In 1972, the year of the olympic games in Munich, I was just four. I kind of remember the year, since my dad who was on the local rowing team went to Germany (Berlin, I think) and came home with a gift for me and a gift for my brother: I got a plastic car track, the one where the car is catapulted through a loop, and my brother got an “Olympia Waldi” teddy dog. We loved those gifts, and I think they are still somewhere at my parents’ house. Now, Olympia Waldi was the official mascot of the Munich olympics, a rainbow coloured dachshund. This was slightly before the games, but I have a vague vague memory of the Black September attack. If one, like me, grew up in Europe in the seventies, terrorism, hostages and cold war threats were highly valid, and I doubt that those born in the 80s has the vaguest of ideas of what it was like. Of course, it is material that could fill a 1000 blog posts, but I’ll just give one concrete example: in the mid 70s, one palestinian terrorist group announced that it had injected Israeli Jaffa oranges (I think it was the only brand of oranges that existed in sweden at the time) with quicksilver. I remember being at the local store with a friend looking through all oranges for signs of injection. If we found an orange that was slightly soft, we announced, aghast, that it was probably poisoned. At least for a very short time, I ate oranges but reluctantly. It was sometimes the feeling of the era: that we were close to very dangerous events.
Anyway! The reason for this post is that I went to see Spielberg’s Munich yesterday. For the record, I think that Spielberg’s so-called serious career is inferiour to his early genre-defining action/thrillers. But this one did not suck. On the contrary, it was a very nice time capsule of that era: clothing, scenography – it all felt very authentic. And the cast was great, especially Eric Bana, who I first saw in Chopper a few years ago. Strange to compare the two characters. What marred the movie, though, was the fact that some fucking punks in the audience were annoying beyond recognition. Sure, the loud talking was irksome, but when the fuckers started to smoke, it was just the most ignorant thing to happen to me in a movie theatre ever. A while after the smoking, and consequent telling-to, they left through the emergency exit, and just before that standing in front of the screen, hands in the air, doing the V-sign. Thirty minutes later, there was some pounding on the emergency exit, someone opened it and enter the morons once again. They were not loud for the rest of the movie, but still, the anticipation that they would once again do stupid things disturbed me. Still, a good movie that brought back memories of the 70s, as well as providing a pretty balanced view of that era of Palestinian-Israeli conflict.