George Clooney stars in The Men who Stare at Goats.
GEORGE Clooney’s latest film, The Men Who Stare at Goats, is based on the non-fiction novel of the same name by influential Jewish Gonzo journalist-cum-author John Ronson.
Ronson spent years researching the US military’s attempts to harness paranormal and psychic powers for use in battle and inspired a documentary series.
The Men Who Stare at Goats is a screwball comedy played out by an all-star cast including Clooney, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey and Ewan McGregor.
Small-town newspaper reporter Bob Wilton (McGregor) goes to Iraq to prove a point to his wife, who left him for his editor. Waiting for clearance in Kuwait, he meets Lyn Cassady (Clooney), a retired army man who claims he was part of the First Earth Battalion, an outfit which experimented with psychic and paranormal warfare.
Through flashback and voiceover, it is revealed that the leader of the group is Vietnam veteran Bill Django, a hippy looking for meaning in a vision that came to him after he was shot on a tour of duty. Read the full story
JEWISH films and filmmakers were largely overlooked at the 2010 Academy Awards, with frontrunners Inglourious Basterds and Up In The Air taking home just one Oscar from 14 nominations between them.
The night was billed as a shootout between James Cameron’s Avatar – the highest grossing film of all time – and Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War action film Hurt Locker. But Cameron’s epic was taken to the cleaners by his ex-wife as Bigelow became the first female director to win the Best Director award.
It was one of six wins for the hit movie, including Best Film and Best Original Screenplay. Avatar managed just three awards, with no wins in any of the major categories.
Austrian actor Christoph Waltz took out the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the “Jew Hunter” Colonel Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds, but it was the only win from eight nominations for the film about a group of Jewish soldiers who brutalise Nazis in occupied France.
It was a red-letter night for Jewish producer Fisher Stevens, whose film The Cove won in the Best Documentary Feature category. The film exposed the wholesale slaughter of dolphins at a Japanese cove in Taiji. Read the full story
THE Academy Awards will be announced in Hollywood on Sunday, March 7 (Monday afternoon Australian time) and as always there are plenty of movies with Jewish filmmakers or themes in the running.
It’s been a long time coming for legendary actress Lauren Bacall, who has received an honourary Oscar after close to 70 years in show business. The former wife of Humphrey Bogart and star of such iconic films as How to Marry a Millionaire, The Big Sleep and The Mirror Has Two Faces, Bacall is still acting at 85.
Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy about a group of Jewish soldiers that brutalise Nazis in occupied Paris, Inglourious Basterds, has eight nominations including best film, while Jewish director Jason Reitman’s Up In the Air received six nominations.
Christoph Waltz’s role as the nefarious Jew Hunter in Inglorious Basterds has earned him a nomination for Best Supporting Actor, while Jewish actress Maggie Gyllenhaal is up for Best Supporting Actress for her role opposite Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart. Read the full story
FILM REVIEW: FANTASTIC MR FOX
REVIEWED BY ADAM KAMIEN
CHILDREN’S books seem to be the new comics in Hollywood at the moment. Where The Wild Things Are, Horton Hears a Who, Coraline and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe have all been released during the past few years and Tim Burton is having a crack at Alice In Wonderland, due for release later this year.
To say that Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox is the best of the bunch is to grossly understate the matter.
While it is well known that Fantastic Mr Fox author Roald Dahl was no great friend of the Jews -– he is reported to have said “There’s a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity” – his children’s novels are universally loved.
And all the elements of Dahl’s 1970 novel are present in Anderson’s lovingly re-created stop-motion feature. It is magical, irreverent, darkly funny and affecting in the same way as the book, but make no mistake, this is a wholly original work. Read the full story
Brad Pitt (right) as Lt Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds about Jewish Nazi hunters. Photo: Francois Duhamel
ADAM KAMIEN
THERE are a host of Jews in line for Oscars when nominations for the 2010 Academy Awards were announced on Wednesday.
Four of the 10 films nominated for best picture have Jewish themes or filmmakers, with Inglourious Basterds, Up In The Air, An Education and A Serious Man all getting selected.
Maggie Gyllenhaal is in the running for her first Academy Award, after being nominated in the Best Actress in a Supporting Role category for her part in the acclaimed drama Crazy Heart.
Inglourious Basterds, Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy about a group of Jewish soldiers that brutalise Nazis, leads the Jewish charge with eight nominations overall, including Best Original Screenplay and Best Director.
Up In The Air, helmed by Jewish director Jason Reitman, garnered six nominations, including best direction and original screenplay. Read the full story
Nelson Mandela (Morgan Freeman) and Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon) in Invictus.
FILM REVIEW: INVICTUS
REVIEWED BY LEXI LANDSMAN
IT’S February 11, 1990. Anti-apartheid campaigner Nelson Mandela is freed from Victor-Verster Prison in South Africa after spending 27 years behind bars.
To the moving sounds of the Zulu folk song Shosholoza (Go forward) we see a team of white players, in crisp uniforms playing on a well-kept green field.
Across the road, a group of black youths wearing torn clothing are playing soccer with a tattered ball on a barren field.
A motorcade with Mandela passes the street separating them. The black youths run to the fence, peering out the wire cheering and chanting “Mandela”, while the white players slowly walk over and frown, their expressions unmoved. Their Afrikaner coach tells them: “Remember this day boys, this is the day our country went to the dogs.” Read the full story
FILM REVIEW: UP IN THE AIR
REVIEWED BY ADAM KAMIEN
IN Jason Reitman’s world there is no grey. In his latest film Up In The Air, he paints a bleak picture of dispassionate disconnect and hangs it all on social networking, emailing, text messaging and other nasty by-products of the free-market malaise.
But in Reitman’s world, the remedy is simple. Take a wife and get a dog, lest any man be an island.
Up In The Air is Reitman’s third film after Thank You For Smoking and Juno and tells the story of Ryan Bingham (George Clooney), a man who relishes his job flying around the US firing people.
He lives out of his carry-on luggage, in airports and hotels and keeps a sparse one-bedroom flat in Omaha, Nebraska, which he dreads.
He is a part-time motivational speaker, who extols his virtues of avoiding relationships and believes that “moving is living”. Read the full story
THE sleeper hit of the summer in Australia looks to be Jason Reitman’s (son of Jewish director Ivan Reitman) Up in the Air.
Starring George Clooney, the film garnered six Golden Globe nominations -– two more than any other film -– and is due out in limited release on January 13.
Other films worth noting include the political satire In the Loop, which will be released on January 21 and stars Jewish actor Anna Chlumsky, and the romantic comedy Did You Hear About the Morgans? starring Sarah Jessica Parker that opens on January 7.
Director Wes Anderson’s adaptation of the Roald Dahl classic children’s book, Fantastic Mr Fox, was released on January 1. The stop-motion animation stars Jewish actor Jason Schwartzman.
Brad Pitt (right) in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
AJN reviewer ADAM KAMIEN looks back at a bumper 2009 for Jewish-interest films and picks his top 10 movies of the year.
Star Trek
JJ ABRAMS could find the money to make a movie about monkeys playing tennis at the moment, and with good reason. Everything he touches turns to gold and 2009 was no exception, with the silver screen’s fastest rising star turning out the best popcorn flick of the past few years in Star Trek.
Just his second film after breathing life back into a flailing franchise with the thoroughly enjoyable Mission Impossible III, Abrams’ prequel to the adored sci-fi canon pulled off the seemingly impossible, pleasing all and sundry from the Klingon-speaking devotees to your average punter and everyone in between.
DOCUMENTARY The Sleeping Book, about the translation of a book first published by a Holocaust survivor in 1948, will be re-screened on ABC-TV’s Compass this week.
It tells of Melbourne ophthalmologist Henry Lew’s mission to revive a story written by Rafael Rajzner that meticulously described Bialystok, its 60,000 Jewish residents and their destruction by the Nazis.
The Sleeping Book follows Lew’s quest to have Rajzner’s work translated from its original Yiddish into English -– with the title The Stories our Parents Found too Painful to Tell -– in no conventional manner.
Lew appealed to the international Yiddish speaking community, sending 10 pages to people in countries all over the world. Read the full story
