December 9, 2011 | 4:23 pm

Joan Rivers channels personal tragedy on ‘The Simpsons’

Posted by Danielle Berrin

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Comedian and soi-disant style icon Joan Rivers recently guest starred on a new episode of “The Simpsons” in all her tragicomic glory.

The blogosphere was quick to note the parallels between the show’s plot and Rivers’ life.

Adam Buckman summated on TVHowl.com:

It was a story about a top comedy talent headlining a network TV show and the show’s headstrong producer, with whom the comedian has a close personal relationship.  In the episode, the producer — played by Rivers — threw her weight around so much on the set that network execs ordered the comedian, Krusty the Clown, to fire her, or else they would.

The story, no doubt devised with Rivers’ approval and possibly with her input, mirrored her own personal history — with Fox, no less — back in 1987.  That’s when she starred in a late-night show on the then-fledgling network — “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers” — while her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, acted as executive producer.  When Fox execs ordered her to fire Edgar, she refused and they were both canned.  Three months later, he committed suicide — the worst tragedy of Rivers’ life.

And yet, there she was on “The Simpsons” spoofing her own tragic history — something only a comedian of her stature and experience would attempt.

Anyone who caught Rivers’ excellent biographical documentary “A Piece of Work” gained insight into the tragedy and trauma that informs her comedy. Not only has she suffered unthinkable loss, she has been riddled with insecurity about her appearance since childhood. Her candid recollections of being told by family, friends and boyfriends that she was ugly, ordinary and sexually unappealing was heart wrenching to hear, though it explains the deep psychic motives she had for all that deforming surgery. As I watched I realized Rivers wasn’t having all that work done just to look younger, she was literally trying to erase her face, the scourge of shame and self-doubt.

Buckman seems somewhat amazed by Rivers’ ability to lay bare her painful past, setting aside her ego for the sake of her art. But that is often the creative salve of great comics who use their vulnerable status to poke fun at everything else.

Producer Bernie Brillstein once observed of Jewish humor, “If you talk about it out loud, it can take away the curse of it all.” That ethos encapsulates the sensibility of Jewish humorists, who have historically responded to the absurdities and tyrannies of the larger culture by self-deprecating. As Roseanne Barr once said, “If you make fun of your own in front of the dominant culture here, you can live next door to them.”

The impulse to mock the very things about yourself that others might fault you for is essentially an attempt at belonging.

December 9, 2011 | 1:58 pm

Funny business in Israel

Posted by Lauren Bottner, Hollywood Jew contributor

Top American comedians, including Maryellen Hooper, John Mulrooney and Saleem, travel to Israel to fundraise for the Koby Mandell Foundation.  The foundation is headed by Avi Liberman and provides “support to family members of victims of terror,” reports the Jerusalem Post. 

This is the seventh Comedy for Koby tour and includes six national comedy shows with an expected audience of around 2,000.

The audiences’ favorite bits typically include “hearing material based on the comedians’ experiences coming to Israel – dealing with El Al security, visiting the Dead Sea, dealing with taxi drivers in Israel and experiencing the holy sites.”

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December 9, 2011 | 1:31 pm

Orthodox Jews’ problem with Adam Sandler

Posted by Lauren Bottner, Hollywood Jew contributor

Adam Sandler gets censored! Signs advertising the actor’s new film, “Jack and Jill were destroyed in Jerusalem according to Israeli blogger Ido Kenan.  The hit movie isn’t such a hit with the Orthodox world, presumably because Sandler plays a woman in the film. 

The images of Jill on the movie posters were sprayed black and it is assumed that Orthodox Jews are responsible for the damage.

Watch what Adam Sandler has to say about the film:

For past Jewish Journal coverage on Adam Sandler:
Adam Sandler proposes wife swap
Adam Sandler will voice the lead role
‘Opera Man’ Adam Sandler hits high note with Hollywood star

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December 8, 2011 | 1:53 pm

Can movies bring light into the world?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Laments about the lost luster of movies are common these days.

A few weeks ago, New York Times film critic A.O. Scott declared, “Film is Dead? What Else is New?” in an essay about the diminishing enchantment of modern moviegoing.

“It can be hard to escape, and even harder to argue against, the feeling that something we used to love is going away, or already gone,” he wrote. “Does whatever we have now…represent at best a pale shadow of bygone glory?”

The question is a relevant one. And it resonates as a nostalgic longing not just for better movies, but for the idealism of youth—the days when everything was possible.

When I read Scott’s piece I remembered how movies used to be, for me, a way of coping with the strangeness and suffering in the world. As a teenager, my immersion in Hollywood fantasy was sustaining through all the disillusionment and despair that comes with being an adolescent girl. In the movies, things were usually better than they were in real life—and if they weren’t, there was comfort in their definite end.

Movies are a way of escaping the world. But they’re also a way of responding to the world, a tool for filtering life’s ineffable beauties and its heavy, burdensome baggage. The characters that fill the screen a model for how to cope. And somewhere in there, the fantasy of ideals imprints upon the brain and you start believing that every love should be a “Titanic” love.

But those moments when the projector could run admission into another universe has become more difficult in today’s world of constant connection. The dark, quiet refuge of a theater isn’t exactly so—last week, while watching “Shame” a young boy sitting beside me couldn’t resist the temptation of text messaging. So I had to endure the light of another screen, luring me back to the real world as I wondered what waited on my phone. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this week, there is no escape from reality when your smartphone literally functions as a tracking device.

As fiendish little gadgets conspire to track our movements and record our activities wherever we go, producing a barrage of pictures of everything we’re doing and saying, our lives will unroll as one long instant replay.

There will be fewer and fewer of what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” intense sensations that stand apart from the “cotton wool of daily life.”

The same is true of literature, of course, which has also been a mode for deep, absorbing reverie. But rather than treating that immersion as an escape, the lessons of film and literature can sometimes illuminate reality, providing relief from our internal incarceration.

In a review of a new dual volume of letters by T.S. Eliot in The Weekly Standard, Edward Short notes that Eliot’s escape from a tumultuous marriage was in letters and literature. He notes how even Eliot’s wife, Vivien, knew this, and said, “poetry and literature are the very only things Tom cares for or has the faintest interest in”. Short adds, “it is as if he can only approach the ruin of his marriage by resorting to literature.”

Then he excerpts the following passage, written by Eliot:

In the last ten years—gradually, but deliberately—I have made myself into a machine. I have done it deliberately—in order to endure, in order not to feel—but it has killed V. .  .  . I have deliberately killed my senses—I have deliberately died—in order to go on with the outward form of living—This I did in 1915. What will happen if I live again? “I am I” but with what feelings, with what results to others—Have I the right to be I—But the dilemma—to kill another person by being dead, or to kill them by being alive? .  .  . Does it happen that two persons’ lives are absolutely hostile? Is it true that sometimes one can only live by another’s dying?

We have all been made machines by the technological triumph of convenience. Dowd acknowledges the irony that a silent film—“The Artist”—is making a comeback in the 21st century.

In the case of “The Artist,” silence is not only golden, it’s a reminder of how much you can articulate without words. If you take away the language, green screens and 3-D glasses, the feelings — pride, vanity, envy, fear, love — can be more primary and fascinating.

Even in an age when “Hollywood rarely makes great movies anymore” a film can still scintillate and inspire. She notes a scene in “The Artist” in which the film’s starlet, Peppy Miller, tries to connect to the man she loves by canoodling with his empty jacket as it hangs on a rack in their dressing room. For Dowd and for others, that quiet moment of closeness and longing, the simple pleasure aroused by a lover’s apparel, proves there is still glamour, there is still romance, there is still hope.

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December 8, 2011 | 12:36 pm

Will Sasson Gabai hit the stage for ‘The Band’s Visit’?

Posted by Lauren Bottner, Hollywood Jew contributor

The Israeli film “The Band’s Visit” is expected to open on a New York stage next year.  The leading role has reportedly been offered to Sasson Gabai, who starred in the 2007 film,  as well as Mohammed Bakri according to Haaretz.

“The Band’s Visit” was awarded multiple awards including 8 Ophir prizes with Gabai taking home the European Film Award for Best Actor. The film is currently being adapted for stage and is still in the fundraising phase but producers hope to start rehearsals in a few months.

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December 8, 2011 | 12:15 pm

Halle Berry becomes a member of the Tribe

Posted by Lauren Bottner, Hollywood Jew contributor

Actress Halle Berry stars in “Cloud Atlas” as both a 1930’s Jewish woman and an old tribal woman depending on the scene says the New York Times.  The $100 million budget movie is set to premiere in the fall of 2012 and poses a challenge to the actors as they switch from one role to another.

Berry described to the NYT how she loses track of fellow cast members and costumes amid the character shifts. 

“Some days I go into the trailer, I’ll be having a conversation – I won’t even know it’s with Hugh Grant until five minutes in.”

 

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December 7, 2011 | 4:18 pm

Babs, bad Jewish men and the 100 Greatest Jewish Films

Posted by Danielle Berrin

It takes real chutzpah to write that among a list of the 100 Greatest Jewish Films, “Schindler’s List is astoundingly stupid.”

But that’s exactly how Tablet magazine’s Liel Leibovitz described Steven Spielberg’s seminal genre film, relegating it to “Holocaust melodrama.”

“It would take a doctoral dissertation to elaborate on just how much is wrong” with the film, Leibovitz writes in his unsparing summation, citing, among other things, that its most egregious offense is telling a Jewish tale through Christian eyes.

Topping the bottom of the list, at No. 100, Leibovitz does not diminish “Schindler’s” cultural importance (that would have been astoundingly stupid). If nothing else (which is eminently arguable though I won’t get into it in this post), “Schindler’s List” realized the adage “Never Forget” in the most important and influential cultural medium in the world, making the Holocaust an accessible and edifying subject for the masses. The movie, in a word, mainstreamed the Holocaust, giving it a visual language and commercial appeal (I know, it’s icky even to suggest) but that undoubtedly ensured its survival as a cultural and historical document. Just count how many Holocaust-themed films followed, cementing it as a genre in the pop culture canon.

The rest of the list is also worth skimming—and skimming is really all that is required since each film is notated in a few brief sentences—so I’ll highlight only one, which I count among my Jewish favorites, not only because on more than one occasion I’ve belted my way through the living room, tears streaming, singing “My Man” in shameless, un-self-conscious mimicry of its final scene, but because it’s Babs, Jewess Godess of them all, and because for some inexplicable reason I’ll have the crazy good fortune of hearing her perform live tomorrow night at Haim and Cheryl Saban’s annual benefit for soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces.

Plus, Alana Newhouse’s not-so-subtle slight on Jewish men made me laugh. Why must they break our hearts, over and over and over again? And why do we take them back, on our knees, desperate for the mix of passion and pain that carves into our souls and grudgingly stays?

Ranking at No. 41, here’s Funny Girl:

1968, dir. William Wyler. Barbra playing Fanny Brice playing herself: This late-’60s musical is like a Matryoshka doll of Jewish womanhood. A story of the comedienne’s stormy love life and unlikely career, it forever changed how America thought about ambitious women, parades, rain, and men named Arnstein.

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December 7, 2011 | 4:15 pm

Mometum builds for Los Angeles movie museum

Posted by Danielle Berrin

The wacky art-deco building that sits on the corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, adjacent to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was recently designated the future site of L.A.‘s first comprehensive movie museum.

The joint partnership between the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and LACMA has the potential to further burnish the prestige of the block, as well as the cultural cache of the entire city, which, has never adequately preserved a curated history of its most defining asset.

But the journey to realizing this dream will be a long one—with a projected fundraising goal in the hundreds of millions, making it clear that if Hollywood wants a place to house its pride, somebody’s going to have to pay for it.

Fortunately Tinseltown is flush with an embarrassment of riches. And as any synagogue president can attest, the best way to raise money is to enlist solicitors who can’t be refused, and the Academy appears to have met that challenge: Earlier today, it was announced that Walt Disney Co. President and CEO Bob Iger will chair the capital campaign for the project, with Annette Bening and Tom Hanks serving as co-chairs.

In the official announcement, Iger promised that the 300,000 square-foot facility will be “a bold new way of saving and presenting film history.” The museum, he said, “will innovate not only the museum experience, but also the public’s relationship to the art form.”

For his part, Hanks spoke to the universal importance of Hollywood’s influence around the world: “The movies have done so much to shape world culture and our own lives. Preserving and sharing their history with the public should be an important undertaking for us all.”

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