In Nathan Silver’s comedy Between the Temples:, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor whose wife’s death the year before has plunged him into despair; he is so paralyzed by depression, he has even lost his ability to sing. He has a chance meeting with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), now a retired widow.
Despite her age and his resistance, she insists on joining the bat mitzvah class he teaches at the temple. She’s a force of nature and may have enough gusto to overcome his angst. As their friendship evolves, will it bring him out of his funk?
Between the Temples is co-written by C. Mason Wells and director Nathan Silver. There are plenty of chuckles arising from Schwartzman’s character trying to neutralize his former teacher’s tsunami of will. And there are LOL moments from Madeleine Weinstein’s hilarious turn as as the rabbi’s lovelorn daughter Gabby.
Kane is excellent, and so is Dolly De Leon, who stole Triangle of Sadness, sparkles as a relentlessly determined Jewish mother. The prolific comedy writer Robert Smigel appears as the rabbi.
I screened Between the Temples for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival; Between the Temples opens in Northern California theaters this weekend.
Photo caption: Amer Hlehel and Ashraf Farah in Maha Haj’s MEDITERRANEAN FEVER at the SLO Film Fest Courtesy of San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.
The San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF) always a major event for Bay Area cinephiles, opens today. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and the program offers over 60 films from Israel, Palestine, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Cyprus, Ethiopia, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, the US and the UK. Here’s my festival preview.
This year, I’m recommending three comedies.
Mediterranean Fever: A depressive writer becomes friends with his shady neighbor and the two embark on a dark journey. Second feature for Israeli Arab director Maha Haj. Although it’s dark and funny, I don’t want to describe Mediterranean Fever, like I do many films, as “darkly funny” because the tone is singular. Haj has written a story about that unfunniest of topics, depression, and keeps us watching with subtle, observational humor. In Mediterranean Fever, we glimpse into the day-to-day life of Israeli Arabs – and middle-class Israeli Arabs at that. Won the Un Certain Regard screenplay prize at Cannes. Here’s my full review.
The Monkey House: This witty, twisty comedy is the latest from popular and prolific Israeli writer-director Avi Nesher. Set in pre-Internet 1989, novelist Amitay (Adir Miller) has gone a long time without a best seller, and sees his literary legacy fading. His ego is uplifted by an American grad student who plans to publish about his body of work; but, when that falls through, Amitay plans an elaborate ruse – he hires the flighty, wannabe actress Margo (Suzanna Papian) to impersonate the grad student. Plenty of unanticipated complications threaten to derail the scheme and humiliate Amitay, especially to his recently-widowed, longtime crush Tamar (Shani Cohen). Nesher, evidently a gimlet-eyed observer of human behavior, delivers lots of plot twists in this smart and funny movie. Nominated for 11 Israeli Academy Awards.
Between the Temples: In Nathan Silver’s comedy, Jason Schwartzman plays a cantor whose wife’s death the year before has plunged him into despair; he is so paralyzed by depression, he has even lost his ability to sing. He has a chance meeting with his childhood music teacher (Carol Kane), now a retired widow. Despite her age and his resistance, she insists on joining the bat mitzvah class he teaches at the temple. She’s a force of nature and may have enough gusto to overcome his angst. As their friendship evolves, will it bring him out of his funk? There are plenty of LOL moments. Kane is excellent, and so is Madeleine Weinstein as the rabbi’s lovelorn daughter. Dolly De Leon, who stole Triangle of Sadness, sparkles as a relentlessly determined Jewish mother.
The SFJFF runs through August 4 in select San Francisco and Oakland venues. Peruse the program and purchase tickets at SFJFF. Here’s the trailer for Between the Temples.
Jon Voight in his screen test for Midnight Cowboy from DESPERATE SOULS, DARK CITY AND THE LEGEND OF MIDNIGHT COWBOY. Courtesy of Kino Lorber.
The remarkably insightful documentary Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy explores the making of Midnight Cowboy and its place both in cinema and in American culture.
Midnight Cowboy won Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, all with an X-rating. Sure, we know Midnight Cowboy as a groundbreaking film, but Desperate Souls argues that it both reflected the zeitgeist of the moment and opened new possibilities in American filmmaking.
This was a transitional period in Hollywood and in the culture. Midnight Cowboy won its Oscars at the same Academy Award ceremony that honored John Wayne as Best Actor. Midnight Cowboy’s protagonists were completely unDukelike, one a would-be gigolo and the other an almost homeless conman.
So, we have two marginal anti-heroes and their unconventional bond, along with, shockingly, incidents of gay sex, heterosexual impotence and incontinence. The director John Schlesinger himself was a closeted gay man. Anyone who was alive in 1969 can tell you that this was extraordinarily transgressive content to penetrate the cultural mainstream.
Besides the unsettling themes, Midnight Cowboy, along with The Graduate (1967) and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) pioneered the effective use of popular music on the soundtrack. Midnight Cowboy is notable for both John Barry’s Emmy-winning score and for the use of Fred Niel’s Everybody’s Talkin’, which Schlesinger used as the theme.
Filmmaker Nancy Buirski, who died in September, builds her case with superb sourcing. She hit gold with the unique perspective of Jennifer Salt, who observed her father, screenwriter Waldo Salt, and the director John Schlesinger birth the film; she also acted in the movie and came to date its star, Jon Voight. Voight himself bookends the film with emotionally powerful reflections.
Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy also includes Voight’s screen test, and I dare you to explain why the filmmakers, after watching it, said THAT’S THE GUY.
As I write, Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy is number 21 on my carefully curated list of Longest Movie Titles.
This is a strong film, and a Must See for cinephiles, especially Jon Voight’s intro and outro. saw Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of Midnight Cowboy, Midnight Cowboy at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and you can stream it now on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube.
Photo caption: Nahuel Pérez Biscayart in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
The Holocaust thriller Persian Lessons walks a tightrope of tension, and the ending is very emotionally powerful. Gilles (Nahuel Pérez Biscayart) is a Belgian Jew sent to a German concentration camp. He seeks to avoid death by claiming to be Persian named Reza. He is not anticipating that a Nazi officer will demand to be taught Farsi. That officer, Koch (Lars Eidinger), aspires to a postwar future as a Tehran restaurateur.
Gilles/Reza, who doesn’t know ANY Farsi, must invent an entire faux Farsi language, word-by-word, and remember it. All the while, he’s sweating out the likelihood that his ruse will be discovered.
The blustery Koch, with his Persian fixation, is an oddball. A chef when he opportunistically joined the Nazi Party, he’s not a True Believer, although he is very comfortable with genocide. In another time or place, he could have easily been a corrupt official or a mafioso. While Gilles/Reza is the protagonist, the story rises and falls on Koch’s whims, and Eidinger’s performance is excellent.
Nazis were bullies at their core, and some of Persian Lessons’ lighter moments are when Gilles/Reza is offscreen and the Nazis’ own foibles, with their sexual peccadilloes and their petty internal power plays, are on display. There’s an especially funny scene when Koch gets a leg up on his boss, the camp’s Commandant.
Nahuel Pérez Biscayart and Lars Eidinger in PERSIAN LESSONS. Photo courtesy of Cohen Media Group.
Persian Lessons was directed by Ukrainian-born Vadim Perelman (2003’s Oscar nominated House of Sand and Fog). Belarus tried to submit Persian Lessons for an Academy Award, but it was too international to qualify as a Belarus film. IMDb catalogues it as a Russian/German/Belarus film; Biscayart is Argentine, Eidinger is German, and screenwriter Ilja Zofin is Russian.
I screened Persian Lessons for its North American premiere at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July 2021. It opens June 9 at the Laemmle Royal in LA and more widely on June 16, including San Francisco’s Opera Plaza and the Landmark Pasadena.
Raya Burstein and Uri Burstein in CHARM CIRCLE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.
One of the Bay Area’s top cinema events is back – the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (SFJFF). This year’s festival is a hybrid, with in-person screenings at San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and the Albany Twin in Albany through July 31, with some films streaming from the SFJFF digital screening room August 1-7. The SFJFF is the world’s oldest and largest Jewish film festival, and the program offers over 71 films from over 14 countries (but mostly from the US and Israel), plus 4 programs of short films (Jews in Shorts).
The Must Sees from this year’s documentary program are:
Charm Circle: You think YOUR family has issues? Inthis superbly structured film, writer-director Nira Burstein exquisitely unspools the story of her own bizarre family, a cautionary and ever-surprising chronicle of mental illness.
Speer Goes to Hollywood: In this absorbing documentary, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.
The Faithful: The King, the Pope, the Princess: Filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines. Who are these faithful, and how did someone they never met “touch their lives”? The journey is sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.
You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF.
Photo caption: THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.
In the documentary The Faithful: The King The Pope The Princess, filmmaker Annie Berman follows the people who are devoted to iconic celebrities, both dead (Elvis Presley and Princess Diana) and alive (the Pope du jour). I don’t mean “fans”, I mean “devoted”, as in those who make annual pilgrimages and who decorate shrines.
At first, Berman wryly observes the endless variety of cheesy Elvis souvenirs, and the possibly cheesier panoply of Pope souvenirs. She archly interviews a Papal spokesman about the Vatican’s commercial licensing of the Pope’s image. We see what are purported to be Pope lollipops, but when they are unwrapped, the Pope’s image turns out to be on a paper cover, so no tongues actually commit the sacrilege of licking the papal face.
But Berman – herself returning yearly to Graceland and Elvis’ Tupelo birthplace, a London Princess Di shrine and the Vatican – focuses on the faithful. She lets them talk about their obsessions, and how someone they never met “touched their lives”. Berman is remarkably nonjudgmental with these people and their sincere devotion and chooses not to mock them.
THE FAITHFUL: THE KING, THE POPE, THE PRINCESS. Courtesy of Annie Berman.
Finally, Berman has to ask herself whether she herself is too obsessed with this project on obsession.
Berman’s narration takes us on a journey that sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling, but fundamentally meditative.
SPEER GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. Courtesy of Vanessa Lapa.
In her absorbing documentary Speer Goes to Hollywood, filmmaker Vanessa Lapa takes us inside a Nazi war criminal’s brazen attempt to rehabilitate his image into “the Good Nazi”. Previously unheard private audio recordings of Albert Speer himself reveal him to be one of history’s most audacious spin doctors.
Speer, the highest ranking Nazi to escape execution at the Nuremberg Trials, was the master of the Nazis’ wartime production efforts. A trained architect, any ability Speer had to design structures was surpassed by his genius in logistics. In Speer Goes to Hollywood, Speer displays an ever greater gift for dissembling.
After being released from prison in the mid 1960’s, Speer published a bestselling (and self-serving) memoir, Inside the Third Reich, to perpetuate what is known as The Speer Myth. Speer would have us believe that the worst crimes in history occurred – right under his nose and to his benefit – without any participation on his part. Speer’s defense was essentially, “Hey, it was the OTHER Nazis“.
(Note: not even a liar as bald-faced as Speer denied that the Holocaust happened.)
To supply the German war machine, Speer exploited the nearly limitless pool of those conquered, persecuted and to be exterminated by the Nazis. Powering his production with forced labor, Speer enslaved 12.5 million victims and worked many of them to death, all to perpetrate a war of aggression.
In the tapes, we hear Speer collaborating with Andrew Birkin, a Stanley Kubrick protege, on the script for a film to further Speer’s version of history. In the face of damning evidence, Speer never wavered in his deflections, dodges and denials. Speer Goes to Hollywood reveals Albert Speer to stay on message with unmatched relentlessness, discipline and audacity.
Andrew Birkin was trying to cash in on the popularity of Inside the Thrd Reich. The tapes show Birkin to be stunningly enabling in the attempted whitewash. Once Birkin slips and blames a kerfuffle on “the Jewish machine”.
Another Birkin mentor, Carol Reed is the truth teller. Reed, the director of The Third Man, gives Birkin a reality check – this IS a whitewash, pure and simple.
A prime example of the banality of evil, Speer doesn’t seem to be a fanatic hater, but an amoral grasper/climber, willing to swallow even genocide as an acceptable price for getting ahead. He does display an ingrained antisemitism, once tossing off “Of course, we resented the Jews“, as if, who wouldn’t?
Here’s a tantalizing nugget from Speer Goes to Hollywood. We hear Speer claim to have written the top Nuremberg prosecutor, American Robert Jackson, to claim important knowledge of Germany’s neurological warfare research, using it as leverage to avoid being turned over to the Soviets. Speer hints at an implied quid pro quo, but given Speer’s credibility, who knows if any of it is true.
The ever-watchable Speer Going to Hollywood chronicles unashamedness on a mass scale.
Yonah Acosta Gonzalez in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The stylish Canadian indie Sin la Habana braids together the yearnings of an Afro-Cuban couple and a Jewish-Iranian woman.
Leonardo (Yonah Acosta Gonzalez) is a Havana ballet dancer frustrated by what he sees as racist favoritism in his company. It doesn’t help that he is an impulsive hothead. His beautiful and canny girlfriend Sara (Evelyn Castroda O’Farrill) is a lawyer. In the socialist paradise of Cuba, their incomes consign them to a cramped, squalid apartment. They want out.
Sara concocts a plan – Leonardo will seduce a foreign tourist who can invite him to leave Cuba; once legally ensconced in the first world, Leonardo will send for Sara.
Evelyn Castroda O’Farrill and Yonah Acosta Gonzalez in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The cynical scheme begins to work. Leonardo gives salsa lessons (and more) to a Canadian visitor, Nasim (Aki Yaghoubi). Nasim, who is Jewish-Iranian, brings Leonardo back to Montreal.
But then stuff happens. Leonardo is not welcomed as the ballet star that he sees himself to be, and it’s unexpectedly more difficult for him to get the job that will bring him legal residence. And Nasim turns out to be far less of a dupe than first apparent.
The ending is well-crafted and authentic.
Sin la Habana is visually arresting from the very first shot, a closeup of a rooster’s red eye soon followed by arty shots of ballet practice. Havana feels steamy and Montreal feels frigid.
Aki Yaghoubi in SIN LA HABANA. Photo courtesy of JFI.
It’s pretty clear that writer-director Kaveh Nabatian, cinematographer Juan Pablo Ramírez and editor Sophie Leblond know how to tell a story with cinema. There are a couple too many flashbacks of Santería rituals, but Sin la Habana is otherwise well-paced.
I screened Sin la Habana for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens on Friday. You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF, and here’s my own SFJFF preview. Here’s where you can stream Sin la Habana.
Benjamin Netanyahu in KINGS OF CAPITOL HILL. Photo courtesy of JFI.
The Israeli documentary Kings of Capitol Hill traces the history of an American political institution, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Founded as a lobby group to advocate for the interests of Israel, AIPAC has grown in power and has shifted (and narrowed) its mission.
AIPAC is controversial because the policies of the recent right-wing Israeli governments, supported by AIPAC, and those of most Jewish-Americans have diverged.
Kings of Capitol Hill highlights two pivotal moments. The first came in 1984 when Paul Simon unseated Charles Percy as US Senator from Illinois, and AIPAC was given the credit and the accompanying political fearsomeness. The second came a decade later, when AIPAC abruptly rejected bipartisanship to become a mouthpiece for the Israeli Right and the US Republican Party.
For 60 years, AIPAC leaders have refused to be interviewed about the organization. Israeli filmmaker Mor Loushy has secured the oral histories of many of AIPAC’s top leadership from its founding and fashioned them into a compelling story.
Note: The film was completed before both Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, two of Kings of Capitol Hill’s villains, were unseated in the past nine months.
I screened Kings of Capitol Hill for this year’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, which opens on Friday. You can peruse the festival’s program and schedule at SFJFF, and here’s my own SFJFF preview. Here’s where you can stream Kings of Capitol Hill.
Pauline Kael in WHAT SHE SAID: THE ART OF PAULINE KAEL
What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael is the remarkably thorough and insightful biodoc of the iconic film critic Pauline Kael and her drive for relevance. Set your DVRs for it on Turner Classic Movies on December 12.
Documentarian Rob Garver has sourced What She Said is well-sourced with the memories of Kael’s colleagues, rivals and intimates. Garver’s portrait of Kael helps us understand her refusal to conform to social norms as she basically invented the role of a female film critic and what today we might call a national influencer on cinema.
Of course, one of Kael’s defining characteristics was her all-consuming love of movies, a trait shared by many in this film’s target audience. Fittingly, Garver keeps things lively by illustrating Kael’s story with clips from the movies she loved and hated. Garver’s artistry in composing this mosaic of evocative movie moments sets What She Said apart from the standard talking head biodocs.
Kael was astonishingly confident in her taste (which was not as snooty as many film writers). For the record, I think Kael was right to love Mean Streets, Band of Outsiders, Bonnie and Clyde, and, of course, The Godfather. It meant something to American film culture that she championed those films. She was, however, wrong to love Last Tango in Paris. She was also right to hate Limelight, Hiroshima Mon Amour and The Sound of Music. But Kael was just being a contrarian and off-base to hate Lawrence of Arabia and Shoah.
Kael was by necessity an intrepid self-promoter and filled with shameless contradictions. She famously dismissed the auteur theory but sponsored the bodies of work of auteurs Scorsese, Peckinpah, Coppola and Altman. She loved – even lived – to discover and support new talent.
Most of the people we like and admire possess at least some bit of selfishness and empathy. Kael’s daughter Gina James says that Kael turned her lack of self awareness into triumph. This observation, of course, cuts both ways.
I screened What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael while covering the 2019 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It’s coming up on Turner Classic Movies this Friday.
