Hollywood's Take on Iran

From the NYTimes:

Of all the filmmakers whose work is in the 63rd Cannes Film Festival...none have had the impact of the man who could not attend. Jafar Panahi is an Iranian director who was asked to join the competition jury, but is currently in a jail in his country for his political views. On Tuesday, a message from him in which he asked to contact his family and speak with a lawyer, was posted on the Web site of the French journal La Règle du Jeu (laregledujeu.org).

“My final wish is that my remains be returned to my family, so that they may bury me in the place they choose.”

The gravity of Mr. Panahi’s statement only underscored the real and often calamitous world events that have informed a number of the films here, with selections touching on the American war in Iraq, the global financial crisis, religious fundamentalism, armed revolutionary struggles and the usual man’s inhumanity against man, women and children.

At a Thursday afternoon press conference, an Iranian journalist asked the director Doug Liman — who’s here with “Fair Game,” about the former C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame and her husband, Joe Wilson — what he thought about the belief that the United States might soon lead an attack on Iran. The slightly surprised-looking Mr. Liman [his father, Arthur L. Liman, served as the chief counsel to the Senate committee that investigated the Iran-Contra affair, the arms-for-hostages scandal that blew up in the Reagan years] paused and then answered that, in contrast to the real Ms. Plame, he is not “a nuclear proliferation expert.” Next question.

Not Funny, Stiller

Found in a movie review of 'Tropic Thunder' by Manohla Dargis:-

What's most notable about the film's use of blackface is how much softer it is compared with the rather more vulgar and far less loving exploitation of what you might call Jewface. Hands down the most noxious character in "Tropic Thunder" is Les Grossman, the producer of the movie-within-a-movie, who's played by an almost unrecognizable Tom Cruise under a thick scum of makeup and latex. Heavily and heavy-handedly coded as Jewish, the character is murderous, repellent and fascinating, a grotesque from his swollen fingers to the heavy gold dollar sign nestled on his yeti-furred chest.

Sometimes, Jews are their own worst antisemites.

This Is What Hollywood Should Be About

Award-winning American actor Jon Voight has visited Israeli victims of Palestinian militant attacks during a trip to Israel.

In Jerusalem on Monday, Voight played with children whose fathers were killed in suicide bombings. He also chatted with a man who lost his legs in an attack.

Voight was visibly moved by the visit and said Israel shouldn't negotiate with Palestinian militants. He called the attackers barbarians who spat on Israeli peacemaking attempts.

Geulah Cohen - The Hollywood Version

The 1949 film resonates Geulah Cohen:-

Sword in the Desert is set in Palestine during World War II. Dana Andrews plays an American seaman engaged in smuggling European Jewish refugees into the Holy Land, despite the restrictions levied by the British occupation troops. Fifth-billed Jeff Chandler makes his movie debut as an Israeli rebel leader; his performance garnered so much fan mail that Chandler was given a seven-year contract at Universal.

Few of those letters came from Britain, where Sword in the Desert ran into distribution difficulties due to its blatant anti-British slant--especially as manifested in the underground radio broadcasts of leading lady Marta Toren. The principal complaint was that the British seemed to be the sole villains in the script, which virtually ignored the Arab resistance to the formation of Israel. Sword in the Desert represents a low-key warm-up to the blood-and-thunder excesses of Otto Preminger's 1960 Exodus.

and this:-

As a Jewish girl who stings the British with her broadcasts on the underground radio, Marta Toren makes perhaps the most forceful and believable individual in the group.

Torn told the Saturday Evening Post that the film-

"allowed me to play a woman of depth and purpose and that Hadassah presented her with a scroll for her contribution to the understanding of the problems of the 'settlers'."

Here she was:-


















And here is the real heroine, the secret radio broadcaster for the Lechi underground, Geulah Cohen:-









Her book:-

Woman of Violence 1943-1948, New York, Holt Rinehart Winston, 1966, Ed.: 1st, Pages: 275.

This is the passionate and moving story of Palestine's fight for independence by a member of the Stern Gang. This was originally written in Hebrew and now appeared for the first time in English. The author's memoirs explode with the ferocious intensity of her terrorist faith & her inflexible idealism. This is a portrait of a woman and the conditions that drove her underground to embrace a philosophy of violence and terror.

There's a new edition with David Ben-Gurion's letter of appreciation to her as well as British police documents and newspaper clippings entitled: Woman of Valor which I edited.

In the 1960s, she was a columnist for the Maariv and I found this:-

In an interview with Geula Cohen in the newspaper Maariv in 1963, Yitzhak Shalev, a writer with right-wing inclinations, complained that the "cease-fire lines have become our emotional borders, the boundary to our longings and desires." He lamented that no poem or tale had ventured further south in setting than Kibbutz Ramat Rahel (overlooking the old border south of Jerusalem) or further east than Mount Zion. His disapproval described the basic parameters: the parting from historical Eretz Israel was not just a political fact but had also been internalized as an existential experience by the Israel-bred generation of the State.

And, while we're at it, Geulah and I:-

Halle Berry Goes Cross-Cultural

Halle Berry's baby is named Nahla Ariela Aubry.

What, Arabic and Hebrew? (although the above site only mentions the Arabic element)

This site has it in full:

Nahla translates as honeybee in Arabic, while the Hebrew name Ariela means lioness of God.

However, there could be a link to two Walt Disney films - ‘The Lion King' and ‘The Little Mermaid'. In ‘The Lion King', the main lioness is called Nala, while Ariel is the lead character in ‘The Little Mermaid'.

After Shiloh and Suri, Hollywood is oh so Jewish.

Mamet Mauls

Casting himself as a straight shooter who isn’t deceived by political correctness, Mamet contends that Hollywood movies are profoundly, genetically Judaic: the product, via the minds of their creators, of certain distinctive racial traits that arose in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and transported themselves to Beverly Hills. Mamet makes this connection by associating these traits (two of which are “ignorance of or indifference to social norms” and “high intelligience”) with a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome that, he writes, “has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants” and “sounds to me like a job description for a movie director.”