Will An Israeli Win By Getting Beaten?

Leafing through Haaretz from a week ago, I spotted an interesting story of Israeli cinema (at the JPost, they have the wrong trailer up, for some reason, but no real story of the film).

According to Haaretz's report, an Israeli film won a Golden Bear award as the best short film in Berlin. Based on this, that makes the film an automatic candidate for next year's Oscars.

The festival site included this description of her film, "The Men Behind the Wall":

Woman seeks men. Man seeks women. Everything could be so simple if she weren’t in Israel and the guys nearby that the app suggests in search mode weren’t in the West Bank. Israeli filmmaker Ines Moldavsky makes herself the subject of her investigation...time and again the talk comes back to their needs, their lust, the possibility of sharing that lust. The filmmaker’s aesthetic strategy is that of a double exposure in her search – she experiences the personally unfamiliar physical space in Palestine as well. The conversations oscillate between virtual phone calls and concrete encounters. The artist stands provocatively at an intersection in downtown Ramallah, dressed in a red spaghetti strap dress, outstretched arms balancing a microphone boom in the air.                                                                                                                 

                                                                                                           Violence resonates – in the search for a violation of boundaries.

Haaretz was a bit more, er, explicit:

The idea for the short seems simple, but her highly experimental documentary actually touches on a multitude of complex themes.

“Every morning, I woke up in my Jerusalem apartment and thought about what it would be like to target Palestinian men that live behind the wall for dates on my dating app,” Moldavsky explains, referring to the West Bank separation barrier.

The 28-minute short shows the filmmaker soliciting Palestinian men in Gaza and the West Bank for BDSM sex via the dating apps Tinder and OkCupid, and then getting in touch with them on the phone and via Skype. It also documents their candid, explicit conversations about lust, hard-core sexual practices and the desire for casual dating.

This reminded me, in a backwards fashion, of a something written in 1977 about Zionism, which I blogged in 2007,  That since the word zayin in Hebrew is the male penis, Zionism is actually the Jews screwing the Arabs.

The filmmaker, Ines Moldavsky, 

said she

wanted to show young Palestinians simply as men; as gentle, sexy, handsome, nice guys who think about the mundane things in life like sex and dating.

She is a graduate of Bezalel. On its site the film's description reads:

זהו מסע פטישיסטי של אישה, ספק מרגלת, ספק אומנית, ספק נימפומנית בשטחים הכבושים. 

which translates as

This is a woman's trip of fetishism - perhaps a spy, perhaps an artist, perhaps a nymphomaniac - into the occupied territories.

As I do not know if actual sex was engaged in, what I do know is that this is at her Facebook page:

and she's been thinking about "occupation" since at least October 2012.

Going back to Hazelton, after reading her, Henry Makow understood her so:

According to Hazleton -- whose analysis overlaps significantly with that of Jay Gonen, the Israeli-born author of A Psychohistory of Zionism -- Zionism's predominant impulse is an acting out of son-mother incest. 

While I am willing to yield that once the area of psychology becomes a dominant element of analysis, there really are no borders.  What was an Arab woman doing exploding herself on a Jerusalem street?  Participating in an orgy? Is that Arab sexual activity?  When an Arab stabbed a Jew near the Ariel junction was he exhibiting homosexual aggressiveness?

These theories are not only outrageous, but, in my opinion, reveal more about the perversions of those who suggest them.

Again, I do not know from the film's descriptions whether or not Ines actually did get physical, whether her sex was violent against her or against the males or whether she was just a talker, and that is none of my business.

What I do think is that she should keep any perverse thoughts about the conflict Arabs have with Israel to herself and what she does with the award is for her private pleasure.

But next year's Oscars will be Israel-centered again.

___________

Cross-post version here. ^

What Is That Tallit Doing There?

That tallit:

From the trailer for the new film Mascots by Christopher Guest.

I think that character is a worm?

^

In Which Natalie Portman Movie is the Wailing Wall Mentioned?

Garden State.



Source.

^

Hollywood Revenge?

First, Noah is coming to our screens.

Then, Exodus is scheduled.

And there are three more, at least:

“Son of God,” 20th Century Fox, February

“Heaven is for Real,” Sony Pictures, April

“Mary, Mother of Christ,” Lionsgate Films, December




The Bible trumps the Quran?

Poor Saeb Erekat and his Natufian Nonsense.

^

Lechi in a New Comic Israeli Film

The name of the film is "Hunting Elephants".  And it opened the Jerusalem Film Festival yesterday.

The synopsis has a young kid with no social skills stuck in an old-age home with his grandfather who he never met and with two of his friends. 

The grandfather was in Lechi, a bank robber, tough who doesn't believe in tears, one friend from the underground days who is full of charged energy, sexuall too, but which will never come to fruition anymore and an English gentleman who was a Shakesperean actor who is penniless but owes 232,000 Euros.

 credit

They decide together to rob a bank so as to take revenge of the establishment that hasn't paid the work insurance to the kid for his father's death at the bank where he worked, as well as fulfilling one last dream wish.

Directed by Reshef Levi [his father, Eliyahu, was in Lechi and was picked up during the Saison and exiled to Eritrea] with Sasson Gabay, Patrick Stewart (who replaced John Cleese), Moni Monshonov, Gil Blank, Moshe Ivgi, Tikki Dayan, Zvika Hadar, Yael Abecassis and others.

The trailer:

^

When Filmed Fiction Forgets Fact

The other Israeli entry at the London Film Gestival - Zaytoun:-

From award-winning Israeli director Eran Riklis, Zaytoun is the story of Yoni and Fahed, two exiles from a divided land.

    Director Eran Riklis
    Producer Gareth Unwin, Frederick Ritzenberg
    Screenwriter Nader Rizq
    With Stephen Dorff, Abdallah El Akal, Ali Suliman
    UK-Israel 2012
    107 mins
    Sales Pathé International

Yoni, an Israeli pilot, crash-lands in war-torn Beirut in the run-up to Israel’s ill-fated invasion of the country in 1982. He is captured by a group of fighters from the Palestine Liberation Organisation, one of whom is Fahed, a young orphan and refugee, who longs to return to his family’s home in Northern Israel. Yoni and Fahed soon find themselves on the run from rival militias as their unlikeliest of friendships begins to take root in the most extreme of circumstances. Israeli director Eran Riklis (The Syrian Bride; The Lemon Tree) avoids sentimental clichés thanks to a wonderful performance from Abdallah El Akal as the wise-beyond-his-years Fahed and some sweeping cinematography that will remind viewers of the irony – and tragedy – that such a beautiful land can be the theatre of such horrific conflict.

You will recall the real story:

Ron Arad was born on May 5, 1958 in Israel...Arad, an air-force navigator in an F-4 Phantom jet...On October 6, 1986 Arad was captured by members of the Amal Shi’ite militia after bailing out of his crippled warplane over the Lebanese city of Sidon.

About a year after his capture, Israel received photographs and letters from Arad’s captors, and Arad’s case quickly attracted the attention of the international community...When negotiations for Arad’s release collapsed in 1988, Arad was “sold” by Amal security chief Mustafa Dirani to Iranian backed forces in Lebanon. Since that time there has been a great deal of contradictory information regarding his fate and whereabouts. Israeli intelligence sources have maintained that Arad is being held in Iran or Lebanon by Iranian backed forces. The Iranians have never publicly admitted to holding Arad or to having any information regarding his condition or location. Over the years many foreign governments have pressured Iran on the matter. Particularly the German government has continually attempted to utilize its close relationship with Iran to broker deals for Arad’s release, but without success to date. Arad’s case continues to haunt the Israeli public.

Oh, the other entry:

To Fill the Void:

Set in an Orthodox Hassidic community in Tel Aviv, this riveting debut feature tells the story of eighteen-year-old Shira, the youngest daughter of a deeply religious family who is about to be married off in a promising match to a young man she does not know. When an unexpected death occurs, grief engulfs the family and Shira’s impending liaison is postponed. Caught between an overwhelming sense of familial responsibility and the unfamiliar sensation of romantic yearning, Shira faces a choice that will ultimately define her future. Director Rama Burshtein draws on her own knowledge of Orthodox practice and its rituals, imbuing this singular film with great authenticity especially in her attention to gender division within the community and the relationships between the female protagonists. The visual design oscillates between intimate and suffocating, with cinematographer Asaf Sudry (Beaufort) keeping the camera close to the actors and tightly framed, while art director Ori Aminov adopts a studied, muted palette. Hadas Yaron’s mesmerising performance gives full expression to Shira’s struggle between moral, ethical and emotional truth, her suspended state of uncertainty providing the film with its dramatic tension and continuing to reverberate in the indelible final image.

And she is not an actress. 

She's the director of the film.

 And:-

Venice film critics wowed by ultra-Orthodox Jewish director's debut

'Fill the Void,' a film by Rama Burshtein, gets rave reports in Variety magazine, Hollywood Reporter and Screen Daily, while Indiewire website is less impressed.

Rebbe Nahman Conquers...Cannes

Rebbe Nahman conquers...Cannes.  With God’s Neighbors.

Here's the trailer for it:-

Another international achievement for Israeli cinema:

God's Neighbors, a film by Meni Yaesh has won the Gaul's Society of Authors, Directors and Composers award in the prestigious Cannes Film Festival.  The film is also nominated in the Caméra d'Or category for best first feature film.
 
God's Neighbors is an Israeli-French co-production by Mark Rosenbaum and Transfax Film Productions and was one of seven films competing in the category.

The movie features a group of young Hasidim in the city of Bat Yam who force their beliefs on the neighborhood's residents. When the group's leader falls in love with a woman from the neighborhood he is forced into a moral and existential conundrum.

From Hollywood Reporter review:

What looks at the outset to be a straightforward vigilante movie about a trio of hot-headed religious watchdogs in Israel turns into a worthy study of personal maturation and growth in God’s Neighbors...the film’s raw power and controversial content make it a good festival item and will ignite strong reactions among Jewish and Israel-minded audiences.

A trio of twentyish skull-capped guys, Avi, Kobi and Yaniv, have taken it upon themselves to police their Bat Yam neighborhood for transgressions against the letter of religious laws. Handy with baseball bats and their fists, they’re particularly hot to go after Arabs who have the effrontery to play loud music and otherwise disrupt the Sabbath, but they’re also rough on more relaxed Jews who keep their stores open too late on Friday nights, don’t dress right and so on (the film’s Hebrew title can best be translated as The Supervisors or The Monitors).
While they pursue Torah studies seriously with a notably inspiring and charismatic rabbi, the boys aren’t exactly exemplars of conservative behavior...The arrival of an attractive, independent-minded woman, Miri, into Avi’s life causes the expected, and resented, disruption in the young men’s dynamic. Ari wrestles with his desires in predictable ways, but where God’s Neighbors feels fresh is in he portrayal of his intense religious struggle...The result causes a moving and entirely plausible growth of character, one spurred—of course, since this is in part an action movie—by a final round of bloody violence. But the final stretch gives the drama a heft and impressive perspective that are not necessarily evident up to that point.

...a scrappy, hard-hitting debut.

From Variety:

As forceful as a kick in the jaw, "God's Neighbors" reps a sharp rebuke of bigotry and

male aggression perpetrated under the banner of religious orthodoxy. Israeli writer-helmer Meni Yaesh borrows savvily from genre conventions to portray a young man's attempts to break away from a gang of religious extremists who terrorize their suburban neighborhood...

As the gang's thuggery escalates, Yaesh vividly captures the men's intoxication with self-righteous brute power ("There's a higher force, and there's an earthly force," Kobi smugly remarks) through raw, dynamic lensing and visceral violence. But the filmmaker also weaves in scenes to remind that they're regular dudes as well, whether dancing joyously to their own remixed songs, playing backgammon or praising the teachings of their rabbi (Gili Shushan).

Their blatant sexism, racial intolerance and eagerness to pick fights are subtly attributed to sexual frustration. This becomes the catalyst for a fallout when Avner successfully courts Miri (Rotem Ziesman-Cohen), the feisty new neighbor whom they initially try to intimidate for wearing skimpy clothes.

...the film is fundamentally about a crisis of faith, its most powerful scene is an introspective one, in which Avner delivers a cri de coeur to God at the beach, culminating in a moving, symbolic gesture.

The pic opens with a quotation from Hasidic spiritual leader Reb Nachman of Breslov: "To the true believer, faith is observation." It also reflects the helmer's artistic mantra as he consistently regards his characters with an observer's neutrality, using extreme closeups to linger searchingly on his subjects' rage and arrogance, as well as their self-doubt and spiritual longing. The entire cast, particularly Assaf, turn in intense perfs, though Friedman and Golan convey little complexity beyond hot-headedness. Ziesman-Cohen exerts a sensual presence amid all the testosterone, and subtly reveals a tender side beneath her no-nonsense exterior.

^

Yiddish Goes Silverscreen

Seems we have a unique cinema event from Eve Annenberg.

She stumbled

onto Chulent, a weekly gathering of young, alienated Orthodox and formerly Orthodox Jews in Manhattan [i blogger here about it; and about Gitty]. She had no idea that she was about to embark on one of the most improbable movies of her career.

Four years later she is sending DVDs of her feature-length motion picture “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” to film festivals, agents and famous literary figures...In Annenberg’s retelling of Romeo and Juliet, the character of Friar Laurence is transformed into Rabbi Laurence. Instead of coming upon what he assumes is a deceased Juliet in a tomb, Romeo lays eyes on her in a tahara shtibl.

It seems incongruous, at times, to hear Yiddish coming out of actors’ mouths as we see Shakespearean English in the subtitles on the screen. About 65% of the movie is in Yiddish.

The film not only includes the traditional Shakespearean story line — altered so that Hasidic sects resembling Satmar and Lubavitch substitute for the warring Montague and Capulet clans — but a story within a story: A substantial portion of the plot mirrors the real-life misadventures of its two stars, young Hasidim who left their communities and ended up on the wrong side of the law before they ended up in front of the camera. Neither had ever watched a movie before, let alone acted in one, before they left the Satmar orbit.

The trailer:

Oh, and San Franciscon not only doesn't like brit milah but:

There has been plenty of drama for real in Annenberg’s life during the last year. She not only finished “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish” but underwent cancer surgery and buried her mother. The night her mother died, Weiss and Zafir showed up, the director recalled. “They prayed and prayed and prayed,” she said. “And it helped me a lot.”

The film was finished just days before its first public screening, in front of a sellout crowd at the Berlin Jewish Film Festival on May 2. Annenberg, Weiss and Zafir were on hand when the movie won the festival’s Audience Favorite award.

The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival rejected “Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish,” but the film was solicited for upcoming Jewish film festivals in England, Australia and Boston.

Shooting in Palestine???

You'd presume a line like this

Shooting on "The Promised Land" is slated to begin this fall on location in Palestine.

would raise concern.

It really did appear -

A.  Where is this 'Palestine'?

B.  Isn't there enough shooting in the Promised Land?

But this is about that Michael Winterbottom film that, as far as I have been reliably informed, has not even gone into any production phases due to financial issues.

It has been criticised and even lambasted.

If creating something called (as above) "Palestine", then there really is concern for historical accuracy.  Even for the cinema.

^

Jabotinsky's Samson - Coming to Your Screen Soon

Well, a good film once, hopefully a better film again.

The news, Sergei Bedrov to to direct a film adaptation of Jabotinsky's Samson:

The Book of Judges (13-16) tells us of the heroic life of Samson, one of the most famous characters of the Old Testament. He was a wise judge, a fierce fighter and a brave defender of his people.

Vladimir Ze’ev Zabotinsky in 1927 wrote a brilliant book titled «Samson the Nazarite». In his unique interpretation of the biblical story, he empowers Samson with supernatural strength, yet at the same time he never loses sight of Samson the man. This story rages with the scope and drama of a major cinematic event.

Samson overflows with life. The Philistines are his tribe’s enemies, but they are also his closest friends. Only with them can he be himself, drinking and laughing and entertaining them with his jokes. When his people accuse him of not acting like a judge, Samson answers them: «In my land I live and act as a judge. When I am away from you, I follow my dreams. Do not judge my dreams!» But his dream ends when he falls in love and marries the Philistine beauty Semadar. When his closest friends kill his wife and her family, Samson vows revenge. He burns their fields and towns, killing hundreds, and then flees. The Philistines send their army to capture him. To save his people from war, Samson surrenders. He is rescued by friends, but then betrayed by a woman who loves him. The Philistines blind him, robbing him of his power. The years pass. Blind Samson knows that the Philistines plan to invade his homeland and destroy his people. The day of the great festival to the gods arrives, and Samson takes a horrible revenge.

Samson was the first Superhero in history. His story comes to us from the ancient past, from the land of the Dead Sea. Yet a Superhero never dies. He will live again in this movie.

Genre: Action, epic, drama.
Screenplay: Sergei Bodrov, Carolyn Cavallero
Based on a novel by Ze’ev Zabotinsky
Director: Sergei Bodrov (MONGOL, NOMAD)
Language: English
Casting director: Susie Figgis (PRINCE OF PERSIA, HARRY POTTER)
Production designer: Wolf Kroeger (PRINCE OF PERSIA)
Visual concept: Khamid Savkuev
Locations: Israel, Morocco
Production Co: Bodrov Film Production, Russia, Tengri Production, USA, Kinofabrika, Germany.

Here's Sergei in Jaffa at the event:



And here's Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the author's grandson and great-granddaughter:




Do you understand Russian?

____________

UPDATE:

The promotional trailer:

Holy Cow! Holy Rollers: Faith versus Blind Faith

Just came across this:-

In the upcoming film “Holy Rollers,” rapper Q-Tip (Kamaal Ibn John Fareed, born Jonathan Davis) of the critically acclaimed group A Tribe Called Quest, will be starring as an Ethiopian drug dealer known as Ephraim in the movie.

Set in 1999, “Holy Rollers” follows the journey of a young Hasidic Jew, Sam Gold, from an Orthodox Brooklyn community who innocently gets lured into the world of ecstasy drug trafficking by a friend, Barak Zimmerman, with ties to Jackie Solomon, an Israeli drug dealer. Story is inspired by actual events in the 1990’s when Hasidim were recruited as mules to smuggle drugs into the United States. ~ IMDB

The movie “Holy Rollers” was directed by Kevin Tyler Asch and written by Antonio Macia.

How to make a movie.

Not to be confused with this film:

Holy Rollers

Year: 2000
Production Company: Flaming Star Films Pty Ltd
Producer: Sharyn Prentice more credits
Director: Rosie Jones more credits
Writer: Paul M. Davies & Rosie Jones
International Sales: Screen Australia
Status: Completed
Duration: 52 mins
Cast: Suzi Rosedale

Religious faith, the tourist dollar and Middle Eastern politics intersect in Holy Rollers, as tour guide Suzi Rosedale leads busloads of Christian pilgrims on their trip-of-a-lifetime around the Holy Land. These are people searching for a spiritual transformation, but as they follow 'in the footsteps of Jesus' from his birthplace in Bethlehem to the site of his crucifixion, it's impossible to ignore the modern reality of life in this fractured land.

More:

Monday afternoon at Marquee nightclub isn't exactly the setting you'd expect to see two Hasidic Jews, clad in kippahs and tzitzit (tassels), discussing how they'll import thousands of pills of Ecstasy to New York City with the help of a Russian drug kingpin.

It's a scene being filmed for "Holy Rollers," a movie that tells the tale of two Hasidic Jews from Brooklyn who get ensnared in, and eventually enraptured with, a global Ecstasy smuggling ring in the late 1990s.

Based on true events, the film is the brainchild of actor and nightlife figure Danny A. Abeckaser..."It was about Interpol's fight on drugs, and this story about the Hasidic Jews smuggling drugs jumped out at me," he says. "I've always wanted to make a movie my whole life, and this seemed perfect."

Realizing that "drug movies are largely boring," Abeckaser set out five years ago to make a character-driven film, through the eyes of a young Hasid smuggler.

Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Bartha - cast in the respective main roles of Sam Gold and Yosef Zimmerman - move about Marquee, Abeckaser eyes the set with pride.

"The story we ended up with is incredible because it's told through Sam's eyes. His struggles are against his beliefs and his values, religiously," says Abeckaser. "He's so virgin because the sect is so closed off in real life. They don't even look at women, they have arranged marriages; there's never even dates, so when Sam has a love interest in the film, it's out of the norm for him."

..."The mysterious world that is the Hasidic community," says Bartha, "has a lot of fascinating characters." Still, though many in the cast and crew are Jewish, elements of Hasidic culture were unfamiliar to the actors. "Being the Jew I am, it was important to me that people don't think this is a movie that projects Jews in a bad way," Abeckaser explains.

..."I had my own personal connections to this story, being a reformed Jew from Great Neck, N.Y.," says director Kevin Asch. [my wife is from Gt. Neck] "This world was so different to me, but the film is about faith versus blind faith. If you're born into something you blindly believe in, are you allowed to question it? It's a great debate."

Writer Antonio Macia wanted to pen a script about "how people slowly compromise their faith and upbringings...Whatever religion you are, whatever home, the tenets are the same," Macia, a converted Mormon, says. "It's at the heart of the story, in the relationships, that really make every believer different."

...The real Hasidic drug smugglers took advantage of age-old diamond-smuggling methods in the late '90s.

A few of the infamous:

Queens-based Internet programmer Yaish Malka, living with his pregnant wife and child, was dealing in hundreds of thousands of pills in 2000 when he was arrested by the NYPD on a February night as he fed his infant.

Father-and-son team Gabriel and Amos Elimelech manned one of the largest smuggling rings ever exposed, according to police. With his father's encouragement, Amos brought in 100,000 pills to Israel in a false-bottomed suitcase, before taking them to NYC for distribution. In April 1999, Amos' second trip ended in arrest, and he now rots in an Israeli jail. Gabriel was later busted in NYC and extradited to Israel for his own sentence.

Shimon Levita and Simcha Roth were two Hasidic 18-year-olds instrumental in an international plot, which brought more than a half million pills into JFK Airport. The young criminals were responsible for recruiting other Hasids to fly to Paris to pick up 80,000-plus pills from Amsterdam. The duo was brought to justice in 2000.

A.O. Scott, Jewish, On Jewish Identity, Jewish Cinema and Inbetween

Following up on a previous post of mine, I spot that A. O. Scott, the NYTimes film reviewer, has taken on the Coen Brothers Jewish History, Popcorn Included.

He deals with that film as well as with another:

...In the modern world, after all, to broach the idea of Jewish identity is to invoke not one crisis but many. Religion or ethnicity? Theology or ethics? Culture or ideology? Brooklyn or Tel Aviv?...More than 60 years after the Nazi genocide and the founding of the state of Israel, more than 40 years after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and a more than a century into the Ashkenazi passage through the North American melting pot, the old puzzles persist, though in some perplexing new forms. In novels, on television and especially, lately, on movie screens, fresh expositions of ancient dilemmas and anxieties quarrel and contend. Nothing is settled...

...a different, if related, set of associations animates “A Serious Man,” the latest movie by Joel and Ethan Coen. That film, which opened on the Friday after Yom Kippur (just in time for the Sukkot box office rush), travels back to suburban Minnesota in 1967 (after a prologue set in a Polish shtetl centuries before) to re-examine themes first laid out in that long, grim Jewish joke known as the Book of Job. The Coens’ protagonist, though not their title character, is Larry Gopnik, a devoted family man, a quiet neighbor and a hard-working professor whose life is turned upside down by a host of torments...

...Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds,”...presented one of the most audacious examples of counterfactual history ever committed to film. Not only did Mr. Tarantino posit a band of ultraviolent Hebrew avengers smashing the skulls and slicing off the scalps of German soldiers; he also imagined an act of terroristic mass murder —a fire in a crowded theater — that did not so much avenge the Holocaust as undo it.

Was this good for the Jews? Mr. Tarantino’s philo-Semitism, though unorthodox, also proved surprisingly less controversial than it might have even a few years ago. But now even the Holocaust has become a safe subject for pure entertainment. And there was something seductive in the fantasy figures he put up on screen in lavishly saturated color. The basterds themselves, to be sure, but even more so Shosanna, their unwitting co-conspirator, with her honey-blond hair, her African lover and her fangirl appreciation of cinema. In an Allen movie or a Roth novel, such a woman would have the added, transgressive attraction of being an archetypal shiksa, but in Mr. Tarantino’s looking-glass world of wish fulfillment, she was a Nice Jewish Girl.

In the real world of ethical reasoning, a crime like the Shoah refutes the logic of vengeance, which is the only story Mr. Tarantino knows how to tell. He derives it from westerns and martial arts films, among other sources, but the honor-based personal vendettas that propel those narratives become preposterous in the face of mass killing. Which may be why the machinery of death that has become a fixture (and something of a fetish) in so many Holocaust films has no place in the world of “Inglourious Basterds,” where the murder is retail, specific and individual.

Pals. Moving to the States

So far, only a film:

A new film, "Amreeka," looks at the plight of two Palestenians from the West Bank, a single mother and her 16-year-old son, who immigrate to the United States.

Muna, a divorced woman, who along with her son Fadi has made the long trek from the West Bank to Illinois. They are staying with her sister, who arrived to the United States 15 years earlier and her family who have their fair share of conflicts...

...Overall it's interesting, but the movie really can't decide what it wants to be. Is it a hard-hitting look at the Palestinian immigrant experience in America or a gentler take on that subject?

That Film Boycott in Toronto

You did know

that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages

right?


No?

You mean you think that Tel Aviv was founded as Ahuzat Bayit in 1909 on land purchased and built up on sand dunes?

Even "themiddle" had to take an extreme stand, and present the real history:

The vast majority of Tel Aviv is built on what was empty land, purchased with Jewish money, built as part of a Jewish city and in large part driven to live there by Palestinian violence against Jews over the course of many years...Jaffa’s population included about 20% Jews...It grew rapidly as a center for the Jews in Mandatory Palestine over land that was virtually entirely unbuilt and uninhabited. Before 1948, when the city grew to enclose an Arab village, it was done through legal instruments and overseen by the Mandatory authorities.

There are two other critical pieces of information that tell us a great deal about Tel Aviv and its growth. In 1921, it became a separate municipality from Jaffa. The reason? The 1920 and 1921 attacks initiated by Arabs in key areas of Mandatory Palestine against the small Jewish minority brought about a need to separate populations and establish defensive capabilities for the Jews who were still a small minority there. Jaffa was no different. In 1936, Tel Aviv opened its own port, again because of major complications with the Jaffa port and general Arab violence that became prevalent throughout Mandatory Palestine between 1936 to 1939. The result, of course, was that Jaffa’s economy suffered.

...By the time, 1948 rolled around, Tel Aviv had grown to 230,000 almost entirely Jewish residents while Jaffa next door was almost entirely Arab...The UN’s recommendation to partition Palestine in 1947, would have left Jaffa in Arab hands while Tel Aviv was a central part of the Jewish areas...the Arabs rejected UNGA 181, the Partition Plan.

He left out there the murder on May 1, 1921 of one of Israel's cultural literary icons, Yosef Chaim Brener.

----------------

UPDATE


A comment left at a Toronto paper:

Why don't they condemn Islam, for building the Mosque on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem on the ruins of an ancient Jewish Temple?

Open and Shut in Meah She'arim

The new Israeli pro-homosexuality film based in...Meah She'arim:

The NYTimes Reviews "Inglourious Besterds"

I've been following this film's evolution at this blog (I, II, and last August) and here it is in the NYTimes:

Tarantino Avengers in Nazi Movieland

From the moment the charming, smiling, laughing Nazi in “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino’s latest cinematic happening, sweeps onto the screen, he owns this film even more than its maker...

...the American avenger, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), is a nod to the Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, a sandpaper-voiced 1950s Everyman who often seemed most at ease wearing Army fatigues, as he does in Anthony Mann’s 1957 masterpiece “Men in War.” (Mr. Ray’s widow, Johanna Ray, served as one of the casting directors for “Inglourious Basterds.”)

Raine leads a pack of Jewish avengers, the inglourious basterds of the misspelled title, who occupy one part of the sprawling narrative and whose numbers include a bat-wielding American nicknamed the Bear Jew (the director Eli Roth, dreadful). Also elbowing for attention is a young French Jew, Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), who’s running a cinema in Paris under a pseudonym, and a German Army hero, Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), who dangerously woos her, unaware of her true identity. There’s the British film critic turned spy, Lt. Archie Hicox (a very good Michael Fassbender), and the German movie star turned spy, Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger). Mostly, though, there is Landa, whose unctuous charm, beautifully modulated by Mr. Waltz, gives this unwieldy, dragging movie a much-needed periodic jolt.

Mr. Tarantino likes to take his sweet time — he can be a master of the slow windup — but rarely has one of his movies felt as interminable as this one and its 2 hours 32 minutes...

As usual Mr. Tarantino gives you a lot to chew on, though there’s plenty to gag on as well...Set against a sweeping stretch of green French countryside in 1941, it opens with a dairy farmer, Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet), chopping wood. As his ax looms ominously in the foreground of the shot, he readies himself for some unwelcome German visitors. Colonel Landa, nicknamed the Jew Hunter, has come looking for hidden prey, a task for which he is, as he explains in a long verbal jag, eminently suitable. Because Germans are like hawks, Landa explains, most cannot think like Jews, who are more like rats — a characterization that, of course, was a privileged metaphor and ideological instrument in the Nazi’s campaign against European Jewry.

The invocation of Jews as rats is ghastly — both times I’ve seen the movie I could almost hear the audience holding its collective breath — but Landa keeps smiling and talking and charming, and Mr. Waltz’s performance is so very good, so persuasive, seductive and, crucially, so distracting that you can readily move past the moment if you choose. Mr. Tarantino makes it easy to do just that by capping this exegesis with an abrupt sight gag: after asking the farmer if he can smoke, Landa pulls out a pipe so comically large it immediately undercuts his threat, transforming him from a ferocious Jew hunter into a silly man whose flamboyant pipe suggests he suffers from some masculinity issues.

The joke fades quickly, as they do in this film, because Landa has already guessed there are Jews hiding where you might expect to find rats, under the floorboards. Mr. Tarantino reveals them in their hiding place, the camera slipping through the floor to show the terrified family members prostrate, their hands over their mouths and eyes wide in fear. It’s a shocking moment partly because this image resonates with horror, but it’s also shocking because it comes cushioned with laughs. Yet the shock dissipates because the Jews are irrelevant here. What matters is how he builds the tension with unnerving quiet and a camera that circles Landa and the farmer like an ever-tightening rope. What matters, to Mr. Tarantino, is the filmmaking.

But too often in “Inglourious Basterds” the filmmaking falls short...The film’s most egregious failure — its giddy, at times gleeful embrace and narrative elevation of the seductive Nazi villain — can largely be explained as a problem of form...This isn’t to say that the film’s representation of National Socialism, its repellent invocation of the Holocaust crematoriums in the final blowout and calculated use of the Jews-as-rat metaphor are not vulgar in the extreme. Mr. Tarantino likes to push hard against accepted norms, as his chortling exploitation of spectacular violence and insistent use of a noxious epithet for blacks has shown in the past. But complaining about tastelessness in a Quentin Tarantino movie is about as pointless as carping about its hyperbolic violence: these are as much a constituent part of his work as the reams of dialogue. This is, after all, a man who has an Oscar for a movie with a monologue about a watch stashed in a rectum.

...Mr. Tarantino is really only serious about his own films, not history. In that sense “Inglourious Basterds,” which takes its title if not its misspellings from an Italian flick in “The Dirty Dozen” vein, is simply another testament to his movie love. The problem is that by making the star attraction of his latest film a most delightful Nazi, one whose smooth talk is as lovingly presented as his murderous violence, Mr. Tarantino has polluted that love.

This Is Serious?

A Serious Man.

The Coen Brothers new film

The film is set in St. Louis Park, Minnesota in the year 1967, and is intended in some ways to reflect the childhood of the Coen brothers...The protagonist is Larry Gopnik, a Jewish academic living in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood in a Minneapolis suburb. The story follows Gopnik's spiritual and existential struggle as his wife Judith contemplates leaving him for his colleague Sy Ableman. Adding to his suffering is his ne'er-do-well brother, Arthur, who lacks the resources and the ability to care for himself and consequently lives on Larry's couch. Larry begins to question the value of his life as he deals with these and other trials, including his son, Danny, who steals money from his wallet to buy marijuana; his daughter, Sarah, who steals to finance a planned nose job; a student who alternately attempts to bribe him for a passing grade and threatens to sue him for defamation (made all the worse because Larry is up for tenure); and a neighbor lady who distracts him by sunbathing in the nude. Larry seeks advice from three different rabbis in an attempt to solve his problems and to become an austere and devoted man.

Another similar synopsis.

The released trailer:



Here:

What’s most striking about the preview for the Coen brothers’ new film, A Serious Man, aside from the rhythmic head-smashing that meters out a heightened sense of tension and absurdity, is the absence of known faces. Immediately that immerses the viewer in the story. There is nothing of this world distracting the viewer from the world of the movie. And it shows the Coens are confident enough in their story to let it stand on its own, rather than propped on the legs of celebrity. The second most striking thing is that we learn practically nothing about the plot.

As Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeff Wells points out, the trailer is a work of art in itself. It deviates from the hackneyed three-act preview structure that tends to give away too much. Here, using repeated footage, bizarre juxtapositions, and that constant, painful sound of a cranium being bludgeoned, master trailer editor Mark Woollen manages to convey the Coens’ eye for the bizarre without revealing anything more than the fact that there is a character, he is Jewish, and he has serious problems.

Israel's Cinema Industry Wages War

Israel fought a war in Lebanon between 1982 until the embarrassing fleeing in 2000.

Last year, in 2008,

"Beaufort," an Israeli film describing events at an army post in the run-up to Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000, has been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

This year, 2009,

"Waltz with Bashir" will be one of the five finalists competing for the Best Foreign Language Film award at the Oscars on February 22, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced yesterday.

And this coming year, 2010, what is the theme of the Israeli film to be submitted to the Oscar Committee?

You guessed it: Lebanon.

"Lebanon".is a film whose story about a tank that gets stuck in June 1982 in a village while a Syrian commando force closes in. Shmulik Maoz is the director.

Three years in a row, the cultural elite of Israel's cinema industry seems to be fixated on smacking Israel around on one of the most prestigious film stages of the world: Hollywood.

Two years in a row, Israel lost.

Does anyone think a third film on the subject of Lebanon will be nominated - forget about winning?

Why are they doing this?

Premiere May 20 - “Inglourious Basterds”

I blogged earlier and now, it's coming:

“THIS ain’t your daddy’s World War II movie,” Quentin Tarantino said with a grin, standing on a street corner here that had been scrubbed of 21st-century signposts to become the set of “Inglourious Basterds,” his new film about a band of Jewish-American soldiers on a scalp-hunting revenge quest against the Nazis...Mr. Tarantino calls “Inglourious Basterds” his “bunch of guys on a mission movie.” Judging by the script, it should have the crackling dialogue, irreverent humor and stylized violence that are hallmarks of his work.

“You’ve got to make a movie about something, and I’m a film guy, so I think in terms of genres,” he said. “So you get a good idea, and it just moves forward and then usually by the time you’re finished, it doesn’t resemble anything of what might have been the inspiration. It’s simply the spark that starts the fire...I just wanted to tell my story and have the same freedom I would have telling any story. I want the act of writing to be so fulfilling that I have to question do I want to even make the movie.”

...Not that he’ll change the title. “Basterds should be spelled with an e,” he said. “It sounds like it has an e.” He shouted, “Basterds! Basterds!” in what sounded like a Boston accent: more “BAS-tids” than “BAS-terds.” (As for the spelling of “Inglourious,” Mr. Tarantino said: “I can’t tell you stuff like that. It’s a movie thing.”)

...The screenplay is loaded with movie references and jokes, and intrigues involving actors and film premieres. Hitler’s minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, is portrayed as a typical studio chief. (“People write about the horrible anti-Semitic films,” Mr. Tarantino said, “but most of the 800 movies he made were comedies and musicals.”) And it is safe to say, without spoiling the history-bending penultimate scene, that cinema saves the world.

...The Basterds — the film’s Jewish soldiers, given their nickname by the Nazis — hadn’t made the trip to Paris, but their presence could be felt in the grown-out “basterd haircut” (short on the sides and in back, long on top) that Mr. Tarantino was sporting. “The Basterds don’t have the luxury of being soldiers,” he said. “They have the duty to be warriors, because they’re fighting an enemy that’s trying to wipe them off the face of the earth.”

Mr. Tarantino, who was born in Tennessee, said his childhood revenge fantasies centered more on the Ku Klux Klan. “But it’s all the same,” he said. “Once the Basterds get through with Europe, they could go to the South and do it to the Kluxers in the ’50s. That’s another story you could tell.”

Not to mention a shelved subplot about African-American soldiers stuck behind enemy lines. “I have a half-written prequel ready to go if this movie’s a smash,” he said.

Remember The Film "Inglourious Basterds"?

Do you recall the new Tarantino film? I blogged about it here, last August. W




Well, Inglourious Basterds is set to premiere (as promised) at the Cannes Film Festival (France) in May. The film will be in competition as well.

The trailer:



To remind you:

...The film centers on an all-Jewish American commando unit called “the Basterds” which is causing mayhem behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France. The unit is led by one Lieutentant Aldo Raine, played by none other than the yellow press’ favorite Hollywood beau Brad Pitt. He leads them to scalp Nazis and wreak havoc upon Hitler’s occupying force, while sporting a moustache that some claim will bring that type of facial hair back into the mainstream. The most surprising aspect of the script though is that the actual main character seems to be not Raine, but a young Jewish-French girl hiding in a Paris Cinematheque. Shosanna [Dreyfus], as Tarantino has baptised his latest heroine, is seeking revenge for the murder of her family at the hands of an evil SS Colonel, Hans Landa. While Nazi party bigshots are planning the premiere of a propaganda film at the Cinemateque, The Basterds’ and Shosanna’s paths will inevitably cross, in what sounds very much like a clever and violent plot to strike against the occupiers...

Let's make it a bit clearer:

The Basterds

The Basterds are a hand-picked bunch of tough guys who chase down Nazis and scalp them, a practice that has given their leader, Raine, his nickname. "The idea is that they're doing an Apache resistance against the Nazis," says Tarantino. "It's taking the idea that the Jews are acting like the Apaches in a no-win situation. The idea is to terrify the Nazis, get inside their minds."

Aldo 'The Apache' Raine is played by Brad Pitt



Aldo Raine is an American hillbilly who has recruited a crack team of Nazi killers called The Basterds, and who joins forces with the British to carry out Operation Kino.

Shosanna Dreyfus is played by Melanie Laurent



Shosanna is a Jewish girl who escapes the SS and moves to Paris, where she assumes a new French identity and becomes the manageress of a small cinema.

Frederick Zoller is played by Daniel Brühl

Zoller is a German sniper who is being celebrated in Josef Goebbels' latest propaganda production, Nation's Pride. He falls for Shosanna, and tries to persuade Goebbels to hold his premiere in her cinema.

Ed Fenech is played by Mike Myers

Fenech is the brains behind Operation Kino, a plan to sabotage Goebbels' big premiere.

Colonel Hans Landa of the SS, aka The Jew Hunter is played by Christoph Waltz

Landa is the suave genius of the SS and a celebrated Nazi. Hitler has personally put him in charge of ridding Occupied France of Jews.

Sounds a bit violent?

You bet:



And this:-

...Quentin was like, 'No, no, no. This is the movie they were talking about in "Knocked Up"! This is Jews kicking ass.' ... This movie has the intensity of 'Reservoir Dogs,' the style of 'Pulp Fiction,' the violence of 'Kill Bill,' the adrenaline of 'Death Proof' and the characters of 'Jackie Brown.' It's really the greatest of Quentin's talents, all culminating in this film."

..."There are a lot of scalpings," Roth grinned wickedly. "He's not going to skimp on the scalping, let me tell you. Quentin based what the Basterds do on what the Apache Indians did. They would do what's known now as the Apache Resistance, where they would capture people and horribly mutilate them, scalp them, torture them, cut them up and leave one person alive. Then, [the survivor] would go back to the cavalry and describe what happened — and the psychological warfare got so strong that if the cavalry came across a bunch of Apache Indians, they would just take their guns and shoot themselves in the heads and shoot each other in the heads because of the horror of what had been described to them. ... This is what the Jews are doing to the Nazis. We get these Nazis and we scalp them, and we beat them to death with a baseball bat."

And to Roth, a Jewish filmmaker from Boston with a well-known taste for blood, there couldn't have been a more welcoming environment to make his acting debut (after small cameos in various films over the years). "What's funny is I expected [Tarantino] to cast a bunch of big dudes. I thought I'd be the smallest guy," Roth marveled. "Instead, he basically cast my Hebrew school class. I looked around, and I was like, 'These are the kids who were in my bunk at Camp Cedar Lake.' It's them going on a killing spree — and that's what makes it so much fun."