Another Hollywood Talmudic Plot

A new movie is in the works.

A Biblically-themed film.

With Russel Crowe

playing...Noah.

An item:

"Noah" won't be your average Biblical epic though. Aronofsky plans to feature wingless angel demons and giants--based on his tweets, a creature named Og. According to Indie Wire, Og was the King of Bahan, a race of giants, and part of the Rephaim in the Bible.
"According to Jewish folklore, Noah built a special compartment in the Ark for him and/or he rode out the flood by sitting on the top. Either way, we'll see how Og will make an appearance, but it's another interesting note to a movie that is playing as much with myth and legend as it is with the elements of the standard story we know," writes Kevin Jagernauth.

That, of course, is not Hollywood but Midrash:

The Midrash (Pirkei D'Rebbe Eliezer 23) relates* that Og sat on one of the rungs of the ark's ladders and swore to Noach and his sons that he would be their slave forever. Noach then punched a hole in the ark to which he would feed Og through every day. This pledge, however, wasn't enough for Og to survive the flood. The Gemara (Zevachim, 113b) relates that the waters in the flood of Noach were boiling hot but Hashem cooled all the water around the ark so Og would be able to survive and the ark could travel. So we see that Og was a pretty great man as well, for he merited a miraculous miracle.

*

And all living things which were upon the face of the 
earth decayed,^ as it is said, " And every living thing was 
destroyed which was upon the face of the ground " {ibid. 
23), except Noah and those who were with him in the ark, 
as it is said, " And Noah only was left, and they that 
were with him in the ark " {ibid.), except Og,^ king of 
Bashan, who sat down on a piece of wood under the gutter ^ 
of the ark. He swore to Noah and to his sons that he 
would be their servant for ever.'' What did Noah do ? 
He bored an aperture in the ark, and he put (through it) his 
food daily for him, and he also was left, as it is said, " For 
only Og, king of Bashan, remained of the remnant of the 
giants " (Deut. iii. 11). 

And there's this in Talmud Nidah 61b:

...He thought: Peradventure the merit of our father Abraham will stand him by, for it is said, And there came one that had escaped, and told Abram the Hebrew, in connection with which R. Johanan explained: This refers to Og who escaped the fate of the generation of the flood.

An interesting take.

^

Did You See "Rage and Glory"? The Lechi Film

A reminisce:

Photographic Memories / Blast from the past

Avi Nesher recalls the demolition of the British secret police building in 'Rage and Glory,' when he lost his fear as a filmmaker.

When I made "Rage and Glory" in 1984, I wanted to make a film that would deal with the human face of terrorists. When you talk about the enemy they're called "terrorists," but when it comes to our guys they're always "freedom fighters." This film was made at a very sensitive time in Israel, during the first Lebanon war. At the time, for example, they prohibited the screening of "The Battle of Algiers" in Israel, because Arab terrorists were portrayed in it as freedom fighters. I wrote a screenplay about a Lehi [pre-state underground] fighter named Eddie the Butcher, who dedicates himself to an idea and is willing to take a life and pay with his life. I identified with this character and the decision to cast Juliano Mer, a Jewish Arab, for the role was considered scandalous at the time. The feeling was that it would be dangerous to film that here.

Because I started working on this film after "The Troupe" and "Dizengoff 99," which were very popular, it aroused a lot of interest. But because of its subject, there was a feeling in Israel that it represented a foreign viewpoint. Anyone who dared at the time to say anything against the Lebanon war was considered an enemy of the people. As far as I was concerned, I wanted to tell the story of a Lehi cell in Jerusalem in 1942. And I said that if anyone wanted to give the film another interpretation, they were welcome to do so. But that was dangerous. They threatened Juliano's life as well as mine. We weren't afraid of dying, but we felt that we were doing something dangerous.

One night we filmed a scene in which a British secret policeman tries to arrest Eddie. Juliano insisted on being present at the filming, although his character was supposed to be outside the frame, and when the policeman fired a blank at him, which was full of pieces of coal, they pierced his face. We took him to hospital where he underwent surgery all night, and he clearly couldn't be filmed the next day.

The most important scene in the film was planned for the next day, in which the Lehi group blows up the British secret police building in Jerusalem. We filmed it in the high school at what is now the Suzanne Dellal Center, aware that the building - which was slated for demolition - was already packed with two tons of dynamite, and that they were going to blow it up the next day, with or without us.

While we were still in the hospital, photographer David Gorfinkel said to me: "You know what, from behind you resemble Juliano." And then we had the idea that I would play Eddie in that crazy action scene. We decided that the director would blow up together with the building, and a few months later we would film the close-up of this scene with Juliano.

And that's what happened. In the picture you see me while the scene was being filmed, when I was playing Eddie the Butcher. They filmed me from behind while I was being shot at and things were exploding next to me, and everything reaches a crescendo when Eddie tries to escape, lies down on barbed wire, and behind him is the building that is about to blow up. I was holding the device that detonated the explosion. The barbed wire was ripping my flesh, injuring me, [the actor] Roni Pinkovitz is pulling me, and everyone is shouting: "Blow it up, blow it up!" And all I can think about at that moment is that later, in the editing room, I'll want a few more seconds of this moment. In the end I press the button, and in Pinkovitz's eyes I see the entire building fly into the air.

It had a terrible beauty, because I knew that in a few months, when the film came out, something terrible would happen to me. In the end the film failed in Israel but was successful at foreign festivals, and I developed a kind of fearlessness regarding things that are considered dangerous...

Does the actor's name ring a...bullet?

^

Your Understated Headline of the Week

Recent Israeli films are less political
Oscar nominee 'Ajami' is the latest in a crop of movies

that are about other topics

That was a LATimes headline and sub-headline.

And what does Eran Riklis, director of super-charged political/ideological films "The Lemon Tree" and "The Syrian Bride" say?

"There is a dangerous tendency in Israel to say there's so much trouble, don't worry, just worry about your family and your house and your jeep. And I do think in a country like Israel you have to be a socially conscious filmmaker."

Now, to illustrate why the reporter, Steven Zeitchik, is a bit lost in this film business being, ahem, non-political, here's what he writes on Riklis' next movie:-

"The Mission of the Human Resources Manager"...[is]...a dramatic comedy about a man who works for an industrial bakery, with few of the political concerns that informs his previous work. Was it difficult to move away from tensions between Jews and Arabs? "A little bit," he says, then, after a pause, adds, "but it's also kind of a relief, actually."

That movie is based on A.B. Yehoshua's novel of the same name. It's content? Well, Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel, has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman is forced to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity by returning her body to her son and mother in her native land for burial.

Here is a review that shows, ahem, the book's non-political nature:-

A Woman in Jerusalem (dedicated to the memory of Dafna, a friend of the Yehoshuas who was killed by a suicide bomber on Mount Scopus in 2002), is divided into three parts: The Manager; The Mission, and The Journey. And if in the first two parts the manager is identified in variations of "the human resources manager," by the third part he has earned the honor of "Emissary," for he is now a man transformed by his love for the dead woman. Traveling with her coffin to a distant, cold land, he is perhaps an Emissary of God, an angel, an angel who may sometimes be the Angel of Death. This emissary, like most Israeli men, served in the army. He followed orders, and he gave orders, and, in this sense, he is part of a system that is responsible for the death of a woman like Yulia (or Dafna). Yulia is the preternatural Female, who may be dead to the living, but is, in fact, "a sleeping angel" (in the words of the morgue's lab technician). The giver of life, she is helpless against tanks and bullets, but is also indestructible.

And now let's return to Zeitchik's non-political perspective of Ajami and read what Ha-Ha-Haaretz published:-

while "Ajami" is a sophisticated detective story, it also manages to contain, in the terse way characteristic of great art, not "only" the complexity of life in Jaffa's hardscrabble streets among Arabs between themselves and Arabs from other places, but also the complexity of the loaded encounter between Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, and Arabs from Israel and their relatives in the territories. All are shown multidimensionally.

"Ajami" is a courageous film. It is neither obsequious nor ingratiating, arrogant nor cynical. It is merciless and painful, but at the same time, and perhaps because of this, it is human and full of compassion. Therefore the viewer's heart goes out equally to the mother of the Arab hero from Jaffa, to the "illegal resident" boy from Nablus who gets into trouble because of his dying mother, and to the tough Jewish cop who appears to take pleasure in hating Arabs.

Make no mistake: the film is not apolitical. In fact, it is very political, but deals with a much deeper question than "who is right, Jews or Arabs?"

Its political power is in daringly revealing - never before seen in an Israeli film, and perhaps in no other Israeli art form - the mud into which all of Israeli society is sinking: Jews and Arabs alike, but Arabs more so, and poor Arabs most of all.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict flows, as in reality, through the plotlines, but the directors do not use it even for a moment in the usual boring way.

What crazy dissonance. On the one hand Israel will be represented in the world with a superior Jewish-Arab film, with Arabic dialogue and Arabic music, created in Jaffa only 62 years after the Jaffa elite left, followed by the flight and expulsion of many others, leaving the city bereft of its splendor. Yet the film was chosen precisely at a time when an evil spirit is growing stronger, bearing on its wings the Netanyahu-Lieberman government in whose name Israel's Arab citizens are being shoved aside into a shadowy corner.

Poor poor readers of the LATimes.

Will Winterbottom Bottom-up?

In another blog, I had related that Michael Winterbottom came to the Begin Center to research his upcoming film on the clash between the British Mandatory regime and both the Jewish and Arabs, each seeking their political goals. I showed him books and we spoke about various aspects of his new film. He was then set on the 1936-39 period as the Arab-Jewish conflict during those years of the "Disturbances" or the Arab Revolt interested him as a forerunner to today's events.

Seems he has now moved forward a decade:

Colin Firth to play Jewish underground leader in 'The Promised Land'

Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen are lining up alongside Jim Sturgess to star in Michael Winterbottom's new film The Promised Land, the film's backers said Sunday.
Due to start shooting in late summer, The Promised Land is billed as a political crime thriller set in British-ruled Palestine at the end of World War II, and covers the period leading to the establishment of Israel.

[ This site has it thus: "A political crime-thriller, The Promised Land is set in British-ruled Palestine at the end of the Second World War, and covers the pivotal period in the region’s history leading to the formation of Israel.

Sturgess and Macfadyen will play British police officers trying to end a campaign of violence and killings by an extreme right-wing Jewish group led by the charismatic poet, Avraham Stern."]

Firth has been cast as Avraham Stern, the leader of the Underground organization Lehi, which lead a violent campaign against the British Mandate in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s. The British authorities also called the Lehi "The Stern Gang."...Sturgess and Macfadyen will play British police officers trying to end the Jewish revolutionaries and underground groups' violent campaign to expel the British, which culminated in the 1946 attack on the British headquarters at King David Hotel in Jerusalem that left dozens of British soldiers dead.

As he hasn't come back to me, although I did send off a mail to his assistant who came with him to the Begin Center last month, I am going to guess that there will be, despite "artistic license", unnecessary errors. Hopefully, but probably not, they will be minor.

Since Stern was killed by the British while handcuffed in 1942, and Menachem Begin led the Irgun from 1944 and the King David explosion took place in 1946, if someone doesn't have a handle on dates, personalities, the intra-Yishuv politics as well as the British Colonial policy that was set in 1939 by the White Paper that reneged on the entire concept of a Jewish National Home, the film might simply be a vehicle for personal outlooks and interpretations rather than a work of art based on real events.

Did the Irgun and Lehi engage in terror or in urban guerrilla warfare against a repressive regime of occupation? Did either specifically target civilians or were legitimate liberation resistance operations directed against the police, the army and the government, even in the instance of the King David bombing?

I know of another production in its early stages which intends to follow, as faithfully as possible, books like Begin's "The Revolt" so as to assure that, at the very least, historical facts will not be manipulated.

I do hope Winterbottom won't, so to say, bottom-up on this project.

Watch Out, Jewesses (and Enemy Terrorists)

One review:-

Sony Pictures has released the movie trailer for their upcoming Adam Sandler comedy You Don’t Mess with the Zohan.

Directed by Dennis Dugan (Big Daddy, Happy Gilmore), Zohan’s screenplay was a collaboration between three comedy greats: Judd Apatow (40-Year-Old-Virgin, Knocked Up), Robert Smigel (SNL) and Adam Sandler. The film stars Sandler as an Israel Intelligence Agent who fakes his death so he can anonymously move to New York and become a hair stylist. Sounds like a promising SNL sketch, but a full length feature film?

IF ABOVE DOESN'T WORK, TRY HERE.

PBS is Still in Gaza

Here's the NYTimes review of a new PBS 'documentary': In Gaza, Even a Hospital Is a Battlefield

“Gaza E.R.,” by Olly Lambert, looks at the goings-on inside Shifa Hospital, the largest in the Gaza Strip, over the last eventful year or so. American hospitals may be maddening in many ways, but at least heavily armed thugs aren’t generally trying to bully doctors in the hallways. At least gun battles aren’t regular occurrences.

The film, which picks up a few months after Hamas came to power in early 2006, captures such episodes and more, as various factions and families carry their disputes inside the hospital when their wounded are brought in for treatment. The hospital becomes a battleground even as it is running out of medicine and supplies, Hamas seeming not up to the task of governing.

...a 12-year-old boy who sells coffee and tea to patients and staff members to help his family get by. The youngster wins us over with his dedication and cute marketing gimmicks. Then, late in the film, as victims of an Israeli strike are being brought in, he is heard to say, “Sometimes I get to pick up the martyrs’ body parts.” His pride is evident, and so is the likelihood of an ever-bleaker future for this part of the world.

West Bank Story - So, It Won

Well, the film I previously blogged about (here) won the Oscar for "BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM".

Here's Ari Sandel talking about this film which cheapens the conflict in my opinion:-

I made a comedy musical about Israelis and Palestinians that takes place between two falafel stands in the West Bank. It is a story about peace and hope and I made it with the intention of showing a subject, that is typically portrayed as hopeless, from a new perspective. I wanted to convey my belief that peace in the Middle East can and will happen and that both sides are more alike than they think. I thought a comedy was the best way.

Everyone told me I couldn't make the movie. It was my first film and my graduate thesis. People warned me that I would piss off everyone on BOTH sides, I would kill my career before it started, I would never be able to make LA look like Israel, and most of all, they told me that you can't make a comedy out of the tragedy in the Middle East. I believed them and so I stopped writing the film. My co-writer, Kim Ray, and I shelved it for 5 months but as I told more people the idea of West Bank Story (all I had was a title at the time), I could see people's eyebrows raise and then they would say "its called what!?" I knew I was on to something so we started again. Once we formulated the competing falafel stand premise it wrote itself.

In finally making the movie, I defied every piece of advice a short film director gets..."Don't do period pieces or foreign environments because it will be too expensive" - we turned a set, in Santa Clarita of all places, into an Arab village in Israel -- no small feat.

...It has screened on every continent except Africa and has even received accolades from audiences that have nothing to do with the conflict -- Spain, Switzerland, China, Canada, and the list goes on! Most importantly it screened in Dubai (a country that does not recognize the State of Israel) [really, I think actually it does] and was received warmly and openly as it was the first time that Arab audience had seen the subject in this light. It has played in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv and the reactions have been the same. [er, Ramallah? Jericho? Shschem? Hebron?]

We made the movie to counter the wave of informative but negative and seemingly hopeless documentaries and news reports about the situation. We wanted to make a film about hope and I think that message is what people have embraced. It has been the most personally fulfilling project I have ever worked on.

...What was the hardest challenge/obstacle on the movie?
1. Keeping this movie even-handed and balanced was our biggest obstacle. This movie was about balance in every aspect. I knew it would be scrutinized by both sides and the credibility of the film would be questioned if it was deemed biased to any one side. I didn't want to have anyone walk out of the movie before they got the message of hope. For every joke about Palestinians, we had to counter it with one about Jews. For every endearing moment with the Jews we had to have one with the Palestinians. I think we did a pretty good job with the balance.

Comedy? Only Jews

Have you seen the trailer for this film:-

West Bank Story is a comedy short, directed by Ari Sandel and co-written by Sandel and Kim Ray. The film is a parody of the classic musical film West Side Story, which in turn is an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet. The film follows the romance between the owners of two rival falafel restaurants, one an Israeli and one a Palestinian. The film stars Ben Newmark as the Israeli soldier and Noureen DeWulf as the Palestinian cashier.

Seems it was among the finalists in the best live action short film category of the Oscars.


It's here.