Critique the critics

I know I promised something on friendship, and there is more and more "research" material piling up daily, but I'll start with something else.

As I left home today for the gym, I noticed that I had inadvertently left my BlackBerry® at home. I know, Maryam, it's a big source of shame, but I'm a relative newbie. This is only relevant because following my workout, I rode my bike to Chestnut Hill Café, Lancaster's haven of sanity (or insanity, if that's what you like best). Not having my handheld device on which to tweet, e-mail, text and play Sudoku or Word Mole, I resorted to whatever section of the New York Times happened to have been left on one of the tables.

It was the film review section. Now, a handful of my dozen followers may recall that I had dabbled in some reviewing of silver screen productions on this very blog, but today I'll do something much wilder. I will attempt to review three reviews of films I have not yet seen. I'm sure this has been done before. I've never read such a piece, but I don't care enough to google it and check.

The review of Woody Allen's new film, Whatever Works, was as entertaining as it was (expectedly) annoying. Critics love comparing any of the former Mr. Konigsberg's newest works to any number of his olden ones. They also occasionally compare him to other directors and accuse him of not being as good as the directors they argue he was trying to imitate. Now I agree that Annie Hall was fuckin' awesome. So fuckin' what? I also loved most of the Almodóvar films I've seen, with or without Penéleope Cruz. But when I watch a Woody Allen movie, I consider it a genre of its own. I guess Almodóvar is another of those genre-of-his-own directors. Robert Altman sure is (when my mother and I were watching A Prairie Home Companion, she leaned over and said, "it's just like Nashville!" to which I replied, "all of his films [e.g., Prêt-à-Porter, Gosford Park] are like Nashville – shit, don't you hate my digressions?).

So here comes A. O. Scott in the NYT with another mediocre review of a Woody flick (great title, I'll give him that: "Kvetch Your Enthusiasm"). And it's shot in Manhattan again (after a few European-shot films, in case you've been under a rock, no offense) and has Larry David as the Woody-like character. Conclusion: a must-see.

The next two I'm less passionate about, but their less-than-perfect reviews have convinced me that I will probably enjoy them.

On The Narrows, Stephen Holden writes that it "can be appreciated as the film equivalent of a reasonably palatable pasta dish concocted from a familiar recipe and served in a no-frills restaurant." Now have I ever turned down a decent fettucine carbonara? A nondescript, yet yummy lasagne? From what it seems, this is another New York movie, one of those that spans more than one borough, has a slightly more masculine than, Leo DiCaprio-looking adorable star, and promises some tension between blue-collar street smarts and ivory-tower goofiness. I'll go see it, I think.

Finally, the only movie I actually had known about before reading today's Times, and one that got probably the most decent review of all three (by Manohla Dargis), Year One. While Ms. Dargis digs up other, more "classic" pseudo-(pre-)historic films, by such geniuses as Mel Brooks, here's one thing about this movie that makes it a priori hilarious: Jack Black and Michael Cera in the leading roles.

I know a lot of people think JB is vulgar, that he overacts, and for those and/or other reasons simply hate his guts. Michael Cera, I guess some people might call him a fad, a fluke, a soon-to-be-has-been. But here's what I see. Jack Black as the anti-hero in School of Rock and as (the anti-?)Christ in Prop 8 – The Musical. And MC not only as the awkward son of the Jason Bateman character in Arrested Development, not only as the complex geek/jock/stud(???) in Juno, but also as a character in and of his own. Just go to YouTube and type his name for some gems. So there you go, a few shallow reasons to see these two in action, together.

Okay, enough of this pop-culture nonsense. I'll be back in a bit with the serious goods.

Two and half films

Despite the war and the need to protest, and before traveling to Jordan, I had a few opportunities to spend some quality time with my mother. That usually means driving her to the doctor (and in one case, the ER; she’s all right now), going with her to IKEA – and other furniture stores – and an occasional trip to the movies. If memory serves me right, we saw three films. The first was a new Israeli feature called hakol matxil bayam ‘It All Begins at Sea.’ It is a tender family drama, which could have been set anywhere in the world really, except it is set in Ashkelon, one of the cities at which – a day or two after we saw the film – Hamas began aiming some of its rockets in retaliation for the criminal acts of the Israeli government. I actually remember the chills I felt when they announced these firings on the news. Ashkelon has usually been a quiet town, far from the spotlights, and here I was, within days, watching a movie set there and then hearing about it on the news.

But I really wanted to write about two other films we saw in Tel Aviv. One of them I had wanted to see as soon as I saw the previews for it at one of the Ritz theaters in Philadelphia. The original title is Entre les murs ‘Between the Walls’, though in English it’s distributed as The Class. The second is an American film called The Visitor.

I knew much more about the premise of the French film than about the American one. It’s set in an inner-city Paris school, in which immigrants and offspring of immigrants outnumber ethnic French kids. It follows their homeroom and French teacher, an attractive thirty-something single guy (of course both the students and yours truly wondered whether he was gay; I won’t spoil it for you with an answer to that question), who was not really trained or mentally prepared for such a diverse – and critical – audience. What I didn’t know about The Visitor was that it, too, revolved around a teacher, or rather a professor in a small college, and that there was some (a lot, in fact) of Middle Eastern content in it.

So both Entre les murs and The Visitor turned out to be very relevant to my own life. And while the protagonists of both films were very different from one another, I couldn’t help but finding bits and pieces of myself in both of them.

At first glance, Entre les murs promises to be yet another To Sir, with Love or Lean on Me. I, however, was relieved to see very little trace of Sidney Poitier or Morgan Freeman in the character of François (actor/co-writer François Bégaudeau). I have nothing against either of the two educational maverick precursor movies, but To Sir is a classic that was good for its time and place, and one Lean was enough. What we see in Entre is the real deal. My mother commented after the credits were over – virtually all the characters share the first names of their respective actors – that it was almost a documentary. We’ve all heard about racial and ethnic tensions in Western Europe, but few of us – in Israel or the US – have had the chance to be the flies on the walls of these tense communities. Entre allowed us a shot at that.

Entre also “keeps it real” by depicting a non-heroic teacher. Some kids like and respect him; others hate his guts; many others couldn’t give a damn. He’s intelligent, has good instincts and responds with wit and respect to his students’ mischief and skepticism, but also gets himself and others in trouble doing the clumsy things that most of us might easily find ourselves doing under pressure. Watching him, I kept waiting for the magic moment in which he’d shine in all his glory and win the proverbial Teacher-of-the-year trophy, but was delighted never to witness such a development.

The Visitor is perhaps a bit more complex. Just this week I had brief discussions about it with two colleagues. With Susan Dicklitch, who teaches a course at F&M titled Human Rights/Human Wrongs, dealing extensively with the issue of political asylum, the title of the movie came up, since it, too, has asylum at its core (or one of its cores). Alan Caniglia, who is a senior associate dean of the faculty at F&M, brought the movie up while we were riding a van from a workshop we attended last weekend at Gettysburg College. The focus of the discussion with him was the personality of the professor (played exquisitely by Richard Jenkins of Six Feet Under fame; he was the dead father).

One of the opening scenes reminded me how ridiculous we can be with all our rules and regulations. A timid student enters the professor’s office with a late paper. The professor refuses to accept it. The student “reminds” the professor that he has yet to distribute the syllabus for the class. “I know,” replies the professor. Plagiarism comes up, at least covertly, when the professor reluctantly agrees to present a paper that carries his name as a co-author, even though his junior colleague had written it all by herself. Somehow we (well, not all of us) allow ourselves the luxury of this double standard. Until we realize we’re hurting ourselves as much as we’re hurting our students. Hmm, do I see an analogy to the war on Gaza? The war in Iraq?

Here, too, immigrants are part of the picture –  “illegal” immigrants, in this case. I’d like to say undocumented, but it is precisely because they chose a certain form of documenting their presence in this country that poses a problem. I’ll say no more. Go rent the DVD (Alan tells me it’s on Netflix).

So there you go, two films (three if you count the prologue). If you’re a teacher or a professor or a linguist or care about human rights, I recommend you watch them. They’re both complex in their simplicity and will leave you thinking – but also feeling (my shrink would be proud of me for making this distinction) – for a long time.

Just a couple more words on translation:

1. I would have preferred that the first film be translated ‘It All Begins at the Beach,’ though there is some merit to the current translation.
2. I find it curious that the Israeli distributors decided to give the French film a Hebrew title faithful to the original: ben ha-kirot.
3. The Visitor: who is visiting whom? The answer is up for grabs. Of the four main characters, any and all could be deemed as such. Hebrew suffers from a deficit in that it is a gendered language. Thus, the Hebrew ha-oreax (literally, ‘the visitor/guest–masc.’) inherently misses the point and precludes at least the two female characters from being candidates for the title role.

A film review and more

So this is not the post I was previewing last time, but as Maryam said, it’s the end of the semester, the beginning of my three-week trip to the Middle East, and I’m in a packed plane with no access to the Internet, which I’d need to write about news and their depiction in the media.

These lines are written from 35 thousand feet above the Atlantic, south-southwest of Reykjavik and west of Dublin, if you believe in the accuracy of the digital map in the screen above my head. By the way, the graphic on these things finally looks like something from the 21st century, unlike the Apple IIe-like images of yesteryear. In the tagline following the title of this blog I mention that I’d like to have a talk show. Two other things on my wish list are to be a travel agent and to write an occasional film review. So what better opportunity than writing a review of a movie I’ve just watched on one of El Al’s newest Boeing 777s en route from Newark to Tel Aviv!

The film is Mamma Mia. And unlike many members of my gay cohort I did not go see it when it was out in the theaters a few months ago. This was partly due to my laziness, partly because I was in the midst of moving back to Philadelphia, and perhaps underlyingly because I had seen the musical on a London stage several years ago, and was severely unimpressed. But I’m on a ten (plus)-hour flight, and I have a video-on-demand system (VOD it’s called in my homeland and its somewhat provincial national airline) and my new Bose noise-canceling headphones, and the woman in the window seat told me Mamma Mia was one of the options, so after finishing an episode of the Israeli version of Americal Idol, I turned to Meryl Streep and Pierce Brosnan and their fellow actors-turned-singers for what ended up being a refreshing two hours.

“Refreshing” doesn’t really cut it. I dare not call it “thought-provoking”, but it was somewhere in between for me. Maybe even “emotion-stimulating”.

Let me back up. I like to say I’m from Tel Aviv, but I’m really from a fairly affluent suburb just north of the city called Herzliyya. The city itself is quite diverse, but the western portion of town, within a mile or so from the Mediterranean shore, is quite hoidy toidy. This is not to imply that my family is particularly wealthy, but more to provide some background as to the type of society I grew up among. Many of my friends came from much richer families, but we were educated, well-traveled, and despite my parents’ socialist upbringing (mostly because of the youth movements they were in, not quite from their parents), we were very much Americanized in many of our ways.

Americanized, but within a provincial setting with one TV station broadcasting in black and white (until the mid 1980s). In order to get some color on our screen we had to tune our sets to one of the two Jordanian channels, and even with our rooftop antennas our reception of those was pretty staticky.

So on the one hand, my friends and I would go to the Scouts (co-ed in Israel) and build tents out of blankets, pebbles and rope and roast our own potatoes in campfires in the woods of Mt. Carmel of in the sand dunes that once existed just east of our own beach. But on many a Friday night we’d have parties. Now I’m talking about 1979-1980, when I was in third and fourth grades. Honestly, that was the peak of my social life until much much later. Occasionally we’d have parties to which the entire class would be invited. Usually birthday parties (maybe because “the more the merrier” was interpreted “the more kids, the more gifts, the merrier the birthday child”). But the real fun parties were much more exclusive. We’d hand-pick the invitees, and different parties sometimes had different people. Yet there was a core of kids that we called “the society”, and I was always in that group. I was even in a smaller “quintet”, which included my best friend Ron, his girlfriend Fafi (who during that time became the mayor’s daughter), her best friend Ortal, my girlfriend at the time (yes, yes; my one and only ever girlfriend) Shelly and your humble servant.

How is this related to Mamma Mia, you ask? I have one word for you: ABBA. That was our music. We’d listen to it on our turntables and later Walkmans. We’d dance to it. We’d compete getting each new album as it came out. To be fair, the Village People and some instances of the Eurovision Song Contest also played significant roles in our pre-pubescent cultural lives, but ABBA just wouldn’t leave.

For many years, when I was closeted in particular, I’d try to repress my nostalgic passion for ABBA. I knew this kind of schmaltzy music had become a huge part of stereotypical gay pop culture (along, surprise surprise, with the other two components I just mentioned). And even in the 2-3 years after I came out, I still tried to shy away from being perceived as a nelly gay boy. I guess I’ve evolved since.

If you haven’t watched the movie or the London/Broadway musical on which it is based, the plot really doesn’t matter one bit. Basically it’s an excuse to sing some of the songs that our favorite Swedes (pardon me, IKEA, you’re number two, at best) have written, sung, and made a legend of. A schmaltzy story was made up, in which the schmaltzy songs make half a sense, and every moment is a blend of actors making fun of themselves, ABBA (the two guys in the band, who wrote all of the songs, are behind the production) parodying itself, and the audience making fun of everyone. But unlike the stage production, I actually had fun watching the movie.

Watching the film, I found myself naïvely drawing an analogy between ABBA and The Beatles. At the same time, I knew it was blasphemous of me to even consider that the two groups had even remotely the same kind of impact on anyone. Well, anyone except perhaps myself. I’m a bit too young to be a Beatles fan, but I am a fairly avid one. I’m too old (or am I?) to distinguish between Britney and Paris and all those. I’m supposed to be too culturally sophisticated to think anything of ABBA.

Buy fuck it, if Meryl Streep can have fun with it, I’m in! Now understand, Meryl Streep for me will always be the mother from Kramer vs. Kramer. It was the first film I’ve seen her in, around the same time I was listening to Dancing Queen and dancing to Voulez-vous. Pierce Brosnan is 007. In reality, “my” James Bond has always been Roger Moore. But let’s face it, Brosnan is Moore. Streep sings well in the film. Not as well as some critics have claimed, but movingly well. Brosnan sucks at singing. She’s the proverbial American Idol second runner-up that everyone likes but couldn’t help not vote for at the very end. He’s the guy who wouldn’t make it past the Wasilla auditions. But at the end of the day, (plot-spoiler ahead!) what could be more charming, in the schmaltziest way, than poor divorced ex-Mrs. Kramer marrying a retired Commander Bond on a Greek island full of American, British and Swedish tourists?

I have to give credit where it is due. The real artistic stars are actresses Julie Walters and Christine Baranski. They both combine their imperfect singing with exquisite comedic acting that overshadows the flaws of their singing. In fact, in the case of Walters, one wonders whether her voice naturally sounds like Janis Joplin on Vicodin or whether she’s doing it to make a point. And Baranski is just fabulous. Pereiod.

I’ll end with this. I wonder how long it’ll take for Streep to become the next Barbra. Both as a campy gay icon and as a sort of jack of all trades (but by no means master of none). Somehow we seem to love the singer who can act (Cher!) and direct (Streisand). So why not love the actress who can carry a tune and remind us of our childhood, which was innocent, yet daring? On that note, I can’t wait to see Doubt, Streep’s (and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s) “serious” movie. I think it’s due in a theater near you any day now.

Oh, and a cute provincial artifact as a PS: movies in Israel are subtitled, not dubbed. The songs in this film were translated in rhyme.