Movie Review

New film September 5 turns lens on media covering 1972 Munich Olympics

John Magaro in September 5.

Photo courtesy of Paramount Pictures

The massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich has already been the subject of two high-profile films. An Oscar-winning documentary, One Day in September, gave an overall look at the events of the day, while Steven Spielberg’s Munich focused on the Israeli effort to enact revenge on those responsible for the murders.

Instead of trying to make sense of the hows and whys of that tragic day, the new September 5 centers on how the crew of ABC, which was broadcasting the games, made the hard turn from showing sports into covering a news story with global impact.

ABC Sports president Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), vice president Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), producer Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), and their team find themselves having to negotiate tricky territory when Palestinian terrorists take members of the Israeli Olympic team hostage on the morning of September 5. With their studios located very close to the Olympic Village, they are in the unique position of covering the breaking news better than anyone else could.

They scramble to deploy their resources, including reporter Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), German interpreter Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), and assistant Carter Jeffrey (Marcus Rutherford), to get as much information as possible. Because of the unpredictable nature of the situation, though, they have to make a lot of hard choices, including whether or not they should show someone getting shot on live television.

Written and directed by Tim Fehlbaum, and co-written by Moritz Binder and Alex David, the film does an excellent job of demonstrating the eternal dilemma of journalists of how to report on tragic events. Not only do they worry about the impact that showing actual violence could have on viewers, but also that their close coverage can be seen by the terrorists inside the dormitories. Every decision they make and every word said by lead anchor Jim McKay is subject to second guessing, a pressure made worse by the fact that they have to move quickly to stay on top of the story.

The film takes place almost entirely within ABC’s studio, a choice that could have made it claustrophobic were it not for the dynamic filmmaking and editing of Fehlbaum and his team. The behind-the-scenes workings of the broadcast come alive with walk-and-talks through the building, shots of screens showing footage of the terrorists and McKay hosting the coverage, and a barrage of phone calls and conversations on walkie talkies that keep the 90-minute film moving at a brisk pace.

The politics of the situations are mostly kept at arm’s length, although they do crop up in various small ways. Not only is there the Israeli-Palestinian side of the equation, but there’s also the fact that the incident is taking place in what was then known as West Germany, which was still trying to rehab its reputation after World War II. Fehlbaum and his co-writers address this element with nuance, understanding that whatever blowback there would be on Germany would pale in comparison to what the hostages were going through.

What makes the film work as well as it does are the uniformly understated performances by each of the actors. The inherent stress of that fateful day could have led Sarsgaard, Chaplin, Magaro, and others to modulate their voices up, but they all choose to stay even-keeled. There’s still plenty of emotion in how they play their scenes, but because they stay in control it lends an extra degree of gravity to the film as a whole.

September 5, 1972 is a watershed day in history, one that continues to resonate because of the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. The coverage of the events of that day was crucial to its indelibility, and September 5 shows that the drama of how it was accomplished was compelling as well.

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September 5 is now playing in select theaters; it opens wide on January 17.

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Movie Review

Meta-comedy remake Anaconda coils itself into an unfunny mess

Photo by Matt Grace

Jack Black and Paul Rudd in Anaconda.

In Hollywood’s never-ending quest to take advantage of existing intellectual property, seemingly no older movie is off limits, even if the original was not well-regarded. That’s certainly the case with 1997’s Anaconda, which is best known for being a lesser entry on the filmography of Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez, as well as some horrendous accent work by Jon Voight.

The idea behind the new meta-sequel Anaconda is arguably a good one. Four friends — Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton), and Kenny (Steve Zahn) — who made homemade movies when they were teenagers decide to remake Anaconda on a shoestring budget. Egged on by Griff, an actor who can’t catch a break, the four of them pull together enough money to fly down to Brazil, hire a boat, and film a script written by Doug.

Naturally, almost nothing goes as planned in the Amazon, including losing their trained snake and running headlong into a criminal enterprise. Soon enough, everything else takes second place to the presence of a giant anaconda that is stalking them and anyone else who crosses its path.

Written and directed by Tom Gormican, with help from co-writer Kevin Etten, the film is designed to be an outrageous comedy peppered with laugh-out-loud moments that cover up the fact that there’s really no story. That would be all well and good … if anything the film had to offer was truly funny. Only a few scenes elicit any honest laughter, and so instead the audience is fed half-baked jokes, a story with no focus, and actors who ham it up to get any kind of reaction.

The biggest problem is that the meta-ness of the film goes too far. None of the core four characters possess any interesting traits, and their blandness is transferred over to the actors playing them. And so even as they face some harrowing situations or ones that could be funny, it’s difficult to care about anything they do since the filmmakers never make the basic effort of making the audience care about them.

It’s weird to say in a movie called Anaconda, but it becomes much too focused on the snake in the second half of the film. If the goal is to be a straight-up comedy, then everything up to and including the snake attacks should be serving that objective. But most of the time the attacks are either random or moments when the characters are already scared, and so any humor that could be mined all but disappears.

Black and Rudd are comedy all-stars who can typically be counted on to elevate even subpar material. That’s not the case here, as each only scores on a few occasions, with Black’s physicality being the funniest thing in the movie. Newton is not a good fit with this type of movie, and she isn’t done any favors by some seriously bad wigs. Zahn used to be the go-to guy for funny sidekicks, but he brings little to the table in this role.

Any attempt at rebooting/remaking an old piece of IP should make a concerted effort to differentiate itself from the original, and in that way, the new Anaconda succeeds. Unfortunately, that’s its only success, as the filmmakers can never find the right balance to turn it into the bawdy comedy they seemed to want.

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Anaconda is now playing in theaters.

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