BEFORE: All right, I can finally call the horror chain over for this year, it's a little late, but you know, the romance chain has a way of spilling over into March, so it's fine if the horror chain makes it to November, I was really busy in October and we can overlook this. So no more horror films for the next 11 months, unless I really really need one to be somewhen else to keep the chain alive. Now I can return to regular movies, but the current choices are all ones that are going to get me closer to Christmas. After that I can start setting up the romance chain for next February, and so it goes - but one possible horror chain for next year is already set up (more or less), I'll just have to figure out how to get to it.
Daniel Betts carries over from "Alien: Romulus".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Munich" (Movie #345)
THE PLOT: During the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, an American sports broadcasting team must adapt to live coverage of Israeli athletes being held hostage by a terrorist group.
AFTER: This is based on a true story, the team broadcasting from the Summer Olympics and the problems they had, in addition to jet lag and having to work the night shift to transmit the sports to U.S. viewers live (or close to it). But this was the first instance of using satellite technology to beam the video footage (even though they still shot on film, for some reason) directly to the broadcast feed. This was ground-breaking because there was no internet yet, and even VHS technology hadn't take over, it was a pre-digital world - even if somebody wanted to put a caption on video footage, somebody had to stick little plastic letters into a tiny pegboard, and make sure they got the spelling right. Nowadays you would just push a button and type the letters on a keyboard, but everything was analog back then - no touch-tone phones, either, they had to rotary dial !! Even pop-top beer and soda cans wouldn't come along for a couple years.
The big challenge was to make sports relatable for non-sports viewers, and that meant focusing on the back-stories of the athletes, trying to evoke some emotional response or support in the American public. Since Mark Spitz, an American swimmer, was Jewish, the plan was to focus on what it meant for him to be competing in Germany - OK, West Germany, but still echoes of Nazi Germany could probably be found. The German government was looking to present the country to the world in a new light, which could have had something to do with why the Olympic Village was easy for the terrorists to take over - how would it have looked to have German armed guards patroling the property? That might have evoked too many bad memories from the past.
So a terrorist group called Black September broke into the apartment complex that was housing the athletes, and took Israeli athletes and coaches hostage, demanding the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners, who were also charged with terrorism. I would say that it was a very different situation in the Middle East back then, only it wasn't, was it? This film got released during a time of a different occupation, one where Israel was the aggressor in Gaza and was holding Palestinians hostage, so there's another echo of the 1972 event (and others) in our current history, and vice versa.
What goes on in a broadcast center when the team suddenly finds itself with access to the biggest news story in the world? Well, it's really what you expect, they pivot, they plan, they play a little fast and loose with the rules, and they send their star reporter (Peter Jennings) into the middle of the action, same as they would do for any big war or weather event. There's a delicate balance between breaking the story and getting the facts confirmed, but that's all news stories across the board, if you think about it. But this was back before there was such a thing as "fake news", there was just news.
However, it might have been the first time that a news organization realized that their reporting might be affecting the story. The ABC camera trained on the apartment that the terrorists were holed up in showed that there was a television on, and the terrorists might have been watching the coverage of their own incident. This could, for example, reveal the location of the police snipers to the terrorists, so perhaps the German police were right to try to shut them down. I bring this up because it's Election Day, and up until just a couple elections ago, the news organizations were reporting early polling results, which has the potential to discourage late voters from turning out, if they see that their candidate has a big early lead. But all of the votes are important, the early ones and the late ones. We're looking at a nail-biter here in NYC, where the Socialist candidate has a perceived 5-point lead, and the former governor with the harassment record is a close second. Just even KNOWING what the point spread is could affect people's decision over whether to vote or not, and that's dangerous. Even if you can't pick the lesser of two evils from that pair (forget the vigilante Republican, he's got no chance) it's still important to get out and vote and make sure your voice is heard. My wife and I are voting for different people but then it's super-important that we both vote and cancel each other out.
What happened in Munich was that the head of the control room had received a fax from the German government that the hostages had been freed at the airport, and he relayed the news to reporter Jim McKay without waiting for double confirmation. What was important to him was breaking the news FIRST, however the actual news from the rescue attempt was much more serious, all 11 hostages actually died in a failed rescue attempt. So ABC had to issue a retraction, and I'm sure that the head of the control room thought he would be fired, but no - his special punishment was getting NOT fired and being forced to continue working in the same position, with the special knowledge that he'd screwed up, big-time. Very relatable, his boss now had extra power over him.
Look, I don't know how you make an international hostage crisis boring, but they found a way. It's got something to do with the action being out THERE while we're all stuck in the broadcast center HERE with the reporters and the technicians. Needed more show and less tell. Jeezus, it's bad enough that some people work hard making TV shows and they don't see the sunlight for hours and hours, or they're stuck on the night shift and that means they don't see the sun for DAYS. I've been there, working on music videos that shot during the winter months, it wasn't fun, that will give you Seasonal Affective Disorder (S.A.D.) for sure.
Directed by Tim Fehlbaum
Also starring Peter Sarsgaard (last seen in "Year of the Dog"), John Magaro (last seen in "Big George Foreman"), Ben Chaplin (last seen in "The Water Horse"), Leonie Benesch, Zinedine Soualem (last seen in "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"), Georgina Rich (last seen in "Radioactive"), Corey Johnson (last seen in "All the Old Knives"), Marcus Rutherford, Daniel Adeosun, Benjamin Walker (last seen in "The Ice Road"), Ferdinand Dörfler, Solomon Mousley (last seen in "Rocketman"), Caroline Ebner, Leif Eisenberg, Rony Herman, Jeff Book, Robert Porter Templeton, Stephen Fraser, Leon Dragoi, Doris Meier, Mark Ruppel, Christian Ulrich, Gunther Wernhard, Antje Westermann, Harry Waterstone, Andreas Honold, Stefan Mittermaier, Miguel Abrantes Ostrowski, Kim Hanfland, David Iselin, Nikita Borisov, Karolina Gabinger, Robert Glade, Immanuel Rahman, Paul Böhme, Saeid Yazdani, AF: Howard Cosell, Jim McKay
RATING: 5 out of 10 ski masks
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