Nozz Reviews (428)

HaZvi (2024)

A bit of history, a bit of genre-crossing

[7/10 · 10 April 2024]

This miniseries is a period piece, and the protagonist is a good-looking, independent-minded young woman who's ahead of her time. (When was the last period piece with a different protagonist?) The buzz around it centered largely on the use of Eliezer Ben Yehuda as a character. He's the man who was dedicated to re-introducing the Hebrew language into everyday speech, and his role here is stern King of Siam to the protagonist's also determined but softer-hearted Anna. The script, however, spends a great deal of time on the protagonist's family (entirely fictitious, as far as I know) and on the soap opera of their lives, as well as on a case of abuse by an extreme religious sect against a suspected loose woman.-- to the point where if you came to see a story about the revival of the Hebrew language, you might feel insufficiently rewarded.

There are other departures from expectations as well. A couple of scenes veer into fantasy or surrealism, and someone decided that the anachronism of Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" would work well in the soundtrack.

At times it can be a tough mix to swallow, but the production puts it across as smoothly as possible. Playing the protagonist, Suzanna Papian reaffirms her standing as the country's sweetheart. Opposite her is Or Ben-Melech, who has his funny-looking face well covered by beard and can thus tackle the Ben-Yehuda role-- a more serious one than he usually plays. Vladimir Friedman, the Depardieu of Israel, is also on hand and is impressive as always, and a smaller role goes to Gala Kogan, who is very very welcome back on screen after a bout with brain cancer.

A great deal of plot is packed into the last episode of the series, as if at one point more had been planned, but although I was happy to follow each episode, I wasn't terribly sorry to see the story end and free all those talented people to move on to other things.

Daniel Auerbach (2023)

Maybe a little self-indulgent, but it makes its point

[7/10 · 3 April 2024]

When a writer directs and stars in his own movie (even if the closing credits acknowledge others who helped with the script), the trap of self-indulgence is wide open. Even more so when it's the writer's long-awaited second feature film and it's about trying to write a long-awaited second feature film - which is how the plot of this one was publicized.

But it's about rather more than the struggling writer as struggling writer. It does have touches of self-indulgence - for example, some needlessly long takes, and a couple of stunning young women who fall for the protagonist without any strong reason - but it's more about the big question of how to participate in the world.

As the movie starts, the protagonist as a young student asks why God bothered to create and populate the world in the first place. As an adult, he goes on asking tough questions and you may start wondering (as I did) whether the script is just a way for the writer to put his collected aphorisms before the public. But it turns out that the protagonist's questioning is also a way of trawling for someone he can connect with, because his relationship with other individuals, with society, and with the passage of time is a problem for him. Aha, we of the third millennium can't help saying, he's on the spectrum.

The movie jumps back and forth in time somewhat, and I hope I'm not committing a spoiler if I say that the resolution involves an incident that helps the protagonist position himself on the timeline.

Shikun (2024)

Nicely surrealistic when it's not offensive

[4/10 · 26 March 2024]

Amos Gitai the director, who has an affinity for architecture, opens the movie with an intriguing shot of a long corridor-- or balcony, actually, as it's open to the outside opposite its many doors. In pleasantly surrealistic fashion, people come and speak and go. At one point, a man can be seen in the background playing a didgeridoo. A woman, who will turn out to be the main character, does a bit of pleasant dancing but feels troubled and uncertain, and the characters' random comings and goings and statements contribute to the feeling that nobody is really in control. The pacing and the sometimes aphoristic nature of the speeches keep the movie interesting even if nothing particular seems to be happening-- except that rhinoceroses may have been sighted and we know what that means. In Israel, Ionesco's famous play "Rhinoceros" left behind a verb that hasn't disappeared from the Hebrew language-- l'hitkarnef (that is, "to go rhino"), meaning to give up your better judgement and join a destructive political juggernaut.

Unless I'm off by a week or so, by the second week of its run at Cinema City, the major movie venue just north of Tel Aviv, this movie had been reduced to one showing a week. The third week too, there was only one showing, a matinee. I was the only viewer who turned up for it. And I rather liked the movie until I realized that the general surrealistic atmosphere of unpredictability and doubt was pierced by a virulent political message - that Israel is a country where foreigners arrived and mercilessly dispossessed the proper residents. In perhaps the most offensive sequence, apparently filmed at the Yiddish book depository in Tel Aviv's central bus station, actress Hana Laszlo plays a character who reads with loving nostalgia from a book about the terrible conditions of a concentration camp. In real life, Laszlo's own mother survived Auschwitz! Did Laszlo know what she was doing in this movie, implying that the Jews are happy to embrace the camps as part of their past in order to legitimize their sins against others? It turns out that the rhinos of this movie, the people who have given up trying to resist the evil of the prevailing politics, are those who believe in the legitimacy of how the State of Israel was founded. Considering that in Ionesco's original play, the rhinos were an obvious metaphor for Nazi sympathizers, Gitai has, in my opinion, crossed a line here.

In the best remembered American production of "Rhinoceros," it was Zero Mostel who could be seen beginning to go rhino before the eyes of the audience. In this movie, it's Irene Jacob, and she doesn't have a rubber face to work with like Mostel's but she has some flexibility in her body and if Zero Mostel is a ten, then Irene Jacob is maybe a respectable seven. It's a shame that the movie is poisoned by a one-sided, wrong-headed political slant, as if Gitai himself had gone rhino.

My Daughter My Love (2023)

Not so much an arc as a watchful amble

[8/10 · 27 February 2024]

Although maybe this movie wasn't preponderantly filmed on location in France, where the story is set, it's reminiscent of those works of the French New Wave that preferred a succession of intriguing scenes to a thrilling one-track-minded plot.

A decade ago, Sivan Levy won Israel's top acting award for the film Six Times, where she played a girl who looks for love in all the wrong places. My Daughter My Love could be thought of not only as a kind of comeback but almost as a kind of sequel, as if her character had grown up and still kept mismanaging her life. As we wonder what her problem is, so does the ostensibly main character, her father, who has dropped by for an entirely different reason and doesn't realize how much has gone wrong. Along with him, we see the situation reveal itself from a number of different angles, but in no hurry and not without tangential material.

One odd aspect of the movie is that occasionally the actors' faces are seen less than clearly as they speak, as if to allow for dubbing later. But although Sivan Levy wasn't nominated this time for the national acting award, Sasson Gabai was (as her father) and so were Albert Iluz (as her father's confidant)-- and Shem Tov Levi for the musical score.

Running on Sand (2023)

Mistaken-identity comedy with a strong message

[8/10 · 7 February 2024]

I'm always in the mood for a nice mistaken-identity comedy. This one is a comedy that begins with a bout of danger before the plot takes the protagonist into another world-- like "Some Like It Hot" or "The Wizard of Oz"-- but throughout the plot, the danger is never far away and we're repeatedly reminded that it's a real-life danger-- the danger that comes with being an illegal immigrant. The audience expecting a formulaic comedy will find one here, with some nicely phrased dialogue, stock characters, and familiar situations, but the actors sell it all successfully and the script swings elegantly between farce and dead-serious social commentary.

The Other Widow (2022)

Deadpan grief

[8/10 · 7 February 2024]

There have been movies in which I wished Dana Ivgy weren't quite so deadpan; but here, it was easy to accept her as a woman stunned by the sudden death of her lover. Her emotional distress comes through mostly in moments of dream or fantasy, which include some impressive and imaginative visuals. There isn't a second when she's not on screen (unless I've forgotten), so you feel inclined to identify with her, but because of her behavior it can be a stretch-- which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

The Hebrew title is not "The Other Widow," it's simply "The Mistress." I'd have to agree that "The Mistress" wouldn't have been a great title in English, but "The Other Widow" implies a kind of symmetry between the wife and mistress and I'm not sure the script meant to imply it.

Lansky (2021)

The tail wags the dog a little

[6/10 · 24 January 2024]

You're making a biopic, you want to involve the audience in the thinking of the main character, so you feel that in order for him to express himself, you have to invent a listener. But the listener can't just sit there, he needs to be justified by having a subplot of his own. In the case of this Lansky movie (not to be confused with the Richard Dreyfus one) too much of the script is about the listener. The tail wags the dog a little. Every now and then there's a flashback to a moment in Lansky's career, but each flashback is rather a self-contained episode; there's little traction moving us from one to the next.

Everyone says Harvey Keitel was wonderful here, but I got impatient with his phony laugh. I never did figure out whether it was a bad imitation of a laugh or an imitation of Meyer Lansky badly pretending to laugh.

Victory (2023)

You might say "What am I watching here?"

[9/10 · 12 January 2024]

I'd call this note of mine a spoiler if it weren't that the Storyline on IMDB already gives the point away. Throughout the beginning of the movie, it's a little hard to understand what the underlying attitude is supposed to be. There are gaudy colors and there are song-and-dance numbers, but they seem to be presented archly. There's the fear that beset Israel before the Six Day War, but we know that things weren't going to turn out that bad. There's the euphoria after the Six Day War, but we know that things weren't going to turn out that good. And there are two couples presented as main characters, but-- it may be entirely my fault, but I'm inclined to blame the casting at least a little-- it took me a long time to realize who was who. Chugging across this canvas is, as the IMDB Storyline tells us, a "Star Is Born" story. It features mild caricatures of some 1960s theatrical figures who are well remembered in Israel at least by the oldsters. But eventually we realize that the movie's serious focus is not on the star-in-the-making but on her husband, who is a victim of war trauma, and all the archness of the presentation (which even includes an arch depiction of Hanoch Levin, himself the king of archness back in those days) is a way of saying "Who cares? Who cares about all this, when your war memories are ruining your sleep?"

Some of the music dates back to the period depicted, but the lion's share is original music in a retro style and it's not bad. I attended a preview where an audience member asked if the music would be coming out on Spotify and the answer is yes. But after watching the movie through to its sobering end, I find it difficult to imagine listening to the music for pleasure.

Beitar Provence (2002)

A variation on the underdog-sports-team motif

[5/10 · 12 December 2023]

Advertised in terms of the "Can our scrappy little underfunded team beat the smug big-leaguers?" motif, this movie also includes a love triangle and an assortment of characters who might have been better served by a TV series that afforded time for character development. Zeev Revach, starring as the team manager, makes up for the sketchiness of the script by employing his decades of acting experience and his expressively saggy face. The script gives the younger actors less to work with-- no backgrounds and only the shallowest of motivations. The script does pull a rabbit out of a hat when one of the minor characters comes forward to change the situation. I have to admit that I didn't expect it.

Desperado Square (2001)

A soap opera plus stooges - and nice music

[5/10 · 25 October 2023]

In English, this movie is called Desperado Square, and when we think of a desperado, we often think of a swashbuckling scrapper who has nothing to lose. But the word is related to despair, hopelessness. And that's the meaning that was in the original Hebrew title. A place full of people who feel hopeless. At least that's the Hebrew title that scrolls up at the end of the final credits of the print I saw. Square of the Hopeless. As advertised, though, the Hebrew title was quite different - Square of Dreams. I guess commercially Square of the Hopeless didn't look like a good bet.

Anyway, the people feel hopeless because, to begin with, they live in a down-at-heel neighborhood. And on top of that, a major consolation - their local movie theater - has been eliminated. As the story begins, the owner of the movie theater has died but has appeared to his son in a dream (so the son says) and told him to run one more movie. There's a reason for that, and it plays out as a soap opera that is lightened (or at least is supposed to be) by the presence of several colorful supporting characters including a trio of tubby middle-aged stooges who unfortunately don't manage to be funny at all. There is also a good amount of music, and the music - including original work by Shem Tov Levy - helps keep the otherwise slightly leaden movie afloat.

Between Walls (2021)

Colorful & educational

[7/10 · 21 October 2023]

Rotem (Zissman) and Moris Cohen are among Israel's most respected actors. For a while-- until she got married, turned somewhat more pious, and semi-retired from acting-- it seemed that Rotem was in all the best Israeli movies; and she received several award nominations. Moris is typecast as a tough guy-- sometimes with a heart of gold, sometimes without-- but he nonetheless managed to pick up Israel's Best Actor award several years ago. However, they didn't put themselves on screen in this documentary. What they present is a slice of life-- or more accurately, several small slices-- depicting the Israeli Border Police on the job in Jerusalem. The Border Police do more than police the border. They try to reduce friction between segments of the population, and in Jerusalem the segments are, of course, varied and packed together. The movie makes the point that even among the Border Police themselves, there are Muslims and Christians as well as Jews; and we see that keeping the peace involves reining in Muslim and Jewish extremists alike. In its enthusiastic promotion of brotherhood, the film claims that the very Jerusalem streets we see may well be where King David, Jesus, and Muhammad walked. No points for that well-intentioned remark, I'm afraid. Historians say Muhammad never came near Jerusalem. Muslims say he arrived from Arabia in the dead of night on a winged steed and immediately jumped to heaven and back. No time for roaming the streets or stopping for knafeh.

Anyway, if Providence had been interested in the creation of a gripping film, and less interested in the citizens' welfare, the camera might have caught a great photogenic confrontation with our Border Police figures in the middle of it. As is, the film has no such climactic moment. It does have picturesque shots of the city and of its people, and it has a tension as the Border Police confront potential violence; but nothing gets out of hand. In order to insert at least some exciting action, the Cohens include film that comes from outside the timeframe of their own shoot. When the end came and the credits rolled, my wife said, "Is that it? Is it over?" Despite some verbal summing-up, the end was indeed sort of sudden. But the content is good, and it's put together well. You come out of the film with some knowledge and appreciation of what the Border Police have taken upon themselves.

What a Wonderful Place (2005)

A large gallery of relatable characters

[8/10 · 18 October 2023]

It seemed at one time that all the best roles for Russian immigrant women went to Evelyn Kaplun (and she aced them). I haven't heard of her for much recently-- this movie is 18 years old as I write-- but here we see her as a victim of human trafficking who works as a cleaner in a brothel because she's not pretty enough bring in good money as a prostitute. The film industry as a whole has a problem with female characters who aren't supposed to be pretty. It's afraid the audience won't watch if not all the young women are stunning. So Kaplun's face is supposed to be ruined by a large strawberry mark, but on my HD TV screen I had to squint to see it. Anyway, she is just one major node in a network of characters who wind up interrelated. The many characters are hastily sketched, but in a way that gives the impression that any of a half dozen carry the germ of a separate movie (the film won Israel's annual Best Screenplay award), and the audience is inclined-- at least I am-- to forgive a couple of improbable coincidences in the way the plot serves to assemble them all in a single sprawling story. My powers of concentration aren't at the champion level, but even I had no problem keeping track of who's who and who belongs where. Well, almost no problem.

Indoors (2016)

If you don't insist on lightheartedness, car chases, or pretty girls...

[8/10 · 14 October 2023]

Yuval Segal, better known for straightfaced comedy, plays the lead here, as a man in a bind. It appears that a little bad luck in business, or bad judgement, seemed to him like something he could soldier through by himself, without disturbing his wife-- whose relationship with him isn't entirely smooth anyway-- but his debts have got out of hand. Will he have to give up the nice apartment he designed for himself, the very actuality of his success in life? Mostly he holds his distress inside. The demonstrative one is his brother-in-law, played by always credible Danny Steg, representing an alternative mode of behavior that is not necessarily preferable. And there's the protagonist's son, who is also trying to hang onto success-- on the basketball court-- despite unpredictable troubles. In addition, the boy has an embarrassing nervous problem that, in a way, takes us back to writer/director Eitan Green's film of twenty years before, "As Tears Go By."

The film takes place in Jerusalem-- mostly in residential areas that could almost be anywhere in Israel. The absence of the city's special beauty could be said to emphasize how thoroughly the characters are preoccupied by their own heavy personal challenges.

There isn't a whole lot of plot-- mostly just the protagonist trying to believe, like Willy Loman, that he can keep his head above water. There's little cinematic excitement-- no pretty girls, no car chases-- but the visuals are intriguing, with an emphasis on vertical lines to imply a kind of maze especially around the beginning, and the music by Yoni Rechter is an asset. I'd never heard of the movie before it popped up on cable. Apparently it didn't attract many viewers. But if you're interested in a well-acted drama on a modest scale, with a bit of reflection on our fate in the world and how to handle it, Indoors is well worth watching.

Eight in the Footstep of One (1964)

Not to be taken too seriously, but very well made

[6/10 · 11 October 2023]

In 1964 the Israeli film industry had scarcely found its feet, but there were some very good people at work. This movie begins with some spooky expressionist scenes and continues with a great sense of pace as it mixes relatively light-hearted suspense with comedy, a little sentimentalism, and even songs. Aside from a clever gag or two, the script is entirely mediocre family fare. If you happen to have seen the acclaimed Israeli film "The Monkey House," from six decades later, this old one represents exactly the kind of collectivist tale that, in that film, nobody likes any more. It's about a group of adventurous kibbutz kids who function in solidarity as a mutually supportive unit. The one who has a parent visible in the film is an oddity. The photography is excellent, and the choice of settings works very well. For the most part, the kids' limited acting ability doesn't matter much. We get to see a nice turn from the legendary Bomba Tzur, who appeared in all too few movies. A bigger role goes to the even more legendary Shaike Ophir, but he doesn't find much to sink his teeth into.

Who Do You Love (2008)

Good job on the music

[8/10 · 7 October 2023]

This is an interesting take on the Chess Records story-- less smoothly presented than the "Cadillac Records" version that overshadowed it back when the two movies were released in close succession. There's an arresting performance by Robert Randolph as Bo Diddley, featured in the preview, that might (along with the title) give the impression that the movie focuses strongly on Bo Diddley. The focus is elsewhere, but the title "Who Do You Love" links together the episodes that show Leonard Chess in his conflicting relationships with his wife, his son, his finances, his recording artists, and specifically the fictional character who sings Etta James' songs. Those episodes are less like a continuous plot interrupted by music than like dramatic skits performed during the breaks between the music, and they suffer from incompleteness and from a bit of heavy-handedness-- problems that may be caused by skimping on time for the sake of including as much music as possible. And the music is very good.

The Monkey House (2023)

They're all liars, but we feel for them

[9/10 · 4 October 2023]

At the Ophir Awards in 2003, The Monkey House received zero wins out of eleven nominations. Director Avi Nesher, a major figure in Israeli cinema, has been through several such disappointments before and indeed the male protagonist of The Monkey House is a once-popular author driven by the desire to overcome the neglect he now suffers from the critical establishment. He grumbles that even the Nobel Prizei is all about self-promotion and the nurturing of connections. We never receive any ringing confirmation that his work really was any good, but we easily sympathize with him, partly because it appears that what he is really looking for is a way of escaping death, or a way of achieving love.

There are other points where the movie touches on Nesher's own story. There is the loss of a character's son (Nesher's own son died in an accident) and there is a quest for fame in Hollywood (Nesher tried, but his only big successes have been in Israel).

The monkey house in the title is an abandoned little zoo high in the hilly section of Ramat Gan, adjoining Tel Aviv. At the end of the movie, Nesher inserts a photo of himself there and he dedicates the project to the memories of youth, although there are no child actors in the movie; childhood is present only in painfully melancholy retrospect. We get a glimpse of the climb up the hill in Ramat Gan, but it's a bit of a shame that the picturesque neighborhood doesn't get more screen time.

Avi Nesher loves to cast Adir Miller in his movies, and Miller as the male lead doesn't let him down here. Nesher also loves to cast Joy Rieger, but this time, for whatever reason, he chose the then little-known Suzanne Papian as female lead. By the time the film came out in Israel, she was already well-liked for the TV comedy/drama Sovietzka, and she also does Nesher proud here, more or less carrying the movie with Miller as her straight man.

Not that Miller has a simple role. One way in which Nesher still typifies traditional Israeli cinema is that he tries not to build a movie around a protagonist at all other characters' expense. Papian shines as a kind of comical, spunky, animated dream girl and her character gives the movie its lightheartedness while Miller is responsible for stolidly keeping the story believable. He's the one with a mission. In his determination to revive his reputation, he wants Papian's character to pretend to be the Israeli doctoral student in the USA who was about to finish a doctoral thesis about him and publish it as a book. But he is only pretending that such a student exists. Actually, the student - by the name he cites, and at the university he cites - does exist. It's the daughter of a local shopkeeper. But she never thought of writing such a thesis. At least to me, the script seems to founder on that point. Even though the movie is set decades ago when there was no internet, you couldn't pretend to be a local shopkeeper's daughter, and publish a book under her name, and expect not to be discovered - if not by the daughter far away in the USA, then by your own neighbors. It would have made more sense, in setting up the scheme, to choose an entirely fictitious name.

Anyway, besides that pair of liars, we also have the woman that Miller's character loved and lost; she has been lying about her happiness as a married woman and her grief as a widow. And there is a curiously tiny sidekick role played by Yaniv Biton - a childhood friend who is now a gay man in the closet. Nesher directs the audience's sympathy to each of them in turn.

Besides preferring not to focus on a single character, Nesher as writer/director often shrugs off the idea of stretching a plot across the film in a familiarly shaped arc from beginning to end. When it seems that The Monkey House is winding up, it pivots into a continuation that resolves certain issues much to the audience's gratification.

The Giants of Easter Island (2023)

A reminder that childhood is a very big deal

[8/10 · 26 September 2023]

Like the title of Reshef Levi's "Lost Islands," Kosashvili's "Giants of Easter Island" doesn't tell much about the movie but instead is the name of an item of mass-marketed escapism that captures the interest of the juvenile characters, whose world from day to day contains nothing unfamiliar. Circumscribed though it is, though, that world presents them with enormous conflicts between fear, loyalty, shame, sexual (or pre-sexual) attraction-- very big quandaries, and the next generation upward in the movie is, if anything, less mature about handling them. Lest the movie go spinning off in all directions, there is a wise father who serves as fulcrum-- but the movie has been criticized as fragmented nonetheless. I'd say keep your eye on the plot thread about the kids, be sure you remember which is which, and enjoy the occasional burst of (former Soviet) Georgian music.

A Room of His Own (2023)

Portrait of a misfit

[9/10 · 13 September 2023]

Writer/director Matan Yair makes movie after movie (I think it's three so far, and a TV series) based on his experiences as a high-school teacher. This one centers around a boy who unexpectedly combines a nervous stammer with a tendency to tactless, defiant criticism. He has an oppressive home life, and the gym teacher-- who somewhat understands that-- is quite forgiving although, curiously, when the boy can't being signatures from both parents on a permission slip because his father has disappeared, the boy doesn't explain and the gym teacher doesn't seriously inquire or try to arrange leniency. Despite the presence of the redoubtable Israeli actor Dror Keren as the gym teacher, the movie rests on the shoulders of young Gilad Lederman, apparently in his first move, as the boy. For some reason his eyelashes seem to have been distractingly darkened, but once you get past that, his acting successfully carries you through.

Farewell Column (2023)

A shame it's a bit shrilly political

[7/10 · 13 September 2023]

Trying to make sense of life is like trying to make sense of a newspaper that's been torn into little pieces when a fan is ceaselessly blowing the little pieces around in the air. The metaphor appears twice in the movie, once as an explanation of the point of view of the protagonists autistic son and once-- in case we didn't get the point-- in relation to the lives of everyday people. The generalization isn't ruined by the fact that the protagonist himself share a tiny bit of his son's failure to function among others. He and his wife can't communicate, he's not much better with his daughter, he makes unreasonable demands, and in his job-- as a political columnist-- he doesn't always take into account the consequences of badmouthing those he disagrees with. He disagrees with the fans of Bibi Netanyahu, and with respect to that political background the movie becomes propagandistically shrill as well as a bit dated in the depiction of an internal political conflict that is still in the process of revealing its true nature. But the protagonist means well and he keeps trying, and he's played by Dror Keren, who despite his lack of political subtlety (he is credited with co-writing the script) is one of Israel's most skilled and most relatable actors.

Seven Blessings (2023)

A big family with many troubles to work through

[9/10 · 13 September 2023]

In 2023, Seven Blessings was the big winner at the Ophir Awards (the Israeli Oscars, as it were): Best picture, script, director, actress, supporting actress, and more. Not best actor or best supporting actor; the movie was definitely about women although a couple of male supporting roles were carried off well.

There are some big family scenes with lots of characters speaking at once in a melange of Hebrew, Moroccan Arabic, and French, and they must have been quite a professional challenge for the cast and crew to present with such panache, but to tell the truth, I found them hard to follow. I had a much better time with the scenes involving only two or three characters.

We in the audience can quickly identify with the protagonist as their guide to her family, which is troubled in various ways-- some interconnected, some not. The atmosphere takes a turn when we realize we're identifying with a character who is troubled herself and whose behavior reflects her troubledness. At that point, the movie cashes in on the sympathy we've built up for her, and the movie moves toward a sad but somewhat redemptive conclusion. The script, by the way, was co-written by the lead actress herself, Reymonde Amsalem.

Golda (2023)

You had to not be there

[4/10 · 29 August 2023]

Much of this story-- Golda Meir's handling of the Yom Kippur War-- is well known to those of us who were around at the time. But it's been fifty years since then. It's even been forty years since Ingrid Bergman starred in "A Woman Called Golda." So the story is worth telling to a new audience even if the surprises are few. (Credited under "Thanks" is Zvi Zamir, and for me one surprise is that as portrayed in the movie, he tips Golda off to some facts that weren't known to the public at the time-- and I must have missed them if they were revealed later.)

Helen Mirren's physical transformation into Golda has been much praised, but I can't say I bought it. Her appearance varied too much from scene to scene, and her cheeks in particular were often wrong-- insufficiently droopy. Other distractions include an occasionally quirky musical score and an inclination by the director to occasionally go expressionistic or even surrealistic.

But a movie that treats Israel relatively kindly is a nice thing to come upon in 2023. At the opening, there's a quick review of Israel's history from 1948 to 1973, and that review could be faulted for extreme reluctance to offend Israel's attackers and for ending with an accusation of "hubris" on Israel's part, but it's quickly counterbalanced by the sympathetic focus on Golda.

The other characters are almost props. There's no attempt to make Liev Schreiber look like Henry Kissinger, although he has the voice down startlingly pat. The role of Lou Keddar is a thankless one, because she's one-dimensionally angelic. She is, after all, the source of the lion's share of inside information that the world has about Golda. The actors playing Golda's security advisors include some of Israel's best, but mostly they just recite exposition in an appropriate tone of voice.

If you don't know much about the Yom Kippur War, this is a good movie to watch. If you know the history, maybe just watch if anyway for Helen Mirren and try to ignore the awkward mask pasted onto her face.

Heart of Stone (I) (2023)

A good story gone limp

[3/10 · 28 August 2023]

Basically, this is a John Henry story. It's about the heroic human in competition against the machines that can ostensibly do the job better. Unfortunately, the story has no purchase because rather than a steam drill, which we can get our head around, the machine is a supercomputer of enormous but ill-defined power. It can do everything that helps the plot along, but it's not good enough to give you any help that would spoil the plot by solving problems prematurely. And meanwhile, the heroes and villains can dodge bullets and burn rubber to the point where there seem to be no rules underlying the action. Someone should tell the writers that what makes Superman interesting isn't that he can do anything, it's that there are things that we realize even he can't do. Granted, though, from time to time the Heart of Stone surprises us with an accident that obstructs the heroes-- at least momentarily.

Like Gal Gadot's previous Netflix movie Red Notice, this one is said to be the start of a possible franchise starring Gadot as a hard-fighting protagonist (although stuntwomen are obviously doing all the physically demanding work in both movies). But I think Heart of Stone's chances of successfully starting a franchise are even less than Red Notice's chances.

The Stronghold (2023)

Apparently it's really a TV miniseries

[8/10 · 8 August 2023]

According to a review I read, this movie will be shown on TV, in expanded form, as a miniseries but really should be seen on the big screen for the sake of impact. I don't agree; even though the line between TV and cinema is increasingly blurring, the photography here is TV photography... not much graphical complexity to the scenes. Lots of close-ups. And in fact, you can even spot a couple of cuts that are obviously for commercial breaks.

The background of the plot is familiar, at least to many Israelis. (And the story is true down to the names of the characters.) The Yom Kippur War takes the country by surprise and Israeli soldiers are left to fend for themselves at bases overlooking the Suez Canal because the army has more to do than it can handle. Surrounded by enemy troops and with help unavailable, is it better to go down fighting or to surrender? The movie emphasizes two complications: Among the Israeli soldiers, many are wounded and important medical supplies have run out. If the situation drags on, they'll die. But on the other hand, soldiers who surrender themselves will not be surrendering to a merciful regime.

The setup of the dilemma takes a long time, and until the debate about it begins, there seems to be little interesting characterization of the soldiers (other than the protagonist). Maybe the TV version will have more.

One chronic problem of war movies like this is that if any dialogue is to exist, the noise must be reduced to an unrealistically low level. Here, that's particularly true in the makeshift clinic full of wounded men.

In the end, and I'll call this a spoiler because not everyone knows the history, the soldiers surrender and their captors immediately set about beating them up. The truth is soft-pedaled, actually; we don't get to see how long and cruelly the soldiers actually were abused. But it's clear that the movie is meant to make us side with the notion of saving lives by surrendering.

The Future (I) (2023)

Don't expect science fiction

[4/10 · 1 August 2023]

This movie's premise includes a little super-advanced science, but the science is just the key that's turned to start the engine of the plot and never touched again. Basically, what we have is a movie about failure. The writer/director has said that it's based partly on the inadequacy of the male-dominated social order. It also implies (don't blame this on me, I'm just reporting the movie) the failure of Jewish Israelis to strike firm roots in the land their families have returned to and the failure of the Arabs to honor their own roots from generation to generation. There are also failures, by the individual characters, to connect on a personal level. To provide a little relief in the form of humor or excitement, there is... virtually nothing. We can admire some lovely scenery around the beginning, and we can appreciate the acting-- although here and there the dubbing is a little clumsy. It's very good to see Reymonde Amsallem in a starring role; she should have more of them. But the movie is heavy with despair, or even hostility, regarding today's society. It's a downer.

The 90s - The Revelry (2023)

For fans of the characters, this is more of the same

[3/10 · 25 July 2023]

It all started with a nostalgic TV comedy series called The 80s, which recalled simpler times in Israel and was heavy on reminders of fads and items we'd almost forgotten from those days. But like other comedies the go on for season after season, the series eventually became a embarrassingly far-fetched. Then it was succeeded by The 90s, with the same characters, but the opportunity for evoking a different decade didn't return the series any closer to the underlying believability that had given it its heart to begin with. Now we have a movie, and aside from references to the First Gulf War, there's almost nothing to tie it to the decade it's set in. But most of the characters from the series take part, and audience who have come to enjoy them will see them doing their familiar schtick in another far-fetched plot. To the movie's credit, though, a couple of the most sketchy characters from the TV show are rounded out a little in the movie.