Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 2005

The Contenders:

Ang Lee: Brokeback Mountain (winner)
Bennett Miller: Capote
Paul Haggis: Crash
George Clooney: Good Night and Good Luck
Steven Spielberg: Munich

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapted Screenplay 2005

The Contenders:

Brokeback Mountain (winner)
Capote
The Constant Gardener
A History of Violence
Munich

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 2005

The Contenders:

Brokeback Mountain
Capote
Crash (winner)
Good Night and Good Luck
Munich

Mission: Impossible--Jerusalem Branch

Films: Munich
Format: DVD from Sycamore Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I knew going in to Munich that it was about what happened with the Israeli Olympic team in the 1972 Olympics. I’m not quite old enough to remember this when it happened, but I new about it soon enough. I assumed that this was about that event, the Palestinian terrorists, the taking of the Israeli team as hostages, and the eventual, terrible conclusion. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Aside from a few imagined sequences that operate as flashbacks, the entire kidnapping of the Israeli team occupies only the first few minutes of the film. No, this is about the terrible retribution that came afterward.

The death of the Olympic athletes and coaches left Israel in a terrible situation. While Germany had nothing to do with what happened, it had to resonate that the terrorism took place on German soil. What the Golda Meir’s government wanted was swift retribution, a message that the targeting of Israelis and Jews in general would not be tolerated. To head that retribution, Avner Kaufman (Eric Bana), a Mossad agent, is recruited. His contact Ephraim (Geoffrey Rush) tells him that he will be heading a team of four other operatives tasked with the job of hunting down the men responsible for planning and carrying out the deaths of the Israeli Olympic team.