborate his story? Would you get in the car and drive with someone that has warned you not to work with a government after he finds out that you did?
[QUOTE=Stranger On A Train]
Methinks you didn’t pay close enough attention: The munitions expert was deliberately blown up; Hanns was stabbed, and the other older member was killed by the freelance woman assassin. While the authority behind those attacks wasn’t named, it was implied to be the KGB or one of their satellite agencies (likely the Bulgarians who were typically employed to do wet work in Europe) as retribution for the attack that killed the Russians. The drunk men who accosted the team in London were clearly CIA. It is strongly implied that Louis and his father sold out Avner and the team to both agencies, each of which had an agenda to stop them from assassinating other Palestinian planners.
Its left up in the air whether that was actually the CIA, it was an accident or who stabbed him. Thats my point in a nutshell. We saw some counterspying action but it was not done in depth. A cople of the team members show up dead and they get revenge. Thats it.
Shrug, I thought it was a point A to point B to point C repeat type movie. A lot of the scenes were cliches:
Man leaves woman and young child at home to go do something and ends up missing them. Our hero almost blows up a child/innocent bystander/cripple but gets there just in time to stop it. Beautiful woman in bar ends up being an assassin.
You’re right. This would never happen in real life. Uncorroborated intelligence gathered by this method certainly wouldn’t be used to justify invading another country halfway around the world.
sigh
It’s fun to pretend that you can get corroboration from multiple sources, or use your canny instincts and multitude of listening posts to find and track people, but to paraphrase a certain authority figure, out in the fleet you make do with what you have, not what you’d like to have. Avner, not an experienced field agent and cut off from whatever information sources the Mossad could have offered, used the only point of contact he had. If you noticed, part of Avner’s waning motivation was with regard to his uncertainty about the culpability of his targets and the people which whom he was associating (including Louis & Co.) in order to secure those targets. This was, as previously discussed, to be his undoing, as Louis was clearly playing both, or rather many, sides.
As I said, in the real world, things get fucked up. All the time. See “Bay of Pigs” and “Castro Assassination Attempts” for evidence of such on the part of the supposed professionals at the Central Intelligence Agency. And “professional spy” is almost as much of a misnomer as professional thief; tradecraft and training aside, field agents have to improvise, have to deal with and trust criminals and sociopaths, and often have to operate without sufficient information to make good judgements.
There are certainly valid criticisms of the film, but this isn’t one of them. The confusion and uncertainty about who to trust and how much is a point in the movie’s favor with regard to verisimilitude.
Stranger
According to this guy Mossad did their own research on and location off targets.
I’ve seen most of the “Oscar” films this year. I still need to see Brokeback and Syriana, but the rest seem like in a good year they’d be the 4th or 5th nominee.
What do you consider the films that I may have overlooked?
Sorry, but I have to disagree. I see a lot of films–not just major releases, but many (probably more) independent flicks and imports–and I think it has been a majorly weak year for film. I was pondering this recently as I was watching a subtitled German film on DVD; I’ve scarcely gone to see any foriegn flms this year, as there hasn’t been anything that really captured my interest, aside from the obscure Bulgarian film Kontroll. There’ve been a handful of good documentaries, but I can’t think of anything else that really stood out. Batman Begins is one of the highlights of the year, and yet by any standard it is a fairly competent by-the-numbers action/superhero film (albeit better done than most). The Constant Gardener–a competent but not groundbreaking Le Carre adapataion–is the best serious-but-not-overwraught, wannabe Oscar material picture this year. (Brokeback Mountain, regardless of your opinion, was made for one reason only–'cause it is controversal enough, without actually being too explicit–to stand out as an Oscar nominee.) I think the most entertaining film I’ve seen is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang–well worth seeing, but hardly material that would be a Top Ten on any average year–and both the big-budget popcorn films and the niche appeal art-house stuff has been pretty disappointing. The exceptions–like Downfall or Good Night, and Good Luck–have been few and far between. And the big budget, above title staring, popcorn sellers–Flightplan, Elizabethtown, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and especially The Island–have all been busts, not only in my critical opinion but commerically as well. (We won’t even mention Stealth, which should have been stillborn at conception.)
This was a tired, conservative, fairly regressive year for movies; I can’t think of a single one that is likely to stand out a decade later as a definitive film, either as a mainstream movie or a cult favorite.
Stranger
Listen, you are singling out an objection from the many I had. I would have had no problem with an omniscient sort of informant if the movie was about something else. But a significant portion of the movie was about spying. That was the whole problem with the movie. He tried to do too much so everything he did came off shallow.
The Spying. Shallow
Charecter Development. Shallow
Israel/Black September. Shallow
CIA/KGB involvement. Shallow
There’s the problem… Treis… The movie WASN’T about spying. The characters weren’t spies. Calling the spying shallow is like calling the aviation in Catch Me If You Can ‘shallow’.
…This is just silly. Tries say you didn’t like the movie and move on because you can’t seem to defend any of your points in a way that makes sense to anyone else. You call things shallow without giving any sort of example that doesn’t fall apart under scrutiny.
Look, the problem isn’t with my writing its with your comprehension. When I say things like:
And then you say something like:
It shows me that you havent comprehended anything I have said.
Listen killer I have explained why I thought it was shallow. You are the one that is having the problem here not me. I’m not the only one that thinks this, the people that I saw it with agreed with me and Campion came away with the exact same impression. You aren’t the authority on deciding whether a movie was good or not so stop acting like it.
I haven’t seen the movie, but from what I’ve read it’s incredibly historically inaccurate.
Spielberg said it was not intended to be history, but a semi-fictionalized version of historical event (wordy). He said he chose the “Based on Actual Events” opener rather than “Based on a True Story.”
Does that make a difference?
It just seems a bit…I dunno…Oliver Stonish of him.
I like Ron Howard’s response when asked whether he, like Dan Brown in his novel, will begin the film version of the Davinci Code by saying that all the historical events are accurate.
One can make the same claim about Schindler’s List. However, when you have 150 minutes to put a compelling story on screen, it is often necessary to combine, conflate, and occasionally concoct details, situations, and principals in order to make a film thematically consistent in a way that real life tends not to be. One of the favorite WWII films, The Great Escape, takes great liberties with the actual events which “inspired” the story; it combines individuals into composites, compresses the timeline of planning and tunnelling to occur over a span of a few months, and essentially creates the American characters from whole cloth. (A few American flyers were in the camp during the early stages of tunnelling but were removed before the escape attempt because they got on far too well with the Brits; the Germans were expecting more friction, which is only implied by Werner’s comments to Henley about the War of 1812.) The Steve McQueen character was a complete fabrication, and the inclusion of the motorcycle chase scenes was done entirely at the behest of McQueen; nonetheless, his attempts and his subplot are what people remember most (and the great theme that Bernstein created especially for his scenes). The actual story while fascinating in it’s own right, would never coherently fit into a three hour running time and cover the salient details and personalities with any coherency.
As for treis’s comments, I’m not quite clear of what to make of his opinon; he seems to stab at one thing and then another without consistency. It’s clear he didn’t like the film–his right, certainly–but one of the major complaints seems to be that it didn’t fit into a conventional actioneer or spy film with a typical three act structure and definitive resolution. That it is not doesn’t make it good or bad in any objective sense, but that lack of structure and sense of confusion appealed to me; it made the film seem more urgent and real, as I could share Avner’s confusion and sense of uncertainty; near the end, his paranoia about who was coming after him–KGB, CIA, his own people from Mossad–was palpable. I also enjoyed the uncertainty demonstrated by the unminted members of his team–their confusion, when they cornered the first target, over whether to shoot. I have to agree that the character development was kind of unsubstantive and motivation was often unclear, and as I said previously, much of the overt symbolism was heavy-handed to the point of shoving it down the viewer’s throat. But as unsubtle as it was in that way, it did at least offer ambiguity and ultimately questoned the moral validity of the team’s mission; for a director like Spielberg who is used to offering pat answers and neatly wrapped up moral lessons, it was quite a surprise, and for that I tend to excuse some of the problems with the way the story was told.
I still contend that Spielberg’s best movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, cartoon Nazi villians, improbable 2000 year old booby traps, and all. It’s hard to imagine a more purely entertaining film.
Stranger
THAT I have no problem with. For instance, Blackhawk Down condensed and combined many elements from the actual battle in Mogadishu, but it conveyed truthfully the essence of what occurred. Munich, however, did not do that. It didn’t just condense and combine, it totally changed and even warped much of what happened, and invented new moral and ethical problems while not dealing with the ones that actually existed. I don’t like that, personally, because when someone does that it shows they are more interested in making a personal or political point rather than telling the story of what happened and letting people draw their own conclusions.
What’s the old saying? Every “historical” war movie is about the current war.
MASH wasn’t about Korea, it was about Viet Nam.
I kind of agree with you about heavy handed editorializing. It is kind of annoying. Drawing parallels is one thing (Clooney did this well in Good Night and Good Luck), but shaping conversations to hit us over the head with a message is quite another.
However, I don’t really know if I agree with you about the criticism of Munich taking liberty with “what happened.” I think the truth is, we still probably don’t know what really happened (Unless you are talking about him fudging events in the public record).
There are differing theories on exactly what Mossad did. So, I think Spielberg fictionalized (and cherry picked) a ton of stuff. He basically took what he chose to believe and then (admittedly) fabricated the rest.
Whether that is responsible film making, I cannot say. But if Spielberg stuck to what we KNEW to be true, I think it would have been a boring film.
This is hilarious. I have one complaint about the movie, it was shallow. I don’t care that it wasn’t a spy thriller. I care that it was sorta a spy thriller, sorta a movie about Israel/Black September and it was sorta a movie about the teams’ mental transformation. You and Push for some reason took “its shallow” to mean “it wasn’t a spy thriller flick.” Nothing could be futher from the truth. I could have just as easily enjoyed a drama about the teams’ mental transformation but that just wasn’t there.
how do they provide backdrops for old shots of new york. do they act in front of a green screen and then just insert the backdrop later by computer?
I think that enough actual Mossad operatives have come forward to say what happened, warts and all, that at least a general idea is pretty clear. One thing is for sure: they killed the wrong man in one instance and some of them spent time in jail for it. I think that would have been a more poignant and dramatic end for the movie, and it would have had the advantage of being true.