X-Men: First Class Movie Review

Superhero movies used to mercifully few and far between. Now they’re ubiquitous along with their various sequels, prequels and spinoffs. I understand why Hollywood studios continue to return to the same source material. It’s guaranteed box office receipts without having to do the heavy lifting of crafting new character. And basically the stories are ready-made clotheslines that have basic garments that always hang on them and the hired writers just have to decide on the occasional undergarment or accent to place alongside the old and familiar. So it is with X-Men: First Class, the fifth iteration of the X-Men franchise, this time going back to the origins of Professor Charles Xavier, Magneto née Erik Lenscherr, and the special school established by Charles to nurture and guide other mutants to learn to control their abilities.

The Debt Movie Review: Questions on Jewish Justice and Vengeance

Vengeance is not Jewish. This is an idea that people throughout history have had difficulty reconciling with their own (at times) warped views of Jewish people. A sense of fairness and justice has primacy in Jewish intellectual and political history. From Shylock to Steven Spielberg’s Munich the question rages on: What is fair and just punishment for a crime and when do we cross the line in to pure revenge.

John Madden’s The Debt, based on the 2007 Israeli film Ha Hov (unseen by me), treads similar ground to Munich, although with far less cunning insight. And I’ve never viewed Steven Spielberg as a particularly insightful or challenging filmmaker. The Debt concerns a fictional Mossad mission to capture The Surgeon of Birkenau, a Nazi war criminal obviously modeled on Josef Mengele, who performed grotesque medical experiments on Jewish and Roma men, women, and children at Auschwitz.