← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · il ragno
Thread ID: 18966 | Posts: 10 | Started: 2005-07-03
2005-07-03 10:38 | User Profile
The troika is now complete. SCHINDLER pointed out once and for all who the Bad Guys are: they speak English with funny Col Klink accents and are total unregenerate evil (because they hate Jews); PRIVATE RYAN lionized the good goyim who were slaughtered by the thousands (in a holy mission to save Jews - St Steven didn't bother tipping his cap to the goys who died fighting Japs); and now, the circle closes as he offers a paean to the only true deserving inheritors of the Earth. Get your tickets early.
[QUOTE][url]http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/01/movies/01spie.html?oref=login[/url]
[B]Next: Spielberg's Biggest Gamble[/B] By DAVID M. HALBFINGER Published: July 1, 2005
LOS ANGELES, June 30 - On Wednesday, Steven Spielberg's apocalyptic thriller "War of the Worlds" invaded movie theaters worldwide. But the director had already moved on. That night in Malta, Mr. Spielberg quietly began filming the most politically charged project he has yet attempted: the tale of a secret Mossad hit squad ordered to assassinate Palestinian terrorists after the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Mr. Spielberg has taken risks before: he said he feared being seen as trivializing the Holocaust when he directed "Schindler's List" in 1993, at a time when he was best known for blockbuster fantasies like "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark." And with "Saving Private Ryan," he gambled successfully on audiences' tolerance for prolonged and bloody combat scenes.
But with the as-yet-untitled Munich film, already scheduled for Oscar-season release by Universal Pictures on Dec. 23, Mr. Spielberg is tackling material delicate enough that he and his advisers are concerned about adverse effects on matters as weighty as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process if his project is mishandled - or misconstrued in the public mind.
Indeed, the movie's terrain is so packed with potential land mines that, associates say, Mr. Spielberg has sought counsel from advisers ranging from his own rabbi to the former American diplomat Dennis Ross, who in turn has alerted Israeli government officials to the film's thrust. Mr. Spielberg has also shown the script to Mr. Ross's old boss, former President Bill Clinton. Mr. Clinton's aides said Mr. Spielberg reached out to him first more than a year ago and again as recently as Tuesday. Mr. Spielberg is also being advised by Mike McCurry, Mr. Clinton's White House spokesman, and Allan Mayer, a Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications.
The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it is his first feature screenplay - begins with the killing of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich. But it focuses on the Israeli retaliation: the assassinations, ordered by Prime Minister Golda Meir, of Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as terrorists, including some who were not directly implicated in the Olympic massacre. By highlighting such a morally vexing and endlessly debated chapter in Israeli history - one that introduced the still-controversial Israeli tactic now known as targeted killings - Mr. Spielberg could jeopardize his tremendous stature among Jews both in the United States and in Israel.
He earned that prestige largely for his treatment of the Holocaust in "Schindler's List" and for his philanthropic efforts, through the Shoah Foundation, to preserve testimonies of survivors of the concentration camps. Until now, though, he has been relatively quiet on Middle East politics compared with more vocal American supporters of Israel.
Making matters more complicated, an important source for Mr. Spielberg's narrative is a 1984 book by George Jonas, "Vengeance," based largely on the account of a purported member of the Mossad's assassination team, whose veracity was later widely called into question.
Friends of Mr. Spielberg said he was keenly aware that admirers of his Holocaust work could misunderstand his new film and regard it as hurtful to Israel. And they noted that he had never before courted controversy so openly. "A lot of people around him never thought he'd make the movie," said one associate, who asked not to be identified, in keeping with Mr. Spielberg's preference for secrecy.
Typically, Mr. Spielberg keeps a tight lid on information about coming projects, and he has been especially careful to do so this time. He has revealed that the film will star Eric Bana as the lead Israeli assassin, along with Daniel Craig, Geoffrey Rush, Mathieu Kassovitz, Hanns Zischler and Ciaran Hinds. The director released a short statement simultaneously this week to The New York Times, the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv and the Arab television network Al Arabiya, but he turned down requests for an interview and declined through a spokesman to answer written questions.
In the statement, Mr. Spielberg called the Munich attack - which was carried out by Black September, an arm of the P.L.O.'s Fatah organization - and the Israeli response "a defining moment in the modern history of the Middle East."
Mr. Spielberg's interest in the question of a civilized nation's proper response to terrorism deepened, aides said, after the 9/11 attacks, as Americans were grappling for the first time with similar issues - for instance, in each new lethal strike on a suspected terrorist leader by a C.I.A. Predator drone aircraft. In Mr. Kushner's script, people who have read it say, the Israeli assassins find themselves struggling to understand how their targets were chosen, whether they belonged on the hit list and, eventually, what, if anything, their killing would accomplish.
"What comes through here is the human dimension," said Mr. Ross, formerly the Middle East envoy for Mr. Clinton, who has advised the filmmakers on the screenplay and helped Mr. Spielberg reach out to officials in the region. "You're contending with an enormously difficult set of challenges when you have to respond to a horrific act of terror. Not to respond sends a signal that actions are rewarded and the perpetrators can get away with it. But you have to take into account that your response may not achieve what you wish to achieve, and that it may have consequences for people in the mission."
Skip to next paragraph Filmography: Steven Spielberg
Forum: Movies Mr. Spielberg's statement indicated that, despite the implications for other conflicts, his movie - to be shot in Malta, Budapest and New York - was aimed squarely at the Israeli-Palestinian divide.
"Viewing Israel's response to Munich through the eyes of the men who were sent to avenge that tragedy adds a human dimension to a horrific episode that we usually think about only in political or military terms," he said. "By experiencing how the implacable resolve of these men to succeed in their mission slowly gave way to troubling doubts about what they were doing, I think we can learn something important about the tragic standoff we find ourselves in today."
That Mr. Spielberg has a daunting task ahead - and the degree to which his film will be scrutinized, interpreted and debated - can be seen in the way a few prominent Israelis responded to the mere mention of doubts on the part of the assassins.
"I don't know how many of them actually had 'troubling doubts' about what they were doing," said Michael B. Oren, the historian and author of "Six Days of War." "It's become a stereotype, the guilt-ridden Mossad hit man. You never see guilt-ridden hit men in any other ethnicity. Somehow it's only the Jews. I don't see Dirty Harry feeling guilt-ridden. It's the flip side of the rationally motivated Palestinian terrorist: you can't have a Jew going to exact vengeance and not feel guilt-ridden about it, and you can't have a Palestinian who's operating out of pure evil - it's got to be the result of some trauma."
And Efraim Halevy, a veteran Mossad agent who headed the organization, Israel's intelligence agency, from 1998 to 2002, warned against reading too much into the misgivings of Israel's hit men.
"I know some of the people who were involved," he said. "Maybe people have doubts. If they have doubts, I think it's to their credit. It's not an easy thing to do. But it doesn't mean it's wrong. I'd be very happy to see the doubts on the other side, the fierce debates going on about whether they should or should not do it."
Yet Mr. Spielberg's advisers say he is studiously avoiding the most glaring potential trap: drawing a moral equivalency between the Palestinian attack and the Israeli retaliation.
While people who have read various versions of the script praised Mr. Kushner, the author of "Angels in America" and "Homebody/Kabul," for humanizing the film's hunted Palestinians and giving a fuller sense of their motivation, they said the terrorists would hold little claim to the audience's sympathies. One scene added by Mr. Kushner, who was commissioned last year to rework an earlier draft by the writer Eric Roth, places an Israeli assassin, posing as a terrorist sympathizer, at a safe house where he listens as Palestinians give voice to their anger but also to their hatred of Jews, two people connected with the film said.
Moreover, Mr. Spielberg is making sure to provide enough historical context to explain what impelled Israel to make killers of its sons, as Golda Meir was said to have lamented at the time. "It's easy to look back at historic events with the benefit of hindsight," he said in his statement. "What's not so easy is to try to see things as they must have looked to people at the time."
Mr. Spielberg's movie will not be the first dramatic telling of this story. In 1986, HBO adapted Mr. Jonas's book as a television movie, "Sword of Gideon," starring Steven Bauer as the lead assassin, "Avner," along with Rod Steiger and Colleen Dewhurst. Mr. Spielberg became interested more recently, after learning that Barry Mendel, the producer of "The Sixth Sense" and several Wes Anderson films, including last year's "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou," had acquired the feature rights to the book for Universal several years ago.
Anticipating questions about the authenticity of the book's source, Mr. Spielberg has sought to distance the movie from "Vengeance," insisting in his statement that the film is based on multiple sources, "including the recollections of some who participated in the events themselves." But one of them, people involved in the film confirmed, is Juval Aviv, a New York-based security consultant identified years ago as Mr. Jonas's Avner character, whose claims to a career in the Mossad have been disputed by experts on Israeli intelligence. Mr. Aviv did not respond to phone and e-mail messages.
Mr. Spielberg originally announced that he would begin production last summer of the script by Mr. Roth, the writer of "Forrest Gump" and "The Insider," but hired Mr. Kushner to humanize what he felt was too procedural a thriller in Mr. Roth's telling, people familiar with both scripts said.
In Mr. Roth's script, for instance, the Munich killings dominated the first 15 minutes of the movie. Mr. Spielberg, the readers said, was still weighing how to depict the massacre without minimizing its power, but also without overpowering the audience. [/QUOTE]
2005-07-03 10:54 | User Profile
Zionists like Debbie Schlussel are actually complaining that Spielberg is being too [I]soft[/I] on terrorists and does not support Mossad [I]enough[/I]. Their kind is not easily pleased:
[COLOR=DarkRed][FONT=Arial] [SIZE=4]Spielberg "Vengeance" Update: Steven's Stockholm Syndrome Worse Than I'd Earlier Diagnosed[/SIZE]
[B]By Debbie Schlussel[/B]
[B]A New York Times article, today, confirms everything I've written (here and here) and worse regarding Steven Spielberg's upcoming "Vengeance" movie. It is now a certainty that Mr. "Schindler's List" will expend the capital he earned on that film to now HUMANIZE(!) Palestinian terrorists who murdered the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972.[/B]
It's bad enough that Spielberg ran the script by Arafat-fan Bill Clinton--Arafat ordered the Olympic athlete massacre--and other assorted Clintonistas who drooled over Arafat, like Mike McCurry and Dennis Ross.
Worse is the revelation that playwright Tony Kushner (a self-avowed socialist and gay activist) is praised for "humanizing the film's hunted Palestinians and giving a fuller sense of their motivation." Can you imagine if someone did a film humanizing Mohammed Atta and giving a fuller sense of his motivation?! Or perhaps he can do "Schindler's Other List," humanizing the Nazis and giving a fuller sense of their motivation. Unbelievable. We don't need more psychobabble about understanding the terrorists and why they hate us. Who cares why they hate us? A better question is: Why don't we hate them enough to quit doing crappy, Stockholm-Syndrome movies like this?
If the Times doesn't make Spielberg's intentions--which I correctly predicted, last summer--clear once, it makes them clear twice. Kushner was hired by Spielberg "to humanize what he felt was too procedural a thriller," as written by another screenwriter.
Spielberg released a statement calling the Munich Olympic massacre "a defining moment in the modern history of the Middle East," as if he's proud of that. It wasn't a "defining" moment. It was an EXTREMELY TRAGIC moment!
One hint Spielberg is playing for the wrong team: "Vengeance" is being shot in Pan-Arabist Malta, which criminally prosecuted columnist Simone Endrich for criticizing Palestinian terrorists, homicide bombings, and the Maltese Prime Minister for participating in a pro-Palestinian demonstration. So glad Spielberg picked such an even-handed locale for "Vengeance."
Other signs Steven Spielberg is glorifying the Munich Olympic terrorists: He
is concerned the project may be "misconstrued in the public mind" (if "Vengeance" denounced the terrorists, instead of humanizing them, there would be no reason for concern);
is being advised by "a Hollywood spokesman who specializes in crisis communications" (if the film were against terrorists, there would be no need);
is worried about "jeopardiz[ing] his tremendous stature among Jews" and that "admirers of his Holocaust work could misunderstand his new film and regard it as hurtful to Israel";
released a short statement not just to the Times and Ma'ariv, but to Arab television network Al-Arabiya; and
is "studiously avoiding the most glaring potential trap: drawing a moral equivalency between the Palestinian attack and the Israeli retaliation," his advisors tell the Times. Morally equivocating terrorists and their victims is not a glaring trap or something that needs hard work in order to avoid. It's a no-brainer, but not apparently in this film, which apparently will do exactly this kind of moral equivocation he needs to "work so hard" to avoid.
Unfortunately, Spielberg's idea of "Israeli assassins find[ing] themselves struggling . . . slowly giving way to troubling doubts about what they were doing," is nothing new. Been there, seen that. Another gay socialist Jewish screenwriter (just like Spielberg's Kushner) wrote a similar Mossad-assassin-has-doubts-about-killing-Islamic-terrorists-and-becomes-sensitive-guy thriller. It's called "Walk on Water," and I doubt Spielberg can improve upon that dreadful celluloid spittle.
Given all this, it makes the disappointing, Oscar-winning Munich Olympic Massacre documentary, "One Day in September," look almost appetizing.
Just two years after the Munich massacre, Yasser Arafat and company were rewarded with a Palestinian U.N. mission. One wonders what they'll get after Spielberg releases this propaganda piece, later this year, just in time for holiday gifts.[/FONT][/COLOR]
[url]http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2005/07/spielberg_venge.html#more[/url]
Petr
2005-07-03 13:43 | User Profile
IR,
What war in the Pacific? According to some people that was a skirmish.
2005-07-03 16:49 | User Profile
It is strange that the Speilberg Jew doesn't do a movie about the Bolshevick Revolution, the momentus event in 20th century history. Or even a pro-American film dramatizing the war against Muslim terrorists in Afghanistan and Iraq which require bravery far beyond his little MOSSAD buddies who alleged were found celebrating when the WTC got hit.
2005-07-03 16:56 | User Profile
Zhids use their dominance in Hollywood to shamelessly rewrite history. The sufferink of obnoxious pests is naturally of no natural concern to humans.
2005-07-04 12:59 | User Profile
[QUOTE] ...The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner - it is his first feature screenplay[/QUOTE]>>Tony Kushner is the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, which airs as a two-part film on HBO... [url="http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2003/11/ma_586_01.html"]http://www.motherjones.com/arts/qa/2003/11/ma_586_01.html[/url]
Mother Jones: The HBO production is being grouped with other shows like Queer Eye for the Straight Guy in this new category of gay TV. How do you feel about that?
Tony Kushner: As a gay man, I'm enormously interested in the phenomenon. Gay TV has been immensely important in transforming American culture in a more gay-positive direction. Roseanne and Madonna, in their respective domains, are so important in their liberation of sexual minoritarians. A show like Will & Grace, especially in the first few seasons, was pretty transgressive in its treatment of the body -- pretty kinky and interesting. And Queer Eye is fascinating. It has a pinch-me-I'm-dreaming quality. It's very bourgeois, of course, and much more about the liberation of the consumer than the liberation of the democratic citizen. Interestingly, I think that Angels will feel tame in some ways...
The Salon Interview: [color=#aa0000][color=#aa0000]You had dinner at the White House last year. What was that like? ** [/color][/color] TK:** I was invited for a dinner of the national Medal of Arts honorees, and I went with my best girlfriend Michael Mayer, who directed the national tour of "Angels." I wore my pink triangle, and I got to explain to Al Gore and the people at his table what a pink triangle was --
[url="http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960610.html"]http://www.salon.com/weekly/interview960610.html[/url]
2005-07-04 13:46 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Sertorius]What war in the Pacific? According to some people that was a skirmish.[/QUOTE]
Just out of curiousity, and if you recall, what tasteles idiot(s) said such a thing? Perhaps we need to get him/her/them a library card of their very own some day....
2005-07-04 23:54 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Petr]Zionists like Debbie Schlussel are actually complaining that Spielberg is being too [I]soft[/I] on terrorists and does not support Mossad [I]enough[/I].[/QUOTE]
This is like a cinematic-propaganda version of the "settlements": They'll push their ultimate goal six or seven feet out farther than they wanted to anyway, then "graciously" announce they're pulling back, so as to appear to have conceded something. Jews do this while doing bargaining of any kind --- watch for it.
2005-07-05 02:49 | User Profile
[QUOTE=Kevin_O'Keeffe]Just out of curiousity, and if you recall, what tasteles idiot(s) said such a thing? Perhaps we need to get him/her/them a library card of their very own some day....[/QUOTE] Kevin:
A library card would be a waste. The three of us ( I include Sertorius) would be better served by taking a plank to the offenders heads--for all the good it would do. Remember the ones that claimed that Pearl Harbor was all our fault--count that lot among them.
They are likely the ones that also were more than willing to look the other way in Europe--at least until Herr Adolph turned his attention to Uncle Joe.
Then it was we must SAVE our FRIENDS the Soviets! These folks later would chime in the same way (for the most part) for Israel.
Hope you all had a good 4th!
FF
2005-07-05 15:44 | User Profile
[QUOTE=albion]Roseanne and Madonna, in their respective domains, are so important in their liberation of sexual minoritarians.[/QUOTE] Oh, brother. :rolleyes: