Alright, in between the centerpieces, Melville's wheels are obviously spinning (Delon plays the coolest man alive - this time a cop - practically reprising/reversing his role in Le Samourai). What's exciting - besides the setpieces - is Delon's squareness: His aptitude for treating the job of police officer as a 9 to 5, drinks to follow with the bad guys. Melville wisely keeps the thing white hat, black hat, never springing the switchover and consistently lurching from out and out physical methodics (a bank robbery on a remote corner in the rain, a man drops from a helicopter to a train to swtich some cases) to methodics of loyalty and duty. That's right: Loyalty and duty. Live together in perfect harmony. Side by side on my piano keyboard, oh Lord, why don't we?

I always find it more interesting when Ross is investigating himself, plugging through layers of reasoning and reality in attempt to decode his obsession with visual documentation. He does a fair bit of this - videotaping the cameraman who is interviewing him, observing a tri-part reality with a woman interviewed after a deadly tornado and, in byfar the most interesting segment, following a rich businessman, less phased than the news makes him out to be over his wife's murder - however, a another large bit of what's included is inconclusive and hardly interesting (the firefighter in particular, but the El Salvadorian, to a certain extent, as well). As ever, it's a pleasure to hear Ross speak - he's like a pleasant friend, sparing you the boredom of his home movies by making interesting comments while they play.

The unforgiving contrast of neighborly feuding (in the key of screwball) and bizarre parable (children obssess over their pet cemetary because, uh, war is hard) really don't jive and, at times, simply work against each other, undermining the quasi-great things they demonstrate they can do, independently.

This one is obviously the keeper, zipping into a great flashback of footage from his other films to bring us up to date, right as the battery goes on his camera. Its as if being interrupted by the reality of the camera's mortality affords Ross the opportunity to brandish his editing skills, using his own life in the way one might use fiction to stitch a high-exposition montage necessary for the context of what follows. But mostly, its very, very personal, with Ross getting married (visiting his bride-to-be before the ceremony and hilariously negotiating for fifteen minutes filming time) and looking visible nervous without his camera.

[Here's what I said originally.]

Let's not talk about how curiously I found myself observing the father in this film. It's proof I'm human.

The cartoon at front really sets the film's tone to a T: Cartoonish attitudes towards Christmas in rotating hilarity. Gets more and more relevant as I survive more and more of these too-planned family compromises.

While Worlds forfeits its purity for square-box PC touches (Dakota Fanning is a commercial for her upper class changeover, a detail that - while valuable - is often distracting) and wrongheaded characterizations (What movie is Tim Robbins planning to direct that he needed to trot out the goober stereotype with such ploddingly simple strokes?), Munich simply doesn't realize that it's a better film when its lost in the throes of its thriller chops, some of which are as dazzlingly methodical as anything in Catch Me If You Can, the somewhat lukewarm dramatic entry to Spielberg's oeuvre this film more precisely parallels than the dusty dark history of Amistad or the terrifying and immediate docu-shock of Schindler's List. Munich just doesn't have the historical urgency it's being pimped with. And while it is about political warfare, what really cripples it is how, while it's alleviating the ever-increasing panic I had that it would never chuck off its viciously partisan perspective (note to self: trust the director next time), it manages to lapse into character study, showing the Israeli idealist who is tired of the fighting and the taking of sides, thereby forcing the movie into a situation where it's merely showing an objective perspective without actually being objective itself. Nevertheless, this changeover was like a weight off of my shoulders as soon as the film took stock of the toll on unwitting terrorists, thereby blurring the line between payback and aggression, suggesting that a difference doesn't actually exist when the freedom fighters become the, ahem, invaders. All of these terms must sound very familiar and specifically allegoric. However, in a broader sense, though both films examine the complacency of revenge, we never lose sight of Bana's or Cruise's plight to stay human, a battle Spielberg sees as, ultimately, a more integral part to understanding the concept of political violence as a whole. This initiates a fittingly punitive cycle for Bana, who realizes he's either been had or has traded his security the way the terrorists traded their lives for the cause. Cruise, who also survives his own shortcomings by killing (Tim Robbins, in this case), finds himself clinging to family. In both films, the subtext echoes a sentiment actually stated in Munich: Home always costs more. Both films aren't merely reactions, but warnings focused on behavior in the wake of terrorist attacks. War of the Worlds sees it from the common (read: working class) man's eyes while Munich comes from the mind's eye of the soldier.

[ I was excited about re-experiencing War of the Worlds since I saw it in July. Despite my dual-driving review here, I really enjoyed the peripheral (that is, what's to be examined without reading into the text); It's flavor is closer to the craftsmanship of entertainment dripping from Jurassic Park mixed with the kinetic and suspenseful realism of Saving Private Ryan. I think it overloads itself on message when it should be tightening its belt and expounding on the kiddy child's-eye thrills, but there's no shortage of vision here: Grandiose, apocalyptic imagery is king. ]