1. in this age of resurrected AI celebrities idk how I feel about cartoon peter lorre
2. the animation in this movie is a brave effort but cel shading on 3d animation just does not hit the same
3. is peter lorre/granny an example of the weirdest guy you've ever met/astonishing baddie dynamic
4. good to have canonical confirmation, after decades of queerbaiting, that wile e coyote and the roadrunner are together in some kind of depraved kink situation
5. john cena should only act in movies opposite cartoon characters or muppets, from here on out
6. really I think to properly understand this movie you have to dig deeply into the Lacanian concept of jouissance

What an odd little movie. Much more trying to be just a fun thriller than you'd expect. You really think this is going to be some kind of "oh this guy is doing Saw for real" thing but really, it's mostly a character study of a deeply strange and lonely guy doing a depely strange and lonely thing. As a movie it has no real vitriol for anybody—excepting perhaps Pacino's comically heartless and self-important character—but it's not interested in romanticizing its subject either. Feels very much like the intended application of this movie is that you just watch it and go "oh yeah, the 1970s were craaaaazy" and then go get dinner.

It is, of course, shot beautifully and it moves with incredible pace for such a long, miserable movie. But it always feels kind of uncomfortably caught between the spy thriller and the serious period drama. Full of odd little digressions and a sense, almost, of unreality. It's strange to say that this movie is basically Spielberg's Mulholland Drive, but it kind of is; the movie's plot is so smeared across space and time and there's so much of it that it takes on a sort of dream logic.

It's a strange film, 20 years on. It's critical of the Israeli state to a degree that seems almost implausible for a big-budget Hollywood movie made in 2005. But at the same time, it still centers the Israeli perspective on events almost categorically; and it more points at its critique than depicts it. I don't think Spielberg's point with this movie is to try to salvage his Zionism out of a story that is, at its bottom, about the highest echelon of the Israeli state deceiving their own cut-outs to carry out a campaign of terror and assassination overseas. If anything, Munich is mostly just pessimistic—about nations, and about people.