Munich is imploding for now, but maybe once it bottoms out it will arrive at some kind of bruised underdog status…did I just say that?

Viacom’s $1.6 billion purchase of DreamWorks SKG yesterday (Friday, 12.9) is so important a story and of such vital interest to the guy on the street …it’s so important that I’m jumping right on it, 16 or 17 hours after the story broke yesterday evening. The shifting of funds from one super powerful group of rich Hollywood elitists to another group of rich super powerful Hollywood elitists …if this isn’t earth-shaking news, what would be?

Another pellet dings the Munich hide in the form of David Halb- finger’s New York Times piece about the potential for Jewish/ Israeli blowback over concerns than Steven Spielberg’s film portrays the Palestinian plotters behind the 1972 Munich slaughter of Israeli athletes in too much of an equal light along- side those of Israeli Mossad agents who sought their deaths in retaliation. Halbfinger quotes Ehud Danoch, the Israeli consul general in Los Angeles, as complaining that Munich “[makes] it seem as if Israel’s response alone had caused an escalation in terrorism,” which Danoch feels is “pure fiction.” He argues, in Halbfinger’s words, that the film “unfairly drew a moral equivalency between the Israeli assassins and their targets — both explicitly, in dialogue in which the Israelis question their own actions and Palestinians defend theirs, and implicitly, as when the camera shifts from a television broadcast showing the names of the 11 athletes to an Israeli official showing the photographs of the 11 Palestinian targets. ‘And so it’s 11 for 11,’ Danoch points out. ‘It’s equal, it’s balanced. It’s these for those.’ But the Israeli athletes “were murdered in the most disgusting and horrible way, and [the Palestinians] were the guys who did it.'”

Any guesses about today’s Los Angeles Film Critics voting? Woody Allen’s Match Point is on the rise bigtime, but it’s gotta be Broke- back Mountain for Best Picture…right? And Heath Ledger for Best Actor? And maybe The Upside of Anger‘s Joan Allen for Best Actress? I would put money on these two if I were the betting type. I’m going to try and report the results by 3 pm or thereabouts…if the voting doesn’t go into extra innings.

It’s a Chronicles of Narnia weekend, all right. Families, church groups and the religious right poured coin into the Disney coffers to the tune of $22.7 million yesterday, and projections are that The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe will take in $75 to $80 million for the weekend…maybe a tad higher. Brokeback Mountain, platforming in just five theatres, did $133,000 per situation for a total of $691 thousand… upscale moviegoers and urban gays coming out in droves. Memoirs of a Geisha earned $99 thousand and change in eight theatres yesterday and is projected to take in $793,000 for the weekend. Mrs. Henderson Presents will take in about $48,000 in six thea- tres for the weekend. The World’s Fastest Indian opened in two theatres and did $2,000 a print.

Okay, I’ve got the wrong attitude. I’ve got to tone it down. The Munich pan by Variety‘s Todd McCarthy isn’t part of a burgeoning Spartacus-like revolt against the high-and-mighty Time-fortified Universal/Spielberg cabal…it’s just a review by one guy and we shouldn’t be talking about the threatening snowball getting big- ger and bigger…none of that neg-head people’s revolt stuff. Be fair.

Woody Allen and his Match Point cast — Scarlettt Johansson, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Emily Mortimer, Brian Cox, Mattthew Goode — did a post-screening q & a last night at the Arclight with Variety Screening Series moderator Pete Hammond. Most of the questions went to Woody, and here are some of his answers. Once a standup comic, always a standup comic — Allen really knows how to tell a story and give the crowd just what they want.

The Munich pile-on is turning into a shocker. I’m quite surprised by what’s happening here. A rebellion of the critical elite…a refusal to fall into line…a resounding f.u. to Steven Spielberg and his media pal, Time‘s Richard Schickel, who sang the film’s praises last weekend. The New Republic‘s Leon Wieselteir (i.e., “The Washington Diarist”) says that “the fakery is everywhere” in this Oscar-bait drama. He calls it “powerful in the hollow way that many of Spielberg’s films are powerful. He is a master of vacant intensities, of slick searings. Whatever the theme, he must ravish the viewer. Munich is aesthetically no different from War of the Worlds, and never mind that one treats questions of ethical and historical consequence and the other is stupid.” And Boxoffice Magazine critic Ray Greene is calling it “a shockingly mediocre and schematic movie…a bad pastiche of James Bond and John le Carre than the drama of ideas its director so admirably aimed for.” I was mezzo-mezzo about Munich, calling it a pretty good film but definitely not a slam-dunk in the Best Picture, but man… these other guys really don’t like it. Who could have foreseen that a presumably Oscar-worthy end-of-the-year Spielberg statement movie that was called a “secret masterpiece” by Time would be getting jabbed and maybe even bruised this early in the game? I’m shocked at this, and I’m told that more blows are yet to come.

Fox Home Video…bad. First they dropped the ball with that barely passable DVD of Alfred Hitchcok’s Lifeboat (it came out dirty, speckled and scratchy in the early portions), and then on 11.15.05 they issued an absolute dogshit-quality transfer of the magnificent Todd AO, 70 mm 30-frame-per-second version of Fred Zinneman’s Oklahoma! (1955), by transferring it at the wrong frame rate. (Or so I gather. I called Fox’s Shawn Belston to get the lowdown but I haven’t heard back.) Oklahoma! isn’t a near-great or even a pretty good movie, but the blue-chip Todd AO version of it (shot in 30 frame and on 70 mm stock) is clean and smooth and beautiful as the Oklahoma sky. (I saw it projected on a big screen in Los Angeles in the mid ’80s. Almost no frame flicker or pan blur!) And yet, appallingly, Fox Home Video’s new DVD rendition of this version is soft and fuzzy and basically crud-level. The Fox Home Video executive who refused to do the transfer correctly (I’m guessing he/she wanted to save money) should be canned, and Fox should offer rebates to everyone who paid for this two-disc set in the naive expectation that they would see a DVD facsimile of what the 30-frame version looked like on the big screen at the Rivoli theatre in 1956. (The second disc contains the standard 24-frame-per-second CinemaScope version of the film, which was shot separately and therefore contains slightly different versions of this and that scene.)

Sharon Waxman’s reporting that Chris Rock won’t be returning as the host of the next Oscar Awards show. I think most of us knew that halfway into his shpiel during last February’s telecast. And Gil Cates doesn’t know who he’s going to hire. “I’m trying to get a handle on what it is this year, and it’s a tough year to get a handle on,” Cates told Waxman. “The movies are broad — there are big movies, small movies. I have to get my hands around what this year is like.” Zzzzzz. Just hire Steve Martin already. Or Jimmy Kimmel.

More slings and arrows and sprays of buckshot are going to collide with the hide of Steven Spielberg’s Munich between now and opening day on 12.23. I’m getting the feeling that some critics may have been riled by the word “masterpiece” on that Time cover. They saw it and then saw the movie and went “what the…?” Who knows how it’s all going to shake down in the end, but it probably wasn’t the wisest decision from Universal’s perspective (not that Time‘s editors are obliged or interested in serving anyone’s interests but their own) for that word to be printed on the cover and flashed at every critic out there like a red flag in front of a thousand bulls.

Brokeback Mountain‘s opening-day reviews are overwhelmingly positive at 82%, but when a movie this sad, classy and penetra- ting comes along, it’s not the percentages that count but the passions it seems to ignite. The movies you want to pay attention to and single out for awards are the ones that hit a nerve, and any film that has more than a few top-dog critics describing it as “groundbreaking”, “landmark”, “heartbreaking”, “masterpiece” and “zeitgeist-capturing moment for Hollywood” is obviously up to something extraordinary. You have to hand it to a film that has so many straight guys out there saying “no way, ain’t goin’, fuck no” and so on…there’s something shuddering in the earth when a movie can make so many guys this uncomfortable without anyone buying (or even contemplating buying) a ticket. The irony once again (and this is the last time I’m going to repeat this) is that Brokeback Mountain couldn’t be less “gay” if it tried, and it’s fortifying to read New Yorker critic Anthony Lane talk about his having been “surprised by its tameness.” When L.A. Weekly critic Ella Taylor calls it “at once the gayest and the least gay Holly- wood film I’ve seen,” she’s acknowledging the basic storyline (two cowboys have it bad for each other) while appreciating the unforced and delicate way that director Ang Lee finds the ordinary, ain’t nothin’ universality of the thing.