“Anyone who claims to take pride in a film not doing as well as its supporters hoped it would is, simply, pathetic,” David Poland has written, obviously referring to yesterday’s Wired item about my feeling a wee bit proud about helping to stop the Munich Oscar train in some small way. Poland has gone after
films and filmmakers and fellow journalists, even, and hurt them to some degree (I still carry the scars), so let’s not have any high-minded judgments about pathetic vendettas. I’m much more of an amiable, shoulder-shrugging, comme ci comme ca type of guy than Poland is any day of the week. My confessing to a twinge of pride in helping to stop Munich (not the film, a tolerably flawed thing that hasn’t aged very well since last December, but the Moses-down-from-the-mountaintop Oscar-campaign attitude generated by that Time cover and “we’re letting the film speak for itself” and Poland’s early proclamation that Munich is the presumptive front runner, etc.) is just a little feeling that I let out. I’m not taking out trade ads…big deal.