Films We Don't Want To See

Of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, Mark Steyn once wrote:

After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’. Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

This year, Spielberg is making a film about the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics. Ed Morrissey writes that true to form with modern Hollywood…:

One of the actors, Daniel Craig, gave the game away in an interview when he claimed that Spielberg intended to have his film send a message that “vengeance doesn’t work”. This apparently bothered Spielberg’s consultant, Bill Clinton’s Middle East envoy Dennis Ross, to such an extent that he felt it necessary to warn the Israelis about the direction of the project.

Craig also said that Spielberg “wants to get it right” as a founder of the Shoah Foundation and as a Jew, but the Israelis may beg to differ. Spielberg has yet to do any research with the Mossad, nor has he contacted agents involved in key intelligence posts at the time. It appears that Spielberg has decided to simply work from rumor and innuendo — much more in the Oliver Stone mode than in the cinema verit