Film

Review: I'm so excited

Brigit Grant — Mon, 06 May 2013 10:00:57 +0100

As a rule, film directors are rarely seen on the Graham Norton Show. The toocheses that grace his scarlet sofa are strictly A-list, front-of-camera types with Quentin Tarantino being one of the few auteurs to ever make the guest-list. Until last week. That was when smiling Spanish director Pedro Almodovar popped up to promote his film I’m So Excited — which host Norton certainly seemed to be, and with good reason. El Gran Pedro is a two-time Oscar and Palme d’Or winner responsible for such box office hits as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and All About My Mother, which, despite their monikers, are devoid of Jewish female content.

Stranded somewhere between a CBeebies programme and a top-shelf magazine, I’m So Excited is the lame English title for Almodovar’s Los Amantes Pasajeros (passenger lovers). The latter fits perfectly and here’s why. The film is about a group of business-class travellers circling the sky in a plane with failed landing gear.

Facing impending doom, they deal with their anxiety and over-sized libidos by drinking, taking mescaline, confessing secrets and having sex with each other — and someone in economy.

Yes, los amantes pasajeros certainly suits these colourful mile-high clubbers including Bruna, (Lola Dueñas), a virginal middle-aged psychic (“my powers scare men away”); Ricardo (Guillermo Toledo), a caddish heart-throb; Benito (Hugo Silva), a hit-man and Norma, a Heidi Fleiss-type madam who is played by Pedro’s long-time muse, the Argentinian-Jewish actress, Cecilia Roth. And then there’s the crew — a camp, tequila-swigging triumvirate of stereotypically gay stewards led by the fabulous Joserra (Javier Cámara).

To keep everyone entertained, they do an impromptu dance in the aisles to the Pointer Sisters’ I’m So Excited, a routine which is alone worth the ticket price. But in what marks a return to his comedies of the ’80s like Tie Me, Tie Me Down, Almodovar has pulled off his own very racy version of Airplane meets Carry on Cruising with a tapas twist for acquired tastes.
Naughty but delicious.

WWII film The Monuments Men to be directed by George Clooney

Zoe Winograd — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:43:37 +0000

George Clooney has signed a long list of celebrities — including Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Bill Murray, John Goodman and Jean Dujardin — to star in his new film about heroic art scholars who retrieved stolen artefacts in the Second World War, entitled The Monuments Men.

Mr Clooney will direct and star as George Stout, who was instrumental in the formation of the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas — otherwise known as the Monuments Men.

The film will tell the true story of the group who, under a mandate from President Franklin Roosevelt, located and preserved wartime artefacts which had been looted by the Nazis, mostly from Jewish families.

The blockbuster, based on the book of the same name by Robert Edsel, is set to be released on December 18 this year and will be edited in the UK.

The announcement of the film coincides with the real-life handover of seven paintings to two Jewish families by the French government last Tuesday.

Six of the seven paintings originally belonged to Robert Neumann, an Austrian Jew whose artworks were restored to his grandson Tom Selldorff, aged 82. Four of the returned paintings have been exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.

The handover was part of the French government’s efforts to return all misappropriated artworks stolen during the Nazi occupation. Between 1933 and 1945, approximately 100,000 pieces of art were taken from Jewish collections across Europe.

Israeli documentary makers and Spielberg win Oscar nominations

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:18:15 +0000

Two Israeli documentaries and a number of Jewish entertainers are among the nominees for the 85th-annual Academy Awards.

Steven Spielberg was nominated for Best Director for the eighth time for Lincoln, his biographical portrait of US President Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was nominated for 12 Oscars overall.

Daniel Day-Lewis, whose performance as the titular president has won numerous plaudits, was nominated for Best Lead Actor. This is his fifth nomination; he has won twice before for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood. His mother is Jewish.

Alan Arkin, who won the Best Supporting Actor trophy in 2006 for Little Miss Sunshine, was nominated in the same category again for his performance in Argo.

David O Russell was nominated for the second year in a row for directing Silver Linings Playbook. He was nominated in 2012 for directing The Fighter. While Mr Russell is secular, his father is of Jewish descent.

Benh Zeitlin was nominated for directing Beasts of the Southern Wild. It is the 29-year-old Mr Zeitlin’s first feature film. Mr Zeitlin’s father is also Jewish.

Israeli-made 5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeeper were both shortlisted as Best Documentary. 5 Broken Cameras details a Palestinian farmer’s struggle against the Israeli army, and The Gatekeepers features interviews with all the surviving directors of Shin Bet.

The Invisible War was another feature to make the Best Documentary nomination list. The film, which looks at sexual assault in the US military, was produced by British Jewish film producer Teddy Leifer, founder and managing director of RISE Films.

Mr Spielberg, Mr Day-Lewis and Mr Arkin were also nominated for Golden Globe awards in the same categories. The Golden Globes will air this Sunday while the Oscars will be presented on February 24th.

Awards recognition for Spielberg’s Lincoln bodes well for Oscars

Anna Sheinman — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 16:12:59 +0000

Steven Spielberg’s US civil war drama Lincoln has dominated the nominations for this month's Bafta awards.

It was announced today that the film has received the most Bafta nominations, 10, including best film and best actor for Daniel Day Lewis.

Mr Spielberg has also been nominated for the prestigious Directors Guild of America award for directorial achievement in a feature film. The winner of the DGA has gone on to win the Oscar for best director in all but six years since 1948.

Lincoln also leads the nominations for Sunday's Golden Globes, with seven nominations including best director.

The nominations for the Academy Awards, or the Oscars as they are better known, will be released on Thursday.

His People

Jenni Frazer — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:31:55 +0000

Edward Sloman's delicious 1925 morality tale, made for Universal Studios, is a silent movie of the kind that must have launched the phrase "they don't make them like that any more." Rudolph Schildkraut, a renowned actor who had his own Jewish theatre in the Bronx, plays David Cominsky, a Jewish pedlar with a reverence for learning and not much ability to make money. His wife Rose (Rosa Rosanova) is a spirited sort who understands, rather more than her unworldly husband, that their son Sammy, a teen newspaper seller with handy boxing skills, is more of a mensch than their book-devoted son Morris, who becomes an uptown lawyer.

Morris is a slug but a slug with ambition; Sammy, who has boxed his way through school in order to pay for Morris's law studies, is in love with Mamie, the pretty Irish girl across the hall landing. Shock, horror, etc. All ends well with a lot of forgiveness all round.

The screening at the UK Jewish Film Festival was more than enhanced with a wonderful live score from the Jewish Music Institute's Sophie Solomon and accompanying musicians Quentin Collins, Ian Watson and Grant Windsor. Altogether a terrific event: more silent movies, please.

Off White Lies

Jenni Frazer — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 14:29:47 +0000

Maya Kenig's scratchy father and daughter comedy (and that's a bit of a push) is set in the opening days of the Lebanon war of 2006 and features a feckless Shaul, played with disturbing accuracy by Gur Bentvich, and his confused 13-year-old daughter Libby, played by Elya Inbar.

Shaul and Libby's mother are apparently long divorced when their daughter arrives in Israel, fresh from California, to stay with her father. But Shaul has managed to conceal the fact that he no longer actually has anywhere to live; instead he has a storage facility in which he keeps most of his belongings, and the rest of the time he bums off whomever he can - an old girlfriend, old army buddies.

It's when Shaul's accommodation options run out, and he and Libby end up in a bomb shelter in the north, that he hatches a cunning plan. People in the centre of the country are taking in "refugees" from the north. Why shouldn't he and Libby be refugees, too?

And so the ill-matched pair arrive in a wealthy home in Jerusalem and proceed to take every member of the family for a ride - or is it the other way about?

Zaytoun

Jenni Frazer — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:40:04 +0000

So, finally, the first fruit of the long-awaited Israel-British film co-production treaty has reached the UK. Zaytoun, a kind of improbable step-bromance-cum-road movie, between a shot-down Israeli air force pilot and a Palestinian child refugee, was one of the opening gala films at this year's UKJFF and received a rapturous audience reception.

The film, set in the Lebanon of 1982, is directed by the leading Israeli film-maker, Eran Riklis, and produced by Gareth Unwin, the award-winning producer of The King's Speech. Unwin, garlanded with awards for the latter, was searching hard for a follow-up movie to provide him with equal success.

I hope his instinct is correct about Zaytoun. Rarely can a film have had so many anxious godparents hovering around its cot, praying for it to do well. It has all the right boxes ticked. High-profile American male lead (Stephen Dorff)? Tick. Gorgeous photography? Tick. Take him home and give him a good meal talented junior lead (Abdallah el Akal)? Tick, tick, tick.

That's before we even get to the symmetry of a script written by a Palestinian Israeli (Nader Rizq), directed by a Jewish Israeli (Riklis), and produced by the aforesaid Unwin. Oh, and just to add to the sense of familiarity, for UKJFF audiences, one of the two female actors in the film is Alice Taglioni, who stars in the festival's opening screening, Paris Manhattan.

So there are many good and hopeful things about Zaytoun. But the truth is that it's just a little bit too clunky, a little bit too contrived, to work well as a five-star feature. The suspension of disbelief required to accept that Palestinian fighters would allow a group of children to guard their top-class Israeli prisoner is hiked up all too often, as the long arm of coincidence requires the audience to accept escape after escape and near-miss after near-miss as Yoni the pilot and Fahed the refugee make their way towards the Israel-Lebanon border.

There's plenty of politically correct Israel-bashing (as voiced by the Palestinians) and a fair amount of politically incorrect Palestinian-bashing, courtesy of the Lebanese. In the end, Yoni's and Fahed's is a relationship that has no future with a border in between, as the pilot returns to Israel and Fahed goes back to the uncertain miseries of a Palestinian refugee camp. I couldn't help thinking that though the film's central message was probably that peace is possible once the enemies get to know each other, a sequel would probably show Yoni bombing Fahed's camp to smithereens. Sad but true.

Gainsbourg by Gainsbourg, An Intimate Self-Portrait

Jenni Frazer — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:34:44 +0100

One word for this 99-minute archive documentary chronicling the life and times of the writer and musician Serge Gainsbourg - smoking.

Narrated by the late, great (or should that be grate?) enfant terrible of the French avant-garde, this film, much of which is previously unseen footage, seems entirely viewed through a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Gainsbourg, born Lucien Ginsberg, the son of a Russian Jewish café pianist, went on to become one of France's most celebrated songwriters. Most famously he was the author of that song (Je t'aime…moi non plus) which, sung with his then partner Jane Birkin, scandalised polite society in 1969.

I tried really hard to like this but failed. Just couldn't get past all the smoke, which seemed to ooze off the screen.

All In

Jenni Frazer — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:33:39 +0100

We're in Jewish Buenos Aires for Daniel Burman's romantic comedy which won best screenplay at this year's Tribeca Film Festival.

Uriel Cohan (Drexler) is a professional poker player for whom every twist and turn in life is a gamble. He's newly divorced, with two cute kids to whom he is devoted. He has an endless succession of difficult girlfriends and he's just about considering the hazardous step of a vasectomy – another roll of the dice – when his life takes a course he had not anticipated.

This is the re-emergence in Buenos Aires of Gloria, Cohan's old girlfriend from before he was married. Gloria, too, has been round the block a bit. She's back home for the funeral of her father and to sort out his house and belongings. She's ready to give Cohan a second chance, but this time she wants commitment – not a word in his vocabulary.

Burman's enjoyable script follows the pair as they get over the inevitable hurdles of love the second time around. There's a jolly rabbi and a twinkly Jewish doctor, too.

Foreign Letters

Jenni Frazer — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 10:31:33 +0100

Everyone remembers the agony of school friendships. You like someone, they don't like you, you don't know the reason; your best friend is suddenly no longer your best friend; girls huddle in corners, whispering, and lockers are interfered with.

Teachers appear either blithely indifferent to the cross-currents of emotion, or spend more time than is strictly necessary in attempting to "help." Into this swamp of difficult relationships is catapulted Ellie, whose family has moved from Israel to 1980s Connecticut so that her father does not need to fight in Lebanon.

Poor Ellie is drowning. She speaks no English and school is a complete nightmare. She has no friends, her parents have their own problems, and her little brother is too young to understand. All she clings on to are the letters she writes and receives from her best friend in Israel. Even they are not much of a comfort after a few months, since it is plain there is no longer an Ellie-shaped hole in her friend's life.

But then she meets Thuy, the clever daughter of a family of Vietnamese refugees. Thuy's English is good and she is a dedicated scholar. Carefully and slowly Ela Thier (who appears in the film playing Ella's mother) unpicks the strands of friendship, trust and acceptance.

The two young girls are wonderful in their respective roles and the reveal at the end of the film – which I won't spoil – gives Foreign Letters an even more enjoyable frisson.