March 18, 2010 | 4:37 pm

What’s Ivan Reitman doing with Natalie Portman?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Directing her next film, of course!

According to Variety, producer and director Ivan Reitman will direct Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher in a romantic comedy currently called “Friends With Benefits.” 

Production begins in May and release is set for next January, which already tells us about low expectations for the film. What good movie has ever been released at the end Oscar season?

The last film Reitman directed was “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” in 2006, starring Uma Thurman.

Isn’t it just awesome when your son gets you nominated for an Oscar and it totally revives your career? Reitman is also set to direct “Ghostbusters 3.”

Portman’s upcoming slate includes the adventure comedy “Your Highness,” Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” and Kenneth Branagh’s “Thor,” Variety reports.

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March 18, 2010 | 4:16 pm

How Auschwitz, “X-Men” and its Jewish director changed comics

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Director Bryan Singer, who is credited with launching the “X-Men” film franchise did so with an unexpected Jewish twist: he set the opening scene of a comic book adaptation at Auschwitz.

It’s the last place you’d expect to find emotionally tortured mutants with superpowers, but the move wove a box office gamble into gold. And as a result, the comic book genre was given grit, severity and seriousness in popular culture.

Singer, who was raised Jewish in New Jersey is largely responsible for the change and is will soon reclaim the franchise he built with “X-Men: First Class.”

According to the L.A. Times:

From those first moments, “X-Men” set itself apart from the entire Hollywood history of comic-book adaptations and marked the beginning of this current era of fanboy cinema, which has dominated the box office and elevated San Diego’s Comic-Con International into something resembling a Cannes for capes.

“The opening, it really was a declaration of intent,” producer Lauren Shuler Donner said of that sequence, which showed a terrified young boy exhibiting mutant powers as his family was separated by German guards. “It said to the audience this is a serious film, grounded in the realistic and the historic and somewhat dark. It was so smart. And it was all totally Bryan.”

That would be Bryan Singer, the director of “X-Men” and its first sequel, who was sitting next to Shuler Donner in her office on a recent afternoon. The pair both had big smiles on their faces—they had been reunited by an invitation to reminisce about the legacy of the July 2000 release, which they were happy to do, but the conversation kept veering into giddy plans for the future. Singer is returning to the “X-Men” universe, it’s clear now, for a project called “X-Men: First Class”; it’s all just a matter of timing.

Singer not only brought the Holocaust to the comic book world, he used social and political allegory to shine a light on homosexuality. 

How did Fox respond to Singer’s plan to start a superhero movie with a Holocaust scene and infuse it with subtext about the struggle of homosexual teenagers in modern America?  Singer said there were really no battles to be won. “There was no particular expectation, really, or pressure—it wasn’t an enormous budget—and there was no template because these characters were not Superman or Batman. There was no issue of content or even tone.”

Singer, who is both gay and Jewish, understood the outsider status of “X-Men’s” mutants and infused his films with depth and metaphor. Although the first film made the least amount of money, Singer proved his artistry in an otherwise formulaic genre. The Times writes, that although both Brett Ratner and Gavin Hood gave “X-Men” a shot, The New Yorker’s film critic David Denby valued “the liquid beauty and the poetic fantasy of Singer’s work” over the others.

Below is a 2006 profile of Singer written by Jewish Journal contributor Robert David Jaffee:

Bryan Singer’s first real understanding of evil came when, as a boy of nine or 10, he dressed up as a Nazi one day while playing a World War II game with his German neighbors in Princeton Junction. He came home wearing a swastika.

Singer’s mother admonished him, but it wasn’t until a few years later, when his junior high school social studies teacher, Miss Fiscarelli, taught an entire unit on the Holocaust, that he gained a greater understanding as to why his mother had been so troubled. That class changed Singer’s “whole perception of what people are capable of anywhere,” he said.

It also left a mark on a boy who would grow up to become a Hollywood director whose films, including X-Men, X-2, and this summer’s highly anticipated Superman Returns, deal with the human capacity for evil and for persecuting outsiders, whoever they may be.

“Whether you’re an immigrant or you’re born in the heartland,” said Singer, “at some point we all feel like an alien.”

Of the famed Man of Steel, first introduced to comic book readers in the 1930s, Singer said, “He’s kind of the ultimate immigrant. He comes from a foreign place, adapts to the value system, and has a special relationship with his heritage.”

That might sound like heavy baggage for a film about a superhero, but Singer wouldn’t be the first to read deeper meanings into comic book adventures.

Singer sees Superman, created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster — two Jews who were sons of immigrants — as a Judeo-Christian hero, part Moses, part Jesus. Like Moses, Superman is the boy dispatched down the metaphoric river to be discovered in the cornfields, if not the reeds, of the Midwest. Like Jesus, he has a kind of doubling with his father, voiced in the new film as in the 1978 Superman by the late Marlon Brando, who says, “The son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son.”

Superman first entered popular culture when the Nazis were beginning to assert their power in Germany. He “never cleared up the problems in Europe,” Singer said. “He handled small problems; he served by example.”

Over the decades, however, through numerous incarnations in comic strips, television shows, and films, Superman began tackling worldwide catastrophes, as he does in Singer’s new film.

As Michael Chabon suggested in his novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Siegel and Shuster, in conceptualizing Superman, may very well have been inspired by the Golem, a mythic figure in Jewish folklore who could vanquish all evil.

The 40-year-old Singer calls Superman Returns a “dream project” and said “it was a fantasy of mine to have Kryptonian blood,” not surprising for a man who in the 1970s loved watching reruns of the Superman TV show starring George Reeves. But Singer did not read comic books as a child. To this day, he suffers from dyslexia, which still impedes his efforts at reading. He does like to read short stories, but he did not even know about the X-Men until he was assigned to direct the first movie of that franchise.

Like Superman, the mutant heroes and antiheroes in the X-Men movies are not simply stand-ins for illegal immigrants. They are heroic, if in some cases demonic, fantasies of the outsider in all of us.

As a gay, adopted, agnostic Jew, Singer has always been drawn to the otherness of these superheroes, though he chuckles when asked about a recent Los Angeles Times article that highlighted Superman’s gay appeal. “If you look at my career,” he said, “I’ve probably never made a more heterosexual movie before.”

A graduate of West Windsor-Plainsboro High School and the cinema school at the University of Southern California, Singer had his breakthrough with The Usual Suspects, in 1995, which was hailed for its plot twists, subversion of the noir genre, brilliant ensemble cast, and an Oscar-winning performance from Kevin Spacey.

Singer followed that with 1998’s Apt Pupil, in which Brad Renfro plays a high school student obsessed with the Holocaust and with a former Nazi.

Then came X-Men and X-2, anti-McCarthyite allegories that featured Sir Ian McKellen, the Nazi in Apt Pupil, as a Holocaust survivor, who, like Darth Vader, has turned to the dark side.

Superman Returns is a film with a long and troubled past. Over the last decade, numerous actors and directors were attached to the film, whose budget, like its superhero, seemed to know no bounds. None of that history worried Singer, who got a chance to reshape the storyline. It also helped that he used some of his regular repertory of actors, such as Spacey, playing yet another notable villain: Lex Luthor.

While Singer wants as broad an audience as possible to enjoy the film, he particularly wants “older people and women to have an emotional experience,” he said. Superman Returns opened June 28 nationwide.

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March 15, 2010 | 12:05 pm

Ben Stiller’s Greenberg

Posted by Naomi Pfefferman

Ben Stiller as Phillip Greenberg, taken from the Greenberg film's official site

Before the “Night at the Museum” and “Meet the Parents” franchises made Ben Stiller one of the biggest comic superstars of his generation, the actor played the dramatic lead in a riveting independent film, “Permanent Midnight,” based on Jerry Stahl’s memoir of battling drug addiction while working as a television writer.  At the time, Stiller told me he was drawn to “Permanent Midnight” because, like Stahl, he considered himself “funny and Jewish and not particularly confident or comfortable” in his own skin. He added that he felt “somewhat of an outcast in the WASP culture;” and that he has felt pressured to assimilate not because he is self-hating, but because he hates when people typecast him.

A dozen years later, the now 44-year-old Stiller has made another independent film in which he plays an even more prickly dramatic lead, awash in midlife crisis.  Stiller portrays the eponymous anti-hero in Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg,” which opens March 19 and revolves around a fortyish misanthrope who is “a potentially repellent walking contradiction, an emotional porcupine who uses what he perceives as brutal honesty in order to perpetuate a big lie, that is, that he doesn’t really need anybody else,” the Hollywood Reporter said.

Having failed to make something of himself while his friends have developed successful careers and families, Roger Greenberg has left New York to house sit for his well-to-do brother in Los Angeles, where he is attempting to recuperate from a nervous breakdown.  There he chances to meet his brother’s twentysomething assistant, Florence Marr (Greta Gerwig), who turns out to be relationship material, in part because she is so passive she is able to absorb all of Greenberg’s abusive behavior and deflected self-loathing.

The depth of his self-hatred apparently extends to his Jewish background, as evidenced when Greenberg is persuaded to attend a Bel Air bar-be-queue where he meets up with some old Jewish friends.  These men are comfortably chatting about whether anyone has been to so-and-so’s seder;  various Jewish connections, and what constitutes a “Jewish” gesture (“You’re doing this,” one of them says to Greenberg, miming his effusive hand gesticulations).  “I’m half [Jewish],” Greenberg says.  “You look full,” a friend replies.  The appalled Greenberg has as much disdain for this Tribal schmoozing as he professes for his wealthy friends whom, in his opinion, have abandoned creativity in order to become successful. “Most people think I look Italian,” he says, sulkily.  “My mother is actually Protestant, so I’m not Jewish at all.”

Stiller’s own mother, the actress Anne Meara, converted to Judaism upon marrying fellow actor Jerry Stiller; Ben Stiller unabashedly identifies with the Tribe and also has mined his background to comic effect (during his stint as a presenter at the 2010 Academy Awards,  he peppered his “Avatar” spoof with Hebrew).  In “Meet the Parents” and its sequel, “Meet the Fockers,” Stiller plays a nebbishy Jewish nurse who is continually humiliated by his WASP father-in-law (Robert De Niro), a former CIA agent.  The third installment in the franchise, “Little Fockers,” will hit theaters Dec. 22, with a screenplay by Stiller’s longtime in-house writer, John Hamburg.

“The non-Jewish characters in the films are not anti-Semitic,” Hamburg told me last year.  “But there is the sense that Ben feels out of place among WASPS and also because he is a man who is not a doctor, but a nurse, which creates a kind of stigma.”

At the time of the interview in March 2009, Hamburg said he was “doing his own take” on an existing script for “Little Fockers.”  So how will the fictional interfaith couple raise their children? “When you have a couple of kids – when you have twins – and you have a Jewish dad and a non-Jewish mom, you’ve gotta make some compromises,” Hamburg said.  He wasn’t telling whether only one of the children will have a bris.

“Greenberg” is the latest film by Noah Baumbach, who specializes in difficult and despairing characters and who received an Oscar nomination for his excellent 2005 drama “The Squid and the Whale.” In a Journal interview, Baumbach said the title of “Squid” alludes to “The Clash of the Titans” diorama at Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History; but it also becomes a metaphor for the battle between a confused Jewish teenager and his hypercritical, intellectual father (Jeff Daniels).  The characters were inspired by Baumbach’s life with his own parents, both lauded writers, in Brooklyn in the 1980s.  The filmmaker said that even though his mother is Protestant, he identified as Jewish because he felt a connection with the People of the Book.  He wrote “Greenberg” with his wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, who also stars in the movie.  Baumbach and Leigh are expecting their first child this month.

Read our story on Ben Stiller 

Read our story on John Hamburg and the “Meet the Parents” franchise

Our story on Noah Baumbach

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March 15, 2010 | 11:37 am

Adam Lambert’s tight fashion sense

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Wow, Mick Jagger is so jealous right now.

I can’t decide if Adam Lambert should be called Lady Magaga —to evoke some strange lovechild of Madonna’s goth phase and Lady Gaga’s propensity for wearing sharp objects—or if he should just be Lady McLambert. Either way, it’s quite a costume. The new drag.

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March 11, 2010 | 11:04 am

Corey Haim’s down and dirty Jewish side

Posted by Danielle Berrin

When I first heard that actor Corey Haim died of a prescription drug overdose this morning, I was struck with sadness. And then five minutes later, utter frustration: another young talent self medicates his way through Hollywoodland and winds up “accidentally” killing himself.

Another Heath Ledger. Another John Belushi. Another Marilyn Monroe. (To warp through a history of Hollywood’s most famous overdoses, check out this slideshow from the L.A. Times). For Hollywood’s lost souls, drug overdoses are the slow, inevitable exit of choice; candy coating for a broken heart. Part of me wished Haim could have been more creative; if he was so intent on losing himself, couldn’t he have turned to, like, Scientology? Biologically, he was Jewish, which may be the saddest part of this equation: Did he even know about the life sustaining riches of his own tradition?

According to a 1984 edition of The Montreal Gazette, Haim won his breakthrough role in the film “Firstborn” at age 12, two months before his Bar Mitzvah. Timing, as they say, is everything. And Haim would later fixate on his Jewish manhood. His sense of humor - and self-delusion - about his own Jewishness is apparent in a funny 2007 interview he gave with co-star Corey Feldman to Entertainment Weekly just before they launched their eight-episode A&E reality show, “The Two Coreys.”

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What would you like to see each other do next professionally?
COREY FELDMAN: I think we should have Corey Haim reprise the role of Al Pacino in Scarface.
COREY HAIM: [In accent] Are you talkin’ to me, man? Hey, how ‘bout I go back outside and come back in? How ‘bout that, okay?
FELDMAN: You see what I’m saying.
I see what you’re saying.
HAIM: What you talking about man? Say hello to my little friend! Say HELLO to my little friend!
FELDMAN: And he’s talking about his male anatomy at that point, but, uh, it makes it different.
HAIM: Not so little, yeah. I’ve gotta wrap ‘em five times, yeah. A little wrap tuck, yeah. [Both laugh]
FELDMAN: You know what they say about those Jews.
HAIM: Oh god, come on, kid. You’re Jewish, too.
FELDMAN: I know.
HAIM: What a dick. You realize you just bagged on yourself.
FELDMAN: No, it’s a compliment. It’s a compliment. I’m talking about girth. Anyway… [Both laugh]

Haim’s death is hitting the 80s generation hard. He was one of us; we grew up watching him grow up, and now we’re left to face our own mortality. Absent a meaningful context, life can seem almost too fragile. I mean, wasn’t it enough to see a 42-year-old Molly Ringwald at the Oscars? Isn’t she supposed to stay sixteen forever? The strange thing is, people do stay forever young in Hollywood; frozen in time, on film. And Hollywood’s obsession with youth makes it hard for kids to grow up. As a teenager, Haim had reached the pinnacle; he was an 80s idol with the world at his feet. He had every bit of promise, but no sense of purpose. How can you grow up like that?

Like many others before him, Haim was a child star who became a lost adult soul. And because he lacked inner resources, he went the way of many stars whose flames burn fast and bright, and then burn out.

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March 8, 2010 | 4:24 pm

Ben Stiller’s Jewish Bluish Oscar moment

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Julie Gruenbaum Fax finds the Hebrew in Na’vi with this fun spin on Ben Stiller’s Oscar “Avatar” spoof. And by the way, this was probably the Sascha Baron Cohen toned-down, Jewed-up replacement skit. James Cameron couldn’t possibly be offended; unless he knows Hebrew.

From Bloggish:

Somewhere between the hisses and tongue clicks, Ben Stiller threw some Hebrew into his Avatar spoof at last night’s academy awards when he presented the award for Best Makeup. Decked out in Na’vi blue-face and cat eyes, complete with tail and braids, Stiller seemed to offer a Seder preview.

“Pesach,” he hissed, then trilled and elongated his rrrs in “borei perrrrrri” before busting out with “hagafen.”

“Pesach” is Hebrew for Passover, and “borei peri hagafen” blesses the fruit of the vine in the blessing over wine.

Stiller followed his Na’vi tirade by saying, “that means, ‘this seemed like a better idea in rehearsal.’ It was between this and the Nazi uniform, but the show seemed a little Hitler heavy,” he said, referring to the nominations for WW II fantasy movie “Inglourious Basterds.”

Maybe Stiller, who is Jewish and often plays Jews, was channeling a prophetic impulse in his Na’vi rant? (Get it? Na’vi is Hebrew for prophet?)

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March 8, 2010 | 1:56 am

For Israelis, both despair and delight at “Ajami” Oscar loss

Posted by Danielle Berrin

At the official Oscar party for the Israeli foreign film nominee “Ajami,” the tension between art and politics threatened to overwhelm the night. And rather than celebrate a win for the third consecutive Israeli film to be nominated for an Oscar, private sighs of relief followed the film’s loss to Argentina.

Mixed feelings about the already controversial film were intensified after “Ajami” co-director, Skandar Copti gave a polarizing interview to Israel’s Channel 2 TV hours before the Oscar telecast. In the interview, he denounced his ties to the State of Israel.

“I am not the Israeli national team and I do not represent Israel,” Copti said.

The fallout from Copti’s remarks lingered throughout the evening and divided the mostly Arab-Israeli cast from the rest of the guests in attendance. The Israeli Consulate, who hosted the expensive party at X Bar in Century City, put their best face forward despite the awkward atmosphere, determined to celebrate Israel’s growing inroads in Hollywood.

“Tomorrow no one will remember what [Copti] said,” Consul General of Israel Jacob Dayan said confidently. “They’ll remember that this is an Israeli movie and that it will help make Israel a little stronger by reinforcing the relationship between Israel and Hollywood.”

Shahir Kabaha, one of the film’s stars and an Arab-Muslim resident of the Jaffa neighborhood depicted in the film, relished his moment in the spotlight. The Oscars mark his first visit to both Los Angeles and the United States and multiple camera crews from the Israeli press surrounded him as he gave interviews from the outdoor balcony. For Kabaha, “Ajami” transcends the boundaries of politics to reveal a truth about one slice of Israel.

“I think the film represents human beings,” Kabaha said. “It’s not about Israel; it represents people that are in a bad situation and need help.”

Indeed, the film focuses on the poor and violent underclass that inhabits a religiously and economically mixed neighborhood in Tel Aviv. But while the film portrays Arab Christians, Muslims and Jews engaging in what seems like a gang war, Kabaha said the real neighborhood is more inclusive and that he counts Jews among his friends.

And in fact, “Ajami” itself is the product of an Arab-Jewish partnership.

Copti, who is a Christian Arab, co-directed the film with Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. But, according to Copti, the collaboration is not suggestive of any broader comity between the two groups. During his Channel 2 interview, Copti said the film is “technically” Israeli because it received state funding, but he denied its figurative connection to Israel.

“I cannot represent a country that does not represent me,” he said.

Even though that statement angered the film’s Israeli supporters – “Ajami” received approximately $500,000 of its budget from the Israel Film Fund and Copti is a graduate of Israel’s Technion in Haifa – some felt the remark was affirming.

“The film represents Israel exactly,” said Israeli-American choreographer Barak Marshall. “It touches on almost all of the issues we face in Israeli society and it shows how broad the public debate is; that someone who is from Israel can negate his very connection to the state shows how wonderfully strong and alive our political culture is.”

For Dayan, art that reflects a dynamic Israeli society and its status as a pluralistic democracy is an essential strength of statehood. But on the other hand, the fact that almost every Israeli film of note eventually gets usurped by politics is frustrating.

Out in the lobby, the stars of the film gathered around a large plasma screen to watch the announcement of the best foreign film Oscar (the party was moved after hotel management discovered that several actors were underage), and there they waited with bated breath.

Katriel Schory, the director of the Israel Film Fund stood out in the crowd, with his white hair and high hopes of taking home the golden statuette. Schory didn’t mind either the director’s scathing comments or the film’s challenging subject matter.

“Everything is okay, it’s perfectly alright,” he said. “[Copti] is entitled to his view. I’m very happy with the film and we stand behind it. In Israel, there are many narratives and this is one of those narratives.”

After “Ajami” lost to Argentina’s “El secreto de sus ojos” (The Secret in their Eyes), those who were embittered by Copti’s remarks quietly delighted in the loss, secretly slapping high five’s and sending exultant text messages. But those associated with the film were visibly disappointed. 

“So we lost again,” Dayan said, mildly deflated. “But the fact is, this is our third time in a row in this category and every time we’re there. This helps us better our connection with Hollywood and we have to be there again and again.”

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