A scene from the animated film, Fantastic Mr Fox.

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.
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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.”
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George Clooney in Up In The Air.

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”.
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Michael Gawenda. Photo: AJN file

BOOK REVIEW: PETER KOHN
Rocky And Gawenda: The Story Of A Man And His Mutt
By Michael Gawenda, Victory Books, Melbourne University Publishing, $24.99

WITH his trusty canine Rocky as his muse, esteemed Australian journalist Michael Gawenda has kept Crikey readers entertained from February to November this year through his blog, Rocky and Gawenda.

It has been a baby-boomer’s project -– even the title seems an allusion to that classic 1960s TV cartoon, Rocky and Bullwinkle.

The veteran former Age and Time editor now lectures in journalism and finally has enough hours on his hands for the introspective writing many journos yearn to create.

Gawenda’s blogs usually begin with his daily pre-dawn ritual of walking with Rocky along the St Kilda foreshore to watch the sunrise.
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Jewish actor Jesse Eisenberg (right) is chased by zombies in a scene from Zombieland.

FILM REVIEW: ZOMBIELAND
REVIEWED BY ADAM KAMIEN

WHEN George A Romero shocked movie-goers with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, he set a mark for zombie movies that is yet to be equalled, even by his own seemingly endless stream of sequels.

Jewish director Ruben Fleischer is the latest upstart to attempt a bold, new take on the undead oeuvre with his debut feature Zombieland, and while there are one or two aspects to like about his effort, the status quo is maintained.

The film takes place in the not-too-distant future in a world that is overrun with zombies. Through voice-over we learn that “patient zero” was infected after eating a dodgy Gas n’ Gulp burger.

Humans are an endangered species and the film follows four survivors who go by the names of their hometowns.
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Author Mark Dapin in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Photo: Ingrid Shakenovsky

BOOK REVIEW: RAPH BROUS
King Of The Cross
By Mark Dapin, Pan Macmillan, $32.99 (rrp)

THE Jewish gangster has long featured in the American cultural landscape, with real-life mobsters Bugsy Siegel, Longy Zwillman and Meyer Lansky inspiring fiction by celebrated Jewish authors from E L Doctorow to Philip Roth.

Genre crime writing works best when portraying a city’s seedy underbelly: think James Elroy’s Los Angeles, James Lee Burke’s New Orleans or Carl Hiassen’s Miami. To these literary locales, we can now add Mark Dapin’s Sydney.

King of the Cross, Dapin’s debut novel, tells the life story of Jacob Mendoza, the Jewish underworld supremo of Kings Cross.

Unmistakably modelled upon the late “Boss of the Cross” Abe Saffron, Mendoza is a colourful, unhinged narrator whose lewdness is matched by the brutality of his exploits.
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BOOK REVIEW: BERNARD RECHTER
My Dear Friends: The Life Of Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger, By Rabbi Dr John Levi

WHEN, in 1936, Rabbi Dr Herman Sanger arrived in Melbourne, he found himself conducting services for a small group of non-Orthodox worshippers in the hired Parish Hall of Christ Church, St Kilda.

It was an inauspicious beginning to a significant phenomenon in Australian Judaism.

In writing the biography of a man who became a much-admired public figure, Rabbi Dr John Levi has undertaken a challenging task, not least because he became the subject’s rabbinic successor.

He has produced an absorbing and frank insider’s account of a rabbi who proved to be a catalyst in fashioning a miniscule congregation of breakaways from Orthodox Judaism, into a major element of Australia’s Jewish religious and communal life.

The new arrival possessed the personal, intellectual, moral and oratorical skills much needed by the community in times of Nazism, war and the Holocaust.
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A scene from Haim Tabakman’s Eyes Wide Open.

FILM REVIEW: EYES WIDE OPEN
REVIEWED BY CHANTAL ABITBOL

NO doubt some will find elements of Haim Tabakman’s debut feature film Eyes Wide Open confronting.

But the controversial film about homosexual forbidden love in Jerusalem’s insular ultra-Orthodox community is a charged and well-executed drama. Backed by strong performances and a nuanced script, the film successfully breaks down taboos, while delicately exploring the clash between desire and belief.

The film, which was recently screened as part of the 2009 Festival of Jewish Cinema, charts the path of the happily married kosher butcher Aaron (Zohar Strauss) who falls in love with the young religious outcast Ezri (Ran Danker) when he turns up at Aaron’s shop one rainy day with nowhere to go.

Aaron quickly offers Ezri refuge, giving him a job and a place to stay above his shop until Ezri finds his feet.
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A scene from the Coen brothers’ new film A Serious Man.

FILM REVIEW: A SERIOUS MAN
REVIEWED BY ADAM KAMIEN

THE Coens aren’t romantics, this we know. Even the love stories the pair has tackled in its 14-film career have been tragic, cynical and usually doomed.

But with their latest offering, A Serious Man, Joel and Ethan Coen plumb new, denuded depths, with mixed results.

Set in 1967, in a Minnesota suburb, the film charts the travails of physics professor Larry Gupnik (Michael Stuhlbarg in his first major role).

Larry’s wife Judith (Sari Lennick) leaves him for excruciating patroniser Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed), his socially retarded brother Arthur (Richard Kind) is living on his couch, his daughter is stealing money from his wallet to save up for a nose job, his son is smoking pot instead of practising for his bar mitzvah and the promotion he so desperately wants seems less and less likely with each passing day.
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Israeli pianist and composer Yoni Rechter.

CONCERT: YONI RECHTER
REVIEWED BY DALIA SABLE

MELBOURNE’S Classic Cinema was transformed into a recital hall when musician and composer Yoni Rechter entertained the crowds at his first Melbourne concert.

Rechter brought the house down with his rich voice and expert keyboard playing, punctuated by his casual comments and audience interaction.

At the concert earlier this month he spoke to the audience in a mixture of English and Hebrew, with many calling out words to help translate his Hebrew conversation, while others laughed at Rechter’s comments as though they were sharing a joke with an old friend.

Rechter was joined on stage at first by a guitarist, bassist and drummer and, after a few songs, by two female vocalists and a male vocalist, who also played acoustic guitar.

The band clearly had experience playing together as they harmonised and worked off each other.
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