September 5: Impressively powerful

September 5 (2024) • View trailer

Five stars (out of five). Rated R, for profanity and dramatic intensity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.26.25 

Ingenuity under pressure is fascinating.

 

Director Tim Fehlbaum’s fact-based depiction of what occurred during the 1972 Munich Olympics — and how those events were broadcast to the entire world — is a suspenseful and riveting docudrama: a true, edge-of-the-seat nail-biter.

 

Members of the ABC News sports team — from left, standing, Jacques Lesgardes
(Zinedine Soualem), Geoff Mason (John Magaro) and Carter Jeffrey (Marcus
Rutherford) — surround translator Marianne Gebhard (Leonie Benesch) as she 
dictates an update from the Munich police radio frequency.

The suspense derives not from the terrorist attack itself — the details of which are well known, and remain seared into history — but the resourceful, behind-the-scenes scrambling by the ABC News sports broadcasting team, which allowed 900 million global viewers to witness this incident, in real time.

The key phrase in that previous sentence is “sports broadcasting team” ... as opposed to seasoned television news journalists. That distinction heightens this story’s drama.

 

Events begin quietly, following coverage of events taking place during Day 10 of the Olympics. Newbie coordinating producer Geoffrey Mason (played by John Magaro) is granted the opportunity to helm the next day’s coverage, thanks to a recommendation by Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin), then vice-president of ABC-TV’s Olympic Operations. They both answer to Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), then president of ABC Sports (and later president of ABC News, from 1977 to ’98).

 

World-wide broadcast of the Games has been made possible, for the first time, thanks to new satellite technology.

 

The “thrill of victory and agony of defeat” sporting events aside, these summer Olympics are hugely important for political reasons: the first Games hosted by a German city since Adolf Hitler’s notorious 1936 Berlin travesty. The 1972 invitation was extended, in part, as a means of giving West Germany an opportunity to showcase its reborn democratic virtues.

 

This is tremendously important to the ABC team’s German translator, Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Benesch), who wants the world to see her “new and improved” country.

 

(Unlike the aforementioned individuals, and a few others, Gebhardt is a fictitious character based on a composite of several translators.)

 

Everything goes pear-shaped at 4:30 a.m. September 5, when gun shots are heard from within the Olympic Village. They’re followed quickly by reports on the local police radio frequency — which Gebhardt translates — that armed individuals have invaded the quarters of the Israeli Olympic team.

The Teachers' Lounge: An unsettling real-world parable

The Teachers' Lounge (2023) • View trailer

Four stars (out of five). Rated PG-13, for occasional profanity

Available via: Movie theaters

By Derrick Bang • Published in The Davis Enterprise, 2.9.24

As director Ilker Çatak’s thoughtful drama reaffirms, the road to hell continues to be paved with good intentions.

 

Carla (Leonie Benesch) knows that Oskar (Leo Stettnisch) is one of her brightest students,
but he's also withdrawn; she wonders how best to reach and engage him.

Çatak and co-scripter Johannes Duncker intend their story’s middle school setting to be a microcosm of the outside world, with respect to defensiveness, unintentionally bruised feelings, political maneuvering, failure to communicate and outright lying.

At first blush, though, things seem reasonably comfortable.

 

The location is deliberately vague and ambiguous; this could be any school, in any city. Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) nurtures a positive, respectful and productive atmosphere in her seventh-grade classroom. Her students like her, but she doesn’t get similar “warm cozies” from much of the staff; Carla is new to the school, and many of the veteran teachers have long-established cliques in their lounge, between classes.

 

As the story begins, teachers have become concerned about an ongoing series of thefts: money and property, stolen from students and adults. For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, suspicion falls on somebody in Carla’s class. A meeting is set up by senior teachers Thomas Liebenwerda (Michael Klammer) and Milosz Dudek (Rafael Stachowiak); Carla’s unease rises as they become increasingly insistent with seventh-grade class representatives Jenny (Antonia Küpper) and Lucas (Oscar Zickur).

 

Carla is dismayed when Thomas finally manipulates an answer from the children ... but, given her newcomer status, she doesn’t feel comfortable enough to voice her concerns.

 

The following day’s classroom activities are highlighted by one of Carla’s brightest students, Oskar (Leo Stettnisch), who solves a complex math problem involving limits.

 

(Pre-calculus, in seventh grade? American kids better watch out, or they’ll be eaten for lunch.)

 

The happy moment is interrupted by the arrival of the principal, Dr. Bettina Böhm (Anne-Kathrin Gummich), along with Liebenwerda and Dudek. What follows is inappropriately heavy-handed; the outcome reveals that one student, Ali Yilmaz (Can Rodenbostel), has an “unacceptably large” amount of money in his wallet.

 

That’s the worst sort of circumstantial “evidence,” and easily swatted aside by Ali’s parents, when they show up. They indignantly suggest that racism was behind their son’s being accused: an allegation that neither Böhm, Dudek or Liebenwerda can refute.

 

Böhm lamely justifies the “process” as being required by the school’s “zero-tolerance policy” (a contemptible blanket excuse that continues to be responsible for all manner of real-world harassment, unjust accusation and punishment).