January 16, 2009 | 7:25 pm

Day Two at Sundance:  Philip Seymour Hoffman, the Opening Night Jew

Posted by Larry Mark

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Philip Seymour Hoffman's

Jewish character in

Mary and Max

By Larry Mark

The Sundance Film Festival 2009 opened on Thursday night with an Australian clay animation feature, “Mary and Max,” written and directed by Adam Elliot, a Sundance veteran and Oscar winner for best animated short in 2004.  “Mary and Max” features the voices of Philip Seymour Hoffman, Eric Bana, Toni Collette and Barry Humphries (a.k.a Dame Edna) as the narrator.  Think of it as an Australian “Wallace and Gromit” meets “About Schmidt,” but one painted in dark tones of brown, gray and black.  The movie deals with the serious issues of mental illness, death, and depression; it is neither a “Nemo” nor a “Shrek,” since it is mostly a tragedy sprinkled with bits of comedy.

This is the first time that an animated feature has opened Sundance.  And with the critical success of the Israeli film “Waltz with Bashir,” perhaps we are at the beginning of a cinematic trend in darker-themed animation.

“Mary and Max” is about a pen pal friendship that endures for over two decades between Mary Dinkle, an 8 year old girl in a Melbourne suburb, and Max Jerry Horowitz, a 44-year-old obese Jewish man who lives in black and gray isolation in New York City.  Max has a variety of short-term jobs and suffers from an undiagnosed case of Asperger‘s Syndrome, while Mary has a relatively absent father who works in a tea bag factory and a perpetually drunk mother.  Both endured teasing throughout their childhoods.  I scored a ticket to the opening screening of the film, as well as the after party.

Remarkably, the film is based on a true story… that of Max Elliot‘s life, the film’s writer and director.  Elliot, the son of a trampoline salesman, grew up on an (unkosher) prawn farm in Australia (yes, they really do put shrimps on the barbie there); and he has had a pen pal, or “pen friend” as he calls it, from America since childhood.  It was all on account of his joining a fan site for animation in his late teens and clicking on a box indicating that he would like a pen pal.  Elliot’s pen friend, whom he has never actually met, is a Jewish man from New York City, who, although not named Max, does suffer from Asperger’s Syndrome, and who has been in a nursing home for the past few months recovering from surgery.  Not even Philip Seymour Hoffman, a resident of New York, who lent the voice to the character of Max, has met Elliot’s actual pen pal.

Creating a stop motion “claymation” film is a slow and arduous process, Elliot said.  On average, only five seconds of film are created a day.  Elliot likened the process to “making love and being stabbed to death at the same time.”  The 92-minute film took 57 weeks of actual shooting, a crew of 50, and five years to finally complete.  As an Australian production, over 65 percent of the funding came from the Australian government.

As the story proceeds, Mary grows older and taller, as Max grows wider and fatter.  The browns get more chocolate-hued, and the grays darker, with occasional highlights of spot-red to symbolically highlight something, like a pompom on top of Max’s kippah, which he wears even though he is an atheist.  Elliot told me this was his homage to the spot-color used in “Schindler’s List.”  In Elliot’s film, the back story is that Max’s father abandoned his family, and Max’s mother, who raised the boy on a kibbutz, killed herself when Max was 6.  A very sad childhood indeed.  Max is a creature of habit and his diet consists of kugel and blintzes, as well as fish sticks.  (Speaking of blintzes, the director took his parents to Nate ‘n’ Al’s deli in Los Angeles last week, where, Elliot told me, his father “tried a ‘cheesy’ blintz and a turkey blintz for the first time”).  Max’s wardrobe consists of eight tracksuits, all the same color.  When he sends Mary a letter, he bids the package a ritual farewell with a Yiddish phrase, “geh, gezunt a heit.”

Elliot is not Jewish.  I asked him how he came up with the Yiddish phrase and Jewish foodstuffs.  Mostly he queried his Jewish friends in Melbourne, where he said there is a significant Jewish community, “especially a large group of Holocaust survivors.”  His friends gave him the Yiddish phrase and also told him that he had to include “Yentl’s noodle kugel.”  The actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman, also a non-Jew, had trouble with the Yiddish phrase.  At first, he used a more autistic, “Rain Man-like” voice for Max, but the director had him soften his tone, which helped him to create a more approachable character. 

Because of his Asperger’s, Max is unable to perceive the visual cues from others’ facial expressions, so he carries around a guide to facial emotions in order to discern if people are happy (smiling) or angry (frowning).  The fact that his partially blind neighbor, Ivy, who suffers from alopecia, has no real eyebrows, presents quite a problem in reading her mood.  Mary does not have that problem, since she wears a mood ring that tells her how she is feeling.

What I found so Jewish about this film was not only the character of Max and his rabbinical style of advice, but the movie’s “haggadic” telling of the story of human relationships.  Like the seder’s four question’s, Mary questions and Max responds; their decades-long dialogue informs them and connects them to each other and the human community.  Max teaches Mary that it is wrong for her to naively think that she can cure his Asperger’s Syndrome.  It would be like changing the color of his eyes. The message is that while we cannot choose our relatives, we can choose our friends; that we are all flawed; and that we should aspire to live in spite of our flaws and not hide behind them.  All this makes “Mary and Max,” to me, even more of a Jewish film than meets the naked eye.

For more information, visit the Sundance website.

January 16, 2009 | 1:57 am

Day One at Sundance: Schmoozing With Robert Redford and Spike Lee

Posted by Larry Mark

By Larry Mark

Greetings from Park City, Utah, where I arrived for my seventh (or is it my eighth?) visit to the Sundance Film Festival.  I can’t keep track of how many years I have come, but neither, apparently, can Robert Redford, the festival’s founder.  Speaking at the opening press conference this afternoon, Redford said that Sundance has been celebrating its 25th birthday for the past three years.  It all depends on when you start the count.  Do you start in 1985?  Or maybe you start back in the 1970s, when the fest was called the USA Film Festival and the focus was not on indies?

I arrived really excited about the offerings at the 2009 festival, which runs from Jan. 15-25.  And why not?  The opening film is a Jewish one:  “Mary and Max,“ an Australian clay animation feature written and directed by Adam Elliot.  Elliot made a splash at Sundance in 2004 with his animated short film, “Harvie Krumpet” – about a working class boy with perpetual bad luck – which went on to win an Oscar.  The perhaps even quirkier “Mary and Max” is a feature film about a pen pal friendship that has endured for over two decades between Mary Dinkle, a zaftig 8 year old in a Melbourne suburb, and Max Horowitz, a 44 year old obese Jewish agoraphobe (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who lives in isolation in Queens, NY.  I scored a ticket to the opening screening of the film, as well as the after party, and will fill you in on Friday.

Other films on my growing hit list include: “William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” a documentary by two of the Jewish attorney’s daughters, which explores his famed civil rights litigation as well as his defense of accused rapists and terrorists; “The Messenger,” by Israeli-born Oren Moverman, about two soldiers (Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster)  who work for the military’s Casualty Notification Office, and are “casualties” themselves; “Zion and His Brothers” an Israeli sibling drama set in Haifa, by Eran Merav, who studied at both the Camera Obscura and the Sam Spiegel Film & TV schools in Israel. 

The list also includes a smattering of Palestinian themed films, including “Pomegranates and Myrrh“ by Najwa Najjar; and “Shouting Fire” by Liz Garbus, a documentary on free speech which includes a focus on the infamous Neo-Nazi march in Skokie three decades ago.

In terms of celebrity sightings after just a few hours, I only had two:  Robert Redford and Spike Lee.  At the press conference today, Redford said he’s excited that President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Jan. 20 falls in the middle of the festival. “You’ve got a lame-duck guy going out, but he sure has done a lot of quacking in the last while,” Redford said of the Bush Administration. Redford added that the National Endowment for the Arts had been “fighting the right, which saw art as some kind of threat. “So I think that’s going to change.”

Asked if Sundance was going to create a festival in Abu Dhabi, Redford said that the labs had gone international and had worked well in the Middle East, specifically in Iran and Jordan, since the 1990s.  While still in preliminary discussions with representatives from Abu Dhabi, he expects that Sundance will proceed in creating some lab or event there in the future.

Oh, and then there was Spike Lee.  After the press conference, I skipped the free Park City liquor giveaway (it’s an oat-based vodka.  What self-respecting Litvak would drink a vodka made of oats?)  Instead, I tried a free espresso.  It was just the barrista and me, when a shorter “stranger” approached the coffee bar.  He ordered an espresso as well.  It was Spike Lee.  We chatted about the Knicks and his disappointment with the team – until he stepped out of the theater and was barraged by camera-wielding journalists asking about his latest project, the film of the Broadway rock musical, “Passing Strange.”

And now on to the opening night film…

For more information, visit the http://www.sundance.org website

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January 13, 2009 | 9:06 pm

“Talk, don’t shoot” - Ari Folman’s Antiwar Film

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Ari Folman’s animated documentary film, “Waltz With Bashir” is making headlines—and not just because it’s a darn good piece of filmmaking. As Deborah Solomon points out in her interview with Folman, the doc smacks of irony: Folman’s soi desant “antiwar movie” is doubly resonant if you consider the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza. Solomon dubbed Folman “The Peacemaker,” but he told an audience at the Arclight Saturday night that he doesn’t believe film can change the world.

From the NY Times:

The headlines coming out of Gaza have lent added relevance to your new film, “Waltz With Bashir,” which uses the unlikely form of animation to piece together a nuanced account of your experiences in the 1982 Lebanon War.
It will always be up-to-date because something will always happen again.

You mean the prospect for peace seems so remote? That’s sad.
But it’s true.

You were a 19-year-old soldier at the time of the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christian Phalangists in two refugee camps in West Beirut. Where were you during that 72-hour rampage?
We were nearby, a half a mile away, and we realized what happened just after it ended, while women were running hysterically out of the camps.

The film can be described as the Israeli “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Yes, more than anything else, I see it as an antiwar movie.

One tends to think of Israel as a country where survivalist imperatives do not allow for much antiwar sentiment.
Israelis are divided, definitely, but I think you hear too much of the louder voices that always justify any kind of act of aggression. But there is a very big crowd of people who are fed up with war. I can’t understand the word “war” anyhow.

What can’t you understand?
I can’t understand people killing each other for a piece of land. Can you understand that?

All this offers a sharp contrast with the glamorized image of Jewish soldiers depicted a half-century ago in a novel like “Exodus,” by Leon Uris. Have you read it?
It’s a must-read in Israel, and the film with Paul Newman is a must-film.

Israel’s founding generation didn’t seem to harbor ambivalence about war.
They were survival wars. They were about the existence of the country, and they were influenced tremendously by the Holocaust. But the Lebanon War had nothing to do with survival.

It was a military exception?
It was not an exception. It was a turning point in the relationship between the Israeli leadership and the people, who realized for the first time that war can be declared just for political reasons.

Ariel Sharon would disagree.
What went through Sharon’s head in 1982? Only he knows.

Were you interested in film as a child?
No, not really. I was interested in football and rock ’n’ roll and girls. As a child I played the clarinet, a nice Jewish instrument.

Your parents were Holocaust survivors?
They met in the Lodz ghetto in Poland when they were 16. They married four years later on Aug. 18, 1944. The next morning, during the liquidation of the ghetto, they were evacuated to Auschwitz.

How old were you when you learned of their past?
The moment I understood Hebrew.

You were one of the original writers on “In Treatment,” the Israeli show set in a psychiatrist’s office that was adapted by HBO.
You know the show? There is an Israeli pilot traumatized by his experiences dropping a bomb that killed 14 kids. In the American version, it was adapted to Iraq.

Will he be returning for the second season?
No, he committed suicide.

I’m sorry. Couldn’t you save him?
No. I’m not a great believer in psychotherapy.

Have you been analyzed?
I’ve been analyzed way too much.

The problem with therapy is that you’re listening to no one but yourself. How can you learn anything?
That’s a very good sentence. Can I use it from now on, as if I invented it?

It’s yours, and no one will ever know. Do you find that talk is more effective in matters of war and diplomacy?
Yes. I think you should always ask yourself: has everything been done to prevent the conflict? Talk, don’t shoot. Talk.

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January 12, 2009 | 6:50 pm

‘Waltz with Bashir’ Wins Coveted Golden Globe

Posted by Tom Tugend

Ari Folman, director of "Waltz With Bashir",
shows his trophy for winning the Golden Globe
for best foreign-language film
at the 66th Golden Globe Awards.

Israel’s “Waltz with Bashir” won the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film on Sunday evening, solidifying its frontrunner status to take home Israel’s first Oscar at next month’s Academy Awards.

The edgy, animated film about a traumatized veteran trying to recover his memories of the first Lebanon War, beat out competing entries from Germany, France, Italy and Sweden.

In his brief acceptance speech, director Ari Folman dedicated his Golden Globe to the eight babies (including three of his own) born to the film’s production staff during the four years it took to complete the picture.

“I hope that when they grow up, these babies will watch this film together and will see it as an ancient video game that has nothing to do with reality,” Folman said.

During a panel discussion the previous day among the five foreign directors nominated for the award, Folman recounted a little anecdote.

When the second Lebanon War started in 2006, a friend asked him whether he wasn’t sorry that he didn’t have the film ready to go at that time, to give the anti-war drama more immediacy.

To which Folman quoted himself as responding, “Don’t worry, they’ll cook up another war.” Sure enough, many critics are now commenting on the picture’s relevance to the current fighting in Gaza.

An audience member asked Folman whether the film’s depiction of Israeli warfare in Lebanon had drawn any protests in his home country, to which Folman responded, “No, Israelis are very tolerant toward their artists.”

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, which awards the Golden Globes, honored filmmaker Steven Spielberg with the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement.

Britain’s Kate Winslet took home the trophy for best supporting actress for her role as a former SS concentration camp guard in “The Reader.” She also won the best actress award for her portrayal of a suburban housewife in “Revolutionary Road.”

Veteran director Woody Allen showed that he was still in the game when his film “Vicky Christina Barcelona” garnered top honors for best musical or comedy picture.

Israelis could also take some vicarious satisfaction that the HBO drama “In Treatment,” which was adapted from the Israeli TV hit “B’Tipul,” won the best performance by an actor nod for Gabriel Byrne as the show’s psychiatrist.

The evening’s trophy champ was “Slumdog Millionaire,” the rags-to-riches story of an unlikely Indian game show contestant, which won for best dramatic picture, director, screenplay and musical score.

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January 8, 2009 | 7:56 pm

Why we should care about the actors’ strike

Posted by Danielle Berrin

Israel is at war with terrorists. The U.S. economy is headed for the deepest economic depression since 1929, and, a few weeks ago, Bernie Madoff swindled $50 billion from investors who trusted him, crippling families, foundations and non-profit organizations around the world. This in mind, it comes as little surprise that few people have tolerance (or any interest in) the looming actors’ strike. When millions of people around the country are losing their jobs, why should we care about the majority of the 110,000 Screen Actors Guild members who claim they can’t afford health insurance? 

SAG is arguing that just because the economy is in tatters doesn’t mean actors should accept insufficient contracts. And, as the NY Times Carpetbagger reported a few weeks ago, there is internal division among actors as to whether or not to even authorize a strike. Movie stars George Clooney, Tom Hanks and Charlize Theron have vocally opposed the movement. But Mel Gibson, Martin Sheen and Ed Harris are ready to brawl. To be fair, the tiny minority of celebrities in SAG do not share the same concerns as the majority of under- or unemployed actors who are more dependent on pushing this forward. But still, if the SAG family can’t even agree on where to head, how can they expect our support?

Because we need our actors. It is precisely during dark times that we need the entertainment they offer, the most. Imagine enduring the daily barrage of depressing headlines without the promise of escape entertainers guarantee us. How much worse would war or economic recession seem without the possibility of being set free in a dark theater—where India’s “slumdogs” can become millionaires, and Jewish brothers defy Nazis (who, in other films, look like Kate Winslet), where people fall in love, and “Revolutionary Road” is there to remind you your marriage isn’t that bad after all.

Actors are the image people, the ones we see, who most closely reflect us. It is their heartrending portrayals that can bring us out of our own pain and into a world where hope is still possible. 

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January 6, 2009 | 9:23 pm

Joel Stein hates Torah (but loves that Jews run Hollywood)

Posted by Danielle Berrin

I like Joel Stein. He makes me laugh. But I seriously question the motive for his recent column “How Jewish is Hollywood?” in which he facetiously declares that Jews unequivocally and absolutely control the media. And that, well, “as a proud Jew,” he’d like to keep it that way.

Joel Stein, a proud Jew? Here’s an example of his utter identification:

JJ: What’s Jewish about you?
JS: My name, my face….

JJ: Do you ever go to temple?
JS: No, I never go to temple. My life is short. I don’t want to spend it being bored so I can feel like a better person for something I don’t believe in. I’m a strong atheist. I don’t go to temple ‘cause they talk about the Bible, and I just don’t get anything out of that.

JJ: So you’re not a fan of the Bible?
JS: I just think it’s really kind of violent and mean and selfish and tribal.

JJ: Maybe you’re not reading it with the right lenses.
JS: Dude, I could read ‘Mein Kampf’ with the right lenses on and find something nice about it. You shouldn’t have to bend over backwards to find something nice about a text. I understand the context: You turn around and pity a people being killed, and, like, you turn to salt; God kills your first-born baby; God asks you to kill your child? I know you could come up with counter examples, but there’s enough slavery and murder in that thing ... I’d rather read ‘Finnegan’s Wake.’

While I appreciate—and quite agree—with Stein’s stipulation that a disproportionate number of Jews sit on the highest thrones in the entertainment and media industries (as opposed to Abe Foxman’s rhetorical dodge that people who control Hollywood “happen to be Jewish”), I’m trying to figure out what Stein’s definition of “Jew” actually is. To be fair, Stein’s Judaism is probably much like the Judaism of the people who purportedly run Hollywood. Yet, as a modern, practicing Jewess, I have to wonder how someone who degrades Judaism’s most sacred value (the Torah) could be so unabashedly happy that the title conferred on its followers means there’s any calculated Jewish substance in Hollywood.

Sadly, this reminds me of those wannabe literati who discuss classic literature because they know the titles, but have never read the books. And since I KNOW Joel Stein has read “Finnegan’s Wake” (a work I might add, that is arguably more opaque than Torah) I know he’s capable of plumbing the depths, complexity and humanity implicit in its text. And after all that, he really would be proud that instead of enduring “David and Goliath” re-runs, he now gets to watch “Mad Men.”

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January 5, 2009 | 1:44 pm

Poor Hollywood?

Posted by Danielle Berrin

As last Friday’s LA Times pointed out, even Hollywood – the emblem of glamour and excess – cannot avoid the economic slump. It is expected that more layoffs will follow recent job cutbacks across all media, from networks to studios to smaller independent outfits. Not to mention, fewer and fewer films are being made. That, coupled with ongoing speculation that “new media” will triumphantly overtake traditional modes means one of America’s (and the world’s) best-loved and influential industries is headed for fundamental change.

Jeff Silver, producer of “300” and the forthcoming (hopefully final) “Terminator” starring Christian Bale, suggested that less filmmaking might put more of a premium on creativity. As he put it, “Right now, there’s a lack of ideas in Hollywood. People are recycling ideas not reinventing them.” 

Does that mean the pending industry reformation might return film to the 30s and 40s classicism known as the Golden Age of Hollywood? Then, the financial success of The Jazz Singer enabled Warner Bros. to buy up movie theaters. Or, will audiences get to once again enjoy the irreverent non-conformism of the New Hollywood movie brats like Scorsese, Spielberg, Coppola and Lucas who elevated commercialism to auteurism?

Dreamy as it sounds for us cinephiles, the reality is harsher. The once plush Wall Street well that pumped hundreds of millions from hedge funds into creative independent filmmaking has run dry. And a looming actor’s strike, which “House M.D.” writer/producer Eli Attie said is “stupid” to implement during a recession, may prove even more disastrous to an industry still desperately recovering losses from last year’s writer’s strike. All things considered, studio execs and movie stars, though aggravated by the drama, will still be sitting pretty when it’s mostly unemployed or under-working actors calling out for help.

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January 5, 2009 | 2:51 am

Waltzing to the top

Posted by Tom Tugend

Israel’s “Waltz with Bashir” received another major boost when the cream of American movie critics picked the path-breaking animated film for top honors.

The National Society of Film Critics named “Waltz” as the best picture of 2008 at its annual meeting on Saturday (1/3) in New York.

In its review of the film last October, The Journal reported that the film “combines state-of-the-art animation, an anti-war documentary theme, and a psychoanalytical approach to recover the memory of a traumatized Israeli soldier.

“The mixture may sound odd, but it all comes together as an integrated and haunting biographical movie. Director Ari Folman is also its central character as a 20-year old infantryman, whose unit spearheaded the Israeli advance into Lebanon in June 1982, with the announced goal of stopping incursions and rocket attacks on northern Galilee towns by the Palestine Liberation Organization.”

Israel’s current incursion into the Gaza Strip to eliminate Hamas rocket attacks gives “Waltz” an added relevance.

The top pick by the national critics, although rarely emulated by the Academy’s Oscar voters, does add further laurels to “Waltz,” earned at international film festivals, by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn., and the Golden Globes nominating committee.

As The Journal predicted three months ago, the picture may well become the very first Israeli film to waltz off with an Oscar.

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