(If you want to see
Munich and be surprised, maybe you should come back some other day. I've included a pretty Elizabeth Peyton picture so you don't accidentally read anything. Aren't I nice?)

I turned the radio off this morning when the NPR Olympics coverage turned to 1972 and Munich. I didn't turn it off because of my oft-repeated hatred of the Olympics, or a particular distaste for tales of Steve Prefontaine translating German.
I turned it off because I couldn't get scenes from the movie out of my head. I don't like that, while people were talking about real people who had died violent deaths, I was seeing actors and Karo syrup. There's something really disrespectful about that to me.
I'm not a squeamish girl, and I'm not an anti-movie/tv violence girl. Hell, you could even go so far as to say I enjoy a good gory movie. But I just don't see why a movie about actual events and real people, directed by a well-respected guy, should seem so gratuitous to a girl like me. We know that theirs was an awful death; anyone seeing the movie at least knows this basic fact. I don't need crumpling faces and spattering blood to tell me.
And that seems to be the difference to me: if I'm watching some crap horror exploitation movie (or even a good horror exploitation movie), blood and guts are part and parcel. If I'm watching Oscar bait, they're unexpected and, to my mind, unnecessary.
It feels like lazy filmmaking. And yes, I know I don't like Spielberg to begin with, but this is why. I don't like it when I can tell my emotions are being orchestrated. If I'm watching a movie, I don't want to be pulled out of it with a thought like, "I'm supposed to be sad here," or "I guess I'm supposed to like this guy."
This is true for me whether or not I am sad, whether or not I do like that guy.
This is also why I think John Williams is a hack.
And it's also sort of related to why I've always avoided the 9-11 footage. I don't need to see bodies falling from buildings to feel the tragedy of bodies falling from buildings.
I guess I also do believe that we can be desensitized to some images, and I don't want that for myself.
I would also rather not have bloody naked dead-and-dying women in my Oscar bait. Particularly when said Oscar bait also includes married "love-making" scenes with fully clothed women. I know it's almost too easy for a girl like me to make the misogyny leap, but let me just repeat myself:
The women we saw naked were dead or mortally wounded and bloody.
The camera lingered on one particular naked dead woman.
The loving wife character was always, even during sex, fully clothed.