Yeah, fair enough. Though FWIW, my problems with Gibson's films have little to do with him as a person, or what he's said outside of his filmmaking practices. I'm the judging the films as how I see them.

My problem isn't the subject matter, it's Gibson's treatment of it. I don't laugh out of heartlessness, I don't laugh at the fact that Jesus is getting tortured to death; I laugh at how self-serious it is, at the slow-motion, at the utter seriousness with which it's all depicted. The music, the performances, the sense of pornographic ritual to it all. It's bloated, it's rubbish.

But that's quite a unique, odd choice to make, no? To shoot your film in a language nobody no longer speaks. And does that make it more believable than our average thriller? Is it merely a case of authenticity? I'm not sure.

I was being facetious. I'm pretty sure Braveheart wasn't made to bore or tire people.

Firstly, I'd be interested in what you make of the films I referenced - watching them, and seeing how their depiction of violence may differ from Spielberg's. Spielberg uses violence as a plot device, a gimmick. Those I listed employ it more as an experience in itself, to be felt and endured. You might argue Spielberg does the same, but I'd totally disagree; it's an emotional manipulation as much as the crescendo of strings we hear when E.T.'s bicycle rises up into the air. I don't find any of his violence horrific.

Take that scene in Munich wherein someone has a knife forced into their skull. It's artificial, it's detached, it may as well be a clay model. And I'm talking abstract, here, which I know is very difficult to understand (even for him writing it), and argue against - for which I apologise. It's not horrific at all. All that music, the washed-out cinematography; it just strikes me as very obvious an attempt by Spielberg to seem very sophisticated and mature. There are moments in Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan that are extremely well-done when considered in isolation, but in the context of the woolly narrative, none of it seems alive. It's all mannerism; nothing screams style over substance more.

In contrast, I watched Waltz with Bashir at the cinema the other week and was floored by its daring and ambition, neither of which Spielberg has shown in years. In that film - an animated documentary - the director and protagonist visits several close friends with whom he served in the military years ago, with the intention of finding out what truly happened on a day he can only remember in fleeting memories. Some of the violence in that was not only necessarily brutal, and effective, but affective, too. I think it had something to do with the nature of the narrative - what we were seeing were reconstructions of someone's memory, a memory scarred into "forgetting" past events; and so what we are seeing, what is being revealed, is also a revelation for the protagonist. It's very immediate, very urgent.

Munich, on the other hand, seems tame and pedestrian by comparison.