Quentin Tarantino shows love for Israeli film

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

 by Jana Banin, JTA

Director Quentin Tarantino has a new addition to his recently posted list of 2013′s top films, and this one’s an Israeli import.

After a recent screening of Aharon Keshales’ and Navot Papushado’s “Big Bad Wolves” at the Busan International Film Festival in South Korea, the man behind “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” called it “not only the best film of Busan” but the “best film of the year,” The Jersusalem Post reports.

In the thriller, a series of child murders brings together three men: a victim’s father, a vigilante cop and the suspect, a religious studies teacher.

Check out the seriously dark, seriously engaging trailer here:

Three films with Israeli ties angling for Oscar

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Submissions for nomination in the Best Foreign Language category include an Israeli film, a Palestinian film and a Filipino film about Israeli migrants

By Debra Kamin for The Times of Israel
Three of the films in the running for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year have ties to Israel. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday announced the full list of nations that had submitted a movie for consideration in the category. Seventy-six applicants, including 73 countries, plus Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Palestinian Territories, are angling for the honor. A shortlist of five official nominees will be announced in January.

Three of the films in the running for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film this year have ties to Israel.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Tuesday announced the full list of nations that had submitted a movie for consideration in the category. Seventy-six applicants, including 73 countries, plus Hong Kong, Taiwan and the Palestinian Territories, are angling for the honor. A shortlist of five official nominees will be announced in January.

Israel, which has secured 10 nominations for Best Foreign Language film in its history but has never had a win, is trying its luck again this year with Yuval Adler’s “Bethlehem,” which explores a difficult relationship between a Shin Bet agent and a Palestinian teenager. The gritty political drama has done well at film festivals around the world, and nabbed trophies for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Director and Best Screenplay at Israel’s own version of the Oscars, the Ophir Awards.

Hany Abu-Assad, a Nazareth-born director who holds an Israeli passport but identifies himself as a Palestinian, has also earned honors for his sweeping love story “Omar,” which is competing as the Palestinian entry for nomination. The Palestinian Ministry of Culture has submitted films for consideration in the category under the Palestinian flag since 2003, with Abu-Assad’s first film, “Paradise Now,” making it onto the shortlist of official nominees in 2005. Like Israel, no film from “Palestine” has ever won the coveted gold statue.

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'Jewtopia' - shtick, stereotypes and all

The film rehashes familiar territory: Jews are loud, overbearing and uninhibited, and the goyim can’t get enough of it.

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays. Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

By Malina Saval for Haaretz

What do Chinese waitresses, vaginoplasty and hunting rifles have in common? They all figure into plot points in "Jewtopia," a romantic comedy in which a Jew helps his gentile friend pretend to be a member of the tribe so he can land the local rabbi's hot daughter.

The film is loosely based on writer-director-producer Bryan Fogel's hit off-Broadway play of the same name (both were cowritten by Sam Wolfson). The cinematic version draws on the play's general premise — Jewish guy who likes to chase Asian skirts pimps out gentile best friend on JDate — but with some twists. Here the gentile blue-collar laborer wants the sassy, confident Jewish girl while the neurotic nebbish with a toehold in the family embroidery business feels suffocated by his pushy Jewish fiancée, a top-rated gynecologist.

“In the movie, we realized the JDate thing is done, that dressing up as a Hasidic Jew and all this absurdist comedy that worked so well on the stage, as a movie would be a farce,” explains Fogel, who starred in the original stage version but preferred to stay behind the camera for the film. “About 20 percent of the play is the movie, and the rest was a reimagining of how to take that concept and the cultural aspect and turn it into something that would work for the big screen.”

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These Mean Streets Are In Beirut

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays.  Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Eran Riklis’ ‘Zaytoun’ is an homage to Martin Scorsese.

by George Robinson, Special to the Jewish Week

It would not surprise me if the daily reviews for “Zaytoun,” Eran Riklis’ new film which opens on Sept. 20, chide the Israeli filmmaker for sentimentalizing the film’s central relationship. The movie traces the slowly growing friendship between Yoni (Stephen Dorff), a downed Israeli flyer, and his erstwhile captor Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee who helps him escape captivity during the first Lebanon War. As the pair move from open enmity to tough love and eventually to mutual respect, it would be easy to overlook the intelligent emotional distance with which Riklis treats them, to mistake the film for an easy celebration of the Rodney King-can’t-we-all-get-along school of ineffectual good will.

In reality, Riklis treats the material with enough detachment and wry humor to keep it from becoming a runny treacle bun of a movie. He starts in the very first moment, a vertiginous and lengthy tracking shot that immediately establishes the universe in which Fahed lives: the shattered streets of Beirut, the kaleidoscope of street vendors, scruffy kids and men with guns that is his environment. Riklis keeps both the camera and his cast moving, never letting us settle into a single viewpoint for more than a few seconds.

“I wanted to do two things with that shot,” Riklis said in an interview last month. “I wanted to grab you and take you into this world. And I wanted to open with a big, energetic statement of style, to say, ‘Hey, you’re entering the cinema!’”

The result is a more expansive visual style than is seen in much of his other work; that shot is an homage, he says, to early Martin Scorsese films like “Mean Streets.”

The bravura entrance also reflects Riklis’ image of Beirut in the early ’80s.

“That kind of energy has a lot to do with Beirut in those days,” he said. “It’s also important that in the first 12 minutes of so of the film there would be all this activity, because after that the film is basically a two-man show.”

Or one-man-and-a-boy show.

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