Permanent Adolescence

This review was first published on InterfaithFamily.com on Feb. 27, 2009.

You wouldn’t know it from the trailer, but Two Lovers is one of the most spot-on portraits of modern Jewish life to come along in years. Then again, the trailer doesn’t tell you much of anything about this quietly powerful film. Movies that capture the nuances of real relationships don’t lend themselves to catchy marketing.

Isabella Roselini and Joaquin Phoenix in a scene from Two Lovers.

Directed by James Gray (We Own The Night), Two Lovers tells the story of Leonard Kraditor (Joaquin Phoenix, Jewish on his mom’s side), a mentally unbalanced Jewish man who is torn between the woman his parents want him to like (Vanissa Shaw) and a mysterious non-Jewish neighbor (Gwyneth Paltrow, Jewish on her father’s side). The setting is Brighton Beach, one of the most Jewish zip codes in the country. Leonard lives with his parents, owners of a dry cleaning business. He spends his days sleeping, working for his father and popping pills to fend off his chronic depression.

An Interview with Edward Zwick

This interview was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Jan. 16, 2009.

For a review of Defiance, see Unheralded Heroes of the Holocaust.

Edward Zwick is Jewish, but that is hardly a litmus test for what projects he takes.

"It informs who I am psychically, characterologically, morally, ethically, spiritually," the 56-year-old director says. "It is a strong influence, but it is by no means a solitary influence."

The Unheralded Heroes of the Holocaust

This review was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Jan. 16, 2009.

Also see my interview with Edward Zwick.

Is there any purer pleasure in war film than watching Nazis get shot?

Devoted to the thematic orthodoxy that "war is hell," modern war films offer few guiltless pleasures. What joys there are are usually small: comrades from different social strata bonding during a break from battle, soldiers finding some foodstuff that would barely qualify as a delicacy in peacetime, the hero returning from the front with his arms and legs intact.

Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Mix

This review was originally published on InterfaithFamily.com on Oct. 10, 2008. Also, in the interest of full disclosure, Jenny Rapaport of Lit Soup pointed out that Norah says “minion,” not “minyan,” as I claim. Oops.

About halfway through Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Norah (Kat Dennings) makes an offhand comment to Nick (Michael Cera) that left me floored–and probably made no impression on the rest of the audience. As they engage in an awkward tarry of flirt-and-retreat, flirt-and-retreat, they exchange information about their post-high school plans: Nick is going to Berklee School of Music in Boston, and Norah is going to Brown, 50 miles away in Providence, R.I. Her eyes staring at the floor, Norah mutters about their future proximity, "I really wouldn’t mind getting away from my minyan duties."

The Zohan Cometh

This review was originally published, in slightly different form, on InterfaithFamily.com, on June 6, 2008.

Adam Sandler comedies come in two varieties: mediocre and awful. In the mediocre ones (Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer, etc.), he plays an exaggerated version of himself: bashful, sarcastic, prone to temper tantrums. In the awful ones, he attempts to stretch his range, usually adopting an unbearable accent, and fails. By all rights, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan should have a pedestal reserved for it in the pantheon of crap next to Little Nicky and The Waterboy. Yet, defying all laws of modern comedy, this silly movie about an Israeli commando who comes to America to become a hairdresser isn’t awful. In fact, it’s nearly great.

Tarantino is Wasting His Talent

Mark Harris, of Entertainment Weekly, has written a great column about how Quentin Tarantino has been making homages to bad movies not many people really liked–or watched–for going on a decade and a half now. I couldn’t agree more; Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are masterpieces but everything after (I’ll exclude Grindhouse, because I haven’t seen it yet) has been of dubious quality. The movies are too long, the dialogue needs serious editing, the storytelling isn’t remotely as tight, well-paced and inventive as his first two films. Worst of all, he seems to have completely lost the knack for creating believable characters. His movies aren’t about people anymore; they’re about B-movie cliches, and while that might be entertaining, it makes it hard to care.

My favorite line from Harris’ column?

His fixation on 1970s subgenres has now lasted longer than the 1970s themselves.

The Sopranos Season 6B Premiere

After the incredibly disappointing way that last season disintegrated, I did not have high hopes for the season premiere of The Sopranos. (Although technically this is not a new season. It is actually referred to as Season 6B. Last season was Season 6A.) If there was ever any doubt, last, um, season confirmed that David Chase is intellectually allergic to narrative closure and has a disregard for the viewer that borders on pathological. Nonetheless, few characters in fictional history are as interesting as Tony Soprano, so I was obligated to watch another torturous, frustrating, occasionally brilliant season. It’s all going to end in utter crap, of course, but I have to see this thing through to its bitter end.

All that being said, I was pleasantly surprised by Sunday’s premiere. There was little in overall plot advancement, but I’m fine with that. Seemingly major events never have much payoff on this show anyway. No, this episode was a little gem, a tangent episode in its own way, about Tony and Carmela’s trip to Bobby and Janice’s lakehouse in upstate New York. As has been demonstrated numerous times in the past, The Sopranos writers are particularly inspired when they take their characters out of their suburban milieu.

The Ending of Pan’s Labyrinth

SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT******SPOILER ALERT

Now that’s out of the way…

I was going to write a full review of Pan’s Labyrinth, but time constraints and laziness got in the way. Besides, what more is there to say? I agree with the other critics. It’s a masterpiece. So I thought I’d focus on the ending, which popular critics are barred from discussing.

The Best Movie of 1946?

I’d been hearing great things about The Best Years of Our Lives for years. It’s gotten a little bit of a bad rap in some circles as the movie that beat out It’s a Wonderful Life for best picture in 1947, but that shouldn’t take away from what is a classic in its own right.

Inspired by a story in Life magazine, The Best Years of Our Lives is about three veterans who return from World War II and have trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. One is a captain in the airforce (Dana Andrews), one is an older man, a sergeant in the Army (Fredric March), and the other is a young kid, a former Navy man who lost his hands in a ship fire (Harold Russell). They meet on a military plane flying them from Long Beach back home to Boon City, one of those make-believe Hollywood cities that probably was shot on the same lot as It’s A Wonderful Life. You know the kind–it has an airport, numerous bars, a bustling downtown, rich areas and poor areas, but somehow, whenever you walk down the street, you bump into somebody you know. Small-town intimacy with big-city amenities. God bless Hollywood.

Strange Magic?

It’s commonplace to refer to the magic of movies, but, as arts, movies and magic have little in common. Movies ask us to suspend our disbelief. Magic courts our disbelief. Puzzling over how a movie did what it did is, at best, a subsidiary pleasure of watching a movie. Puzzling over how a magician does his tricks is more often than not the only pleasure of watching a magic show.

Magic, in the sense of a magician’s performance art, does not hold up well when transferred from stage to fictional film. An effect that is astonishing on stage becomes pedestrian on screen. (There’s a reason nearly every kind of celebrity in America has been in the movies, except magicians. We know how the tricks are done in movies.)

The trick, so to speak, that any good movie about magic must pull off is to create a reality so believable that we’re willing to buy into the magic. We need to be so engulfed in the film’s reality that we watch the magic tricks like the spectators in the film, not the spectators in the film’s audience. Like sports movies, movies about magic must be totally convincing just to be good.