The Feel-Not-So-Good Movie of the Year: MUNICH brilliant, though upsetting

If you're looking for a way to recover from the Christmas Blues, rent The Baxter, but if you are really in the mood for an incredibly well done cinematic event, see Munich.

The film is based on the undercover retaliation of the horrific assasination of the Israeli Olympic team by a group of Arabs. In the film, the Israeli government puts together a top secret group full of "the common man" unsuspecting assasins and bomb makers. They are sent to kill a list of men who aided in planning the Munich attacks.

At first, we are thrown into a hectic paced sequence of authentic news clips from the actual 1972 disaster. In one of the more brilliant shots, a tv was showing the well known image of one of the masked assasins waving on the balcony of the hotel where they kept their hostages. In the background, we see the actor playing the assasin run out of the hotel room and reinact it- in other words, we see the same shot from two different angles (except the one on the tv is the actual 1972 footage.) It was extremely powerful. My parents both refused to see this film; "We lived through it, and that was enough for us." This part of the movie made me understand- this sequence was realistically disturbing and intense.

The incredible Hulk Eric Bana plays Avner, the lead everyman secret and governmentally justified assasin. His performance, among others, including the virtually unrecognizable Geoffrey Rush, put us straight into the time period. Director Steven Spielberg does the incredible job of keeping the film in the period of the 70's. One aspect that added greatly to this film was the fact that he really didn't use any big names, besides Bana and Rush, who most movie goers wouldn't recognize anyway. This way, we weren't watching Tom Cruise run around screen as we were with Spielberg's other film this year, (sorry, Chris...)

Anyway, to wrap this up (since, anyone who has been following has noticed this has been to be continued for about 3 months), Munich was in fact an incredible film. I did, however, feel like I wanted to curl up and hide for about a week or so. Definately watch this movie for the beautiful piece of cinema it is, but do not go if you're looking for escapism. Final Grade: A-