These are more than mere parlor-game musings: They open up a discussion about culture, identity, history, and the considerable Jewish contribution to what is perhaps modernity’s only true indigenous art form.

A.O. Scott, chief film critic for the New York Times, and Jody Rosen, music critic for Slate, a Tablet contributing editor, and co-author of the magazine’s list of the greatest 100 Jewish films of all time, spoke to Long Story Short host Liel Leibovitz about Woody and Mel, the Brothers Marx and the Brothers Coen, and everything in between.

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Coming up with the list was no easy task. We spent hours arguing about just what it was that made a film Jewish, and what made one Jewish film more important than another. We’re sure what we came up with will inspire some and infuriate others, but, hopefully, it will get us all thinking about what makes motion pictures such a great–and a greatly Jewish–art form.

Starting Monday, we’ll present you with a new batch of cinema magic each day of the week. Can you guess what our number one pick is? Which movies would you have chosen? Which are overlooked? Which overrated? We’d love to know your thoughts (see: comments!). And don’t forget to grab some popcorn.

Related: Song of Songs [Tablet Magazine]

I met Bergstein at a screening of Dirty Dancing, the seminal coming-of-age film that is actually much, much more than that, organized by the website Jezebel to benefit the New York Abortion Access Fund, which drew a packed house at a downtown movie theater. An illegal abortion (and its botched, back-alley consequences) shape much of the plot, making the 1987 film about summer in 1963 far ahead of its time. Bergstein, in a pre-screening discussion with Jezebel’s Irin Carmon (who last year wrote the definitive piece on Dirty Dancing, and who posted video of last week’s event), said she was adamant as a producer that the abortion remain in the film, since, she had presciently argued, the battle for reproductive rights still hadn’t been won.

Calling Dirty Dancing “a very American film,” Bergstein described it as the story of a young girl who took her life in her hands and ran with it, no matter what it cost her. (As Carmon helpfully contextualized long before the screening, “The daughter of the first generation of American Jews to read widespread upper-middle class prosperity, if not elite cultural acceptance, she is swathed in a pre-Kennedy assassination liberalism.”) I counted enough male attendees to abandon my tally of how many might actually show up as the lights went down and the instantly recognizable opening notes of The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” filtered through the sound system.

For those of you unfamiliar (shame, shame), the film centers around Frances Houseman, a 17-year-old (Jewish) New Yorker whom everyone calls Baby, who is spending the summer with her family in the Catskills at Kellerman’s resort. Heading to Mount Holyoke in the fall to study economics of underdeveloped countries, the idealistic Baby—portrayed perfectly by a pre-plastic surgery Jennifer Grey—intervenes to help get Penny, a dance instructor at the resort, the money she needs for an abortion. Sheltered enough to not realize exactly how dangerously makeshift that procedure might be, but insistent on helping and convinced she can, Baby also fills in for Penny and dances with Johnny, the male dance instructor played by the delightfully swoon-worthy Patrick Swayze, for the pair’s annual gig at the nearby Sheldrake resort.

Returning to find Penny in alarmingly bad shape after the primitive, unsanitary abortion, Baby calls upon her father, a doctor, for help. Jerry Orbach saves the day, as usual, though he is horrified at what his daughter has become a party to. Though Dr. Houseman expressly forbids Baby from seeing Johnny, mistakenly believing he is responsible for what is euphemistically referred to throughout the film only as getting Penny in trouble, she sneaks out to see him for, as Carmon convincingly argues, “the greatest love scene of all time.” Class tensions and scheduled activities resume, while Baby is forced to deal with her changing relationship both to Johnny and her father, challenging each man with her resolute determination (and, dare I say, complete stubbornness).

The film is hugely Jewish, capturing a 1960s Jewish family and their open-minded but still guarded sensibilities. Referring back to Carmon’s description of Baby in the artificial environment at Kellerman’s,

Told her whole life that she could do anything and change the world, she’s faced with the hypocrisy of a long-shunned minority enacting its own unexamined exclusion, this time on class grounds. The guests at Kellerman’s look comfortable, but they were raised in the Depression and traumatized by World War II.

After the screening, I sat on the sticky movie theater steps with the energetic and eccentric Bergstein, who told me how grateful she felt seeing young people who so clearly love the film, and said it had been years since she’d seen it in a theater. I, for one, was certain I never noticed how insanely skinny the female leads were. Or, I suppose, how Jewish some of them were. Did I mention they’re coming out with a remake?

How To Say “Nobody Puts Baby in a Corner” in German [Jezebel]
Eleanor Bergstein, Screenwriter, Talks Dirty Dancing [Village Voice]
Dirty Dancing is the Greatest Movie of All Time [Jezebel]
Do ‘Dirty Dancing’ and ‘Thelma and Louise’ Still Matter? [WSJ]

In fact, on paper (that description) aside, the movie sounded appealing. The plot (the four Meyerowitz siblings prepare for their father’s 70th birthday dinner in the wake of the just-published-by-youngest-son-family-tell-all) seemed new and different enough to sustain a funny, lively narrative. And the cast! Rainn Wilson (of Dwight Schrute fame), Dexter star Michael C. Hall, and sharp-tongued comedian Sarah Silverman play variously troubled siblings dealing with the aftermath of youngest brother Nathan (charming-even-though-his-character-is-a-total-jerk Ben Schwartz)’s bestselling book, Peep World. Sadly, the characters fall flat in four individual, divergent story lines that aren’t fleshed out enough. On the bright side, at least the problem isn’t the Jewish thing!

Sarah Silverman’s character, Cheri Meyerowitz, is the most stereotyped, and “Jewish,” of the ensemble, and she goes all out—as perhaps only she can—to embody middle-child Cheri in all her bratty, obnoxious whininess. It is truly irritating, as I imagine Silverman thoroughly intended, to watch her failed-actress character shriek at her mother and demand back-up her in her libel lawsuit against Nathan. In Cheri’s defense, the film adaptation of Peep World (the film based on the novel within the movie, all with the same name—got that?) is filming outside her window, and the actress playing the film version of Cheri is her father’s new girlfriend. Tough times.

But aside from the stereotyped Cheri (and her inexplicable Jews for Jesus pal, played by Steven Tobolowsky), there is little reference to Judaism throughout the film, and I don’t think any mention at all that the family is Jewish, save for their surname. Cue sigh of relief.

Also worth mentioning is the stellar supporting cast, who play characters more realistic and dimensional than the Meyerowitz siblings. Judy Greer, whose sidekick presence alone makes any film worth seeing, is one of the highlights. Plus, her character is married to Michael C. Hall’s: Awesome couple alert. Taraji P. Henson and Kate Mara shine as Wilson and Schwartz’s unlikely dinner companions.

While I took solace in the fact that not every character in the film (directed by Barry W. Blaustein, who directed The Ringer and wrote Coming to America) was a Jewish stereotype, I wish Peep World had stepped up its narrative game and developed the main characters more fully.

Peep World Trailer

On a cool October morning, actress Natalie Portman is wearing a jean jacket and dangling beaded earrings, sipping tea in Schiller’s Liquor Bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. She talks about the difference between Jews in Israel and Jews in Long Island. “I definitely know what being Jewish in Israel means and what being Jewish in America means,” says this 24-year-old, who was born in Israel to an Israeli father, fertility specialist Dr. Avner Hershlag, and an American mother, artist Shelley Hershlag.

They moved to the United States when she was 3, and they return to Israel every year to visit family. Portman, who uses her grandmother’s maiden name professionally, attended Jewish day schools until eighth grade—mostly, she says, because her parents wanted her to keep up her Hebrew. But the Hershlags were not a religious family, nor involved in the local synagogue. “I grew up in the classic American Jewish suburbia, which has a whole different sense of what it means to be Jewish than anywhere else in the world.”

I ask her to elaborate. “The people I grew up with on Long Island are wonderful people. But I have friends who grew up in $5 million homes, they all drive BMWs, and the only places they’ve been to outside the United States are the islands in the Caribbean. Which is fine, it’s a choice, and I don’t want to be critical of that. But I am. I think it can definitely be a problem, especially since American Jews are the ones who are in a position—politically and financially—to help other Jews around the world who are facing problems that we can’t conceive of.”

Portman explains why she never felt a pull to be a part of Jewish life in her Syosset neighborhood. “I never liked going to temple on Long Island because it just had that aura of someone’s fake party to me, which always made me uncomfortable. So I never went to temple at home, I never got bat mitzvahed, I just sort of rejected that whole thing; it seemed so tied up with values that I hated. But on the other hand, when I go to Israel, I always want to go to temple on the High Holy Days even if no one in my family is going with me. I’ll fast. One year in Israel, my family went to Jaffa to get pizza on Pesach and I would not do that. You know, I get much more Jewish in Israel because I like the way that religion is done there.”

As she describes some of her Long Island girlfriends, the slur “JAP” pops into my head and I ask how she feels when someone uses the word. “I mean, I grew up in a Long Island public school that was 60 to 70 percent Jewish and I know what a JAP is,” she says, sipping her tea. “But obviously the word shouldn’t be misused. I wouldn’t want to have stereotypes used in derogatory ways by people outside the Jewish community, but I think it is something from within the community that we need to examine and be self-critical about, because it’s how we’re raising our young people.”

“I had a fashion designer tell me that when I wear a dress of his, it sells out across the country because Jewish girls ‘look to me,’ and Jewish girls are the ones that buy expensive dresses. It made me sort of sad, because I want to be an influence in ways other than by a pretty dress.”

I ask if she’s felt pressure to use her celebrity on behalf of Israeli causes. “I’m very comfortable with that,” she says, “and I’m currently exploring ways to help because I love the country.” She’s recently become more protective of Israel, in part because people around her have become more impatient with it. “I have a very close friend who lately has this European, anti-Israel way of thinking, and it’s very hard for me to have conversations with him. He says, ‘Can’t you be self-critical?’ But it’s hard to be publicly critical. It has to be done in a very delicate, well-thought-out manner. These issues come up at parties and dinners with people who don’t know a lot, and as someone who was born in Israel, you’re put in a position of defending Israel because you know how much is at stake. It’s become a much bigger part of my identity in recent years because it’s become an issue of survival.”

I turn the conversation to her career, asking if she feels some Jewish pride in being considered a Hollywood beauty. “Yeah,” she replies. “The hard thing is that people often don’t associate me with being Jewish. I’m not someone who you look at and say, ‘You’re Jewish.’ People ask me if I’m Spanish, Italian, or even WASPy. So I don’t think I can be representative. But in another way, I think I look very Jewish because all the Jewish girls I grew up with, we all look the same: small, short, skinny, dark hair, dark eyes. Little noses.” She laughs. “So maybe it is time for a new type. I’d like it if people thought I was Jewish-looking.”

She did play an iconic Jew, Anne Frank, on Broadway at the age of 16, and I wonder how personally Portman connected to the character. “Very personally,” she says. “Because my grandparents didn’t talk about those years much, especially my grandfather. His younger brother, who was 14 at the time, was in hiding from the Nazis and couldn’t take it one more day and ran out and was shot in the streets. And his parents were killed at Auschwitz. He was the one I’d always related to in the family. He was sort of the quiet, brilliant man who led Pesach and I would always imagine him or his father in these horrifying humiliating conditions. The humiliation is almost harder for me to imagine than the physical pain.”

When it comes to Portman’s own romantic life, it has obviously been a staple of gossip columns, but she says she’s not necessarily looking for a Jewish husband. “A priority for me is definitely that I’d like to raise my kids Jewish, but the ultimate thing is just to have someone who is a good person and who is a partner.” She says her parents don’t push her one way or another. “My dad always makes this stupid joke with my new boyfriend, who is not Jewish. He says, ‘It’s just a simple operation.’” She laughs. “They’ve always said to me that they mainly want me to be happy and that’s the most important thing, but they’ve also said that if you marry someone with the same religion, it’s one less thing to fight about. But according to that argument, I might as well only date vegetarian guys.”

She doesn’t think it necessarily takes two Jews to maintain Jewish continuity in a family. “I feel the strength to carry that on myself. It’s obviously easier when both parents are in it together, but I don’t necessarily think it has to be.”

Portman says she resists any kind of blind tribalism. “I don’t believe in going along with anything without questioning. I think that’s the basis of Judaism: questioning and skepticism.” She says that for her, basic humanity comes before faith. “To me, the most important concept in Judaism is that you can break any law of Judaism to save a human life. I think that’s the most important thing. Which means to me that humans are more important than Jews are to me. Or than being Jewish is to me.”

Excerpted from Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish by Abigail Pogrebin. Copyright 2005 by Abigail Pogrebin. Used by permission of Broadway Books, a division of Random House, Inc.

In 2004, a couple of months after graduating college, I found myself in Israel. I had received a scholarship to study at Hebrew University in Jerusalem for a year, and I was now thousands of miles away from my girlfriend. I had heard that Natalie was also studying at Hebrew University, on a short break from her acting career. As we made up the small minority of students older than 20—most students were on their junior-year abroad—I was sure that we were destined to become the best of friends.

I found out through the rumor mill that she was studying Middle East politics at the international school. I was studying Yiddish literature on the other side of campus, meaning that in all likelihood our academic lives wouldn’t overlap. I could have decided to take a politics class so that I might, purely by chance, sit next to an international movie star. But I am no creeper.

Instead I started smoking.

I had seen her once from a distance puffing away—the picture of cool. I was sure a smoke after class would be an innocuous way to become friends, though I guess cancer is bad.

My brand of choice was the French Gauloises. I would step outside, ostensibly admiring the view. The Mount Scopus campus overlooks much of the ancient city, including the Dome of the Rock, so there were plenty of picturesque places to stand, gaze, and smoke. The problem was, I soon found that I was strangely inured to nicotine addiction. I simply couldn’t get hooked. I found smoking gross. But I kept it up. I don’t know how many packs I went through; I got smoker’s cough and my teeth started going yellow. Still, I smoked. Natalie never showed.

One afternoon before Yiddish class, I decided to go out for a cigarette. As I was breathing in that lovely death, suddenly there she was, walking past with a friend toward the main gate of the university. When she was 20 paces ahead of me I put out the cigarette and began to follow, at what I deemed a safe non-stalker distance. When Natalie and her friend reached the entrance they began to look around for a cab. This was my chance. I went up to her friend and asked in Hebrew with my best Israeli accent if they were going downtown and if I could split a cab with them. I am particularly proud of this deception—as if it wasn’t obvious that we were all American. Amazingly, my ruse worked. Natalie answered that English was preferred, that they were American, and that I could certainly share the cab with them.

Once we got in the car (the friend in the front seat, and—serendipitously, amazingly!—me and Natalie together in the back), I froze. “Great day to skip class,” I said, resorting to what now sounds to me like a bad Ferris Bueller impression. I was sweating profusely. She noticed my nervousness and took over the conversation. We talked about books, I think. I tried my best to seem interesting and engaging, but I kept fiddling with my seat belt and crossing and uncrossing my legs, like I was directing traffic while sitting down.

Unfortunately, it’s a short 10-minute ride from the university to downtown. When we arrived, I paid my share of the cab and then stood there, frozen. I had been concentrating too hard on seeming sane to invent a reason for my going downtown. I couldn’t figure out some way to prolong our conversation. She smiled at me before walking away, one hand clutching her handbag and the other in a half-wave. I stood on the corner dazed for a couple of minutes. Then I sauntered off ebulliently. Surely Natalie and I were now friends! I assumed that the magic of celebrity and destiny would do the rest.

After about four or five paces, though, I realized that she didn’t even know my name.

Dejected, I did what any young academic-wannabe does when they’re feeling down on their luck in downtown Jerusalem. I wandered through the city’s many used bookstores and bought comfort books: the newest work by Yoel Hoffmann, novels by David Bergelson and Jacob Glatstein.

Awkwardly fumbling the six or seven books that I bought, I headed to Jerusalem’s main Zion Square. As I turned a corner, preoccupied with the choreography of books and bags and limbs, there she was again, inexplicably quite alone, as if she were waiting for me.

Somehow, without dropping my books (what grace!), I waved hello. She stopped me.

“Hi, I’m Natalie, by the way.”

“Oh, yeah, of course. I’m Saul.”

Her phone rang suddenly, as though on cue. She had one of those huge new Blackberries—it was 2004—and proceeded to have a conversation with what sounded like her agent or someone of the sort. She had been whisked away from our reverie, but I waited beside her patiently.

Then I heard a girl’s voice from behind me: “Who’s that?”

“Oh, he’s no one. He doesn’t know Natalie. He just split a cab with us.”

I turned around to find that Natalie’s friend had been joined by a gaggle of young women, all glaring at me as if I had stolen something from them.

Natalie continued to chatter on the phone and I could feel their eyes like daggers piercing my back with mounting rage. I knew this was a battle I couldn’t win. I noiselessly slipped away. I figured I would see Natalie at school soon.

But Natalie flew back to America for a movie premiere later that week, and I never saw her again.

Watching the Oscars will be hard, though perhaps also therapeutic. It’s time to move on. And at least I can thank Natalie for one thing: A couple of months after that taxi ride, I put my pack of cigarettes away. I don’t think I’ll ever smoke another cigarette.

CORRECTION: The photo caption in this article originally misstated when the photo was taken. It has been corrected.

Saul Noam Zaritt is a doctoral student of Hebrew and Yiddish literature at The Jewish Theological Seminary.

You see, I read the book. And it infuriated me. I loved the beginning passionately, then felt increasingly angry and hoodwinked as it went on. The Elizabeth Gilbert who went to Italy to rediscover food and sensory pleasures after the breakup of her marriage was hilarious and witty. I loved her description of the “gorgeous flower-chain of curses” tossed onto a soccer field by an old Italian man watching the game. I loved that she was an unabashed word nerd like me, telling us that the word for fan in Italian is “tifoso,” derived from the word for typhus—“in other words, one who is mightily fevered.” I loved that she lusted for her young Roman conversation partners but knew that acting on that lust was a mistake.

Oh, I knew Gilbert had done some stupid things in the past. But she owned them. I respected the way she was cryptic about what killed her marriage—she was protecting her husband. I liked the way she was rueful about her self-destructive passion for a younger actor/writer/poet/yogi. When Gilbert took off for Italy, leaving both ex-husband and lover behind, I rooted for her. I rejoiced as she began to eat again. I wanted to suck down plates of pasta with her and giggle over glasses of Barolo. She was my buddy.

But then she left Italy. She went to India to learn how to pray. And I started to turn on her. At first, I made excuses for her inability to write about faith and grace with the same charm she conjured up when she wrote about food. After all, Anne Lamott had the same trouble in Traveling Mercies; it’s hard to make something as internal as spirituality feel immediate. The writing-class rule is “show, don’t tell,” but how do you externalize belief? The book began to feel labored. When Liz wrote about her difficulty meditating and being silent, her self-deprecation started to come off as cutesy. The chattiness I’d loved in Italy was starting to feel glib.

And then one scene pulled the yoga mat out from under me completely.

It’s the scene in which—spoiler alert—Gilbert has a revelatory, out-of-body meeting with her husband’s spirit on an ashram rooftop. She and her husband’s spirit forgive each other, and it is beautiful. The divide between them is gone. Suddenly, his anger and hurt evaporate, because she and he have transcended their earthly selves and their souls have communed.

I was infuriated by Gilbert’s creation of a situation in which she’s been absolved, in which her husband’s soul has done something the man himself could not. It felt like the laziest sort of self-justifying hippie nonsense. I think you have to live with people not liking you. And it’s hard for people like Gilbert (and me), people who really want to be liked, but that is the real work, accepting that not everyone will like you. It’s harder than creating a transcendent moment in which the other person really does forgive you, even if he doesn’t know it consciously.

Of course, I can’t know that Gilbert’s ex’s spirit didn’t meet hers on the astral plane. But I think it’s much more challenging and meaningful to accept that you may never receive absolution. It is braver—and I think more Jewish—to do everything in your power to make right the wrong you’ve done and still acknowledge that forgiveness may not be granted. It’s miserable to live with loose ends. It’s prettier to conjure up resolutions. But it isn’t authentic.

I finished the book because I am a masochist, but I was seething. So much self-examination to so little end! Maybe I just can’t escape my earthly Jewish guilt and perpetual ambivalence about everything. I realize that Elizabeth Gilbert isn’t Jewish, and she’s more than entitled to her own freeform spirituality. But it made me start thinking about how Judaism is more about community than self-acceptance. Ours is not a full-on feel-good religion, like Gilbert’s version of Christi-Bu-ism. But neither is it self-aggrandizing pablum. I do believe the world would be a better place if we spent more time turned outward than inward.

I think back to when I lived in San Francisco and heard so many High Holiday sermons about self-forgiveness—so much talk about forgiving ourselves, so little emphasis on apologizing to others. I think the reason I’m more comfortable with the word “religion” than the word “spirituality” is that religion involves doing rather than just thinking and feeling. Meditation and silence aren’t enough. Healing the world—the actual, physical world—is a more lasting goal.

I don’t want to be too hard on Gilbert. I actually think she did heal the world—her book made people happy. (Not me. Other people.) That’s nothing to sneeze at. Helping readers forget their troubles for a while, letting them in on a life of world travel and adventure, is a mitzvah. I understand that the real Elizabeth Gilbert is a lovely and charitable person. I am glad that she—another spoiler alert—found love again, and I don’t begrudge her a kid-free footloose life, a gazillion dollars, or the privilege of being played by a toothy movie star with lots of hair. But I still think the Jewish takeaway is that Eat Pray Love’s spiritual vision may be a nice place to visit, but we shouldn’t want to live there.

Without giving away too much of the new film’s plot, it’s safe to say that it explores the same major theme as before, namely the devastating moment in which a toy realizes its owner has matured and is no longer interested in child’s play. It’s a moment burdened with more than the cheap sentimentality of mass-produced pop culture; watching the toys have their moment of reckoning, we are forced to have one of our own.

Everything is at stake. One of the Toy Story franchise’s most profound achievements is its ability to remind us how pure our vision was when we were children, when the objects laid at our feet weren’t merely 5-inch figures of polyethylene and fabric but fearless cowboys and daring space rangers.

Had he been around to visit the local multiplex, Walter Benjamin would have likely enjoyed Pixar’s creation. In a short essay, unpublished in his lifetime, Benjamin discussed the difference between the adult’s vision and the child’s. “Because children see with pure eyes, without allowing themselves to be emotionally disconcerted, [their sight] is something spiritual,” he wrote. “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see.” This, he argued, was the reason children’s drawings cancel out “the intellectual cross-references of the soul,” creating instead “a pure mood, without thereby sacrificing the world.”

Pure mood is what Toy Story 3 is all about. It’s also the theme of this week’s haftorah. Like Buzz and Woody, the prophet Micah strikes an existential tone. Like the animated toys, he, too, is distraught by the notion that one day the being in whose grace we all live might lose interest in us and move on.

But unlike Andy, the toys’ owner, God himself doesn’t merely mature and abandon his knickknacks of old. Instead, Micah informs us, the Creator pursues a grim course of action: First he empowers his people—“all your enemies shall be destroyed”—and then he punishes them. “I will destroy the cities of your land,” God promises Israel, “and I will break down all your fortresses.”

It’s a bleak sequence of events. First comes redemption, then destruction. Why not the other way around? Why not suffering followed by salvation? To answer the question, we need not a prophet but a puppet, a toy truck, or an action figure. We need to look at the objects we’ve abandoned and recall how they could once conjure entire worlds writhing with thrills and promises. We need to think of the carefree lives we’d had when we toddled and realize that with each skill we’ve acquired, with each spurt of growth and drizzle of maturity, we’ve lost the most magical of all human capacities, the gift of being able not to reflect but just to see.

Unlike many other Hollywood blockbusters, the Toy Story movies do not require us to suspend our disbelief, nor do they pretend that a return to innocence could ever be possible. Impermanence is their point of departure, acceptance their goal. But not in the Buddhist way, not by Nirvana, not through transcending suffering or outgrowing the boundaries of our own consciousness. Instead, Woody, Buzz, and their friends are, I believe, good, observant Jews. They know, like Rabbi Akiva, that all is foreseen and permission is granted. They have no doubt that they are destined for abandonment by their master, and yet, in their earthly toy world, they depend on each other and love one another and strive for a better life. They worry about fate, but not enough to stop playing.

We may never be able to again see the world with the child’s untainted gaze, but if we listen to Buzz and Woody we may still be able to go—say it with me now!—to infinity and beyond.

UPDATE: This list should have included An Education (see comments). Your guide follows:

An Education
• What: Nick Hornby adopted this film from a memoir about a young girl in early-’60s England who falls for an older Jewish man, played here by Peter Sarsgaard.

• Up for: Best Picture; Leading Actress (Carey Mulligan); Adapted Screenplay (Hornby).

• Will win: Its best chance is in Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 5. While the older man’s Jewishness isn’t the film’s dominant theme, or even necessarily his dominant characteristic, it’s certainly in there.

And now, the list.

5: Up in the Air
• What: This flick, adopted from Walter Kirn’s novel, stars George Clooney as professional fire-er. Fans say it’s very now; detractors say it’s very mediocre.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Jason Reitman); Adapted Screenplay (Reitman and Sheldon Turner); Actor (George Clooney); Supporting Actress (Vera Farmiga); Supporting Acress (Anna Kendrick).

• Will win: Very long shot at Picture, Director, and Supporting Actress; slightly less long shot at Actor; favorite at Adapted Screenplay.

• Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 2. Largely on the strength of Jewy (and kind of insufferable) director/co-writer Reitman.

4: The White Ribbon
• What: German auteur Michael Haneke’s extremely dark film about a village in Germany immediately before World War I.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film; Cinematography.

• Will win: It’s the Foreign Language Film prohibitive favorite.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 3. Not really explicitly Jewish, but it is dark and German. Plus a prominent Jewish writer called it fantastic in a certain magazine of Jewish life and culture.

3: Inglourious Basterds
• What: Quentin Tarantino’s crazy, violent, hilarious, awesome World War II movie about a group of American Jews whose mission is to brutally kill as many Nazis as possible and then assassinate Hitler, as well as a French-Jewish movie theater owner who secretly plots, also, to assassinate Hitler. Spoiler alert: They succeed.

• Up for: Picture; Director (Tarantino); Original Screenplay (Tarantino); Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz); Cinematography; Film Editing; Sound Editing; Sound Mixing.

• Will win: Waltz is all but a lock, and Tarantino is the Original Screenplay (though not Director) favorite. Also a threat in the technical categories.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 7. Except for Waltz’s SS agent and Brad Pitt’s commando leader, the major characters are Jews; the French-Jewish theater owner is even played by a young French-Jewish actress named Mélanie Laurent. On the other hand, at its heart, the movie isn’t about Jews, Nazis, or really anything besides other World War II movies. Also, Liel hated it (though Germans liked it!).

2: Ajami
• What: Israel’s third consecutive Best Foreign Language nominee, and the first in Arabic, its gangster plot depicts Palestinian-Jewish relations in the titular Jaffa neighborhood.

• Up for: Foreign Language Film.

• Will win: It’s a long shot.

•Jew rating (out of 10, and adjusting for Hollywood): 8. I mean, it’s Israeli!

1: A Serious Man
• What: The Coen Brothers’s quiet, comic, and in the end deeply serious tale of Larry Gopnik, a Jewish physics professor in late-1960s Minnesota who wonders why his life has gone totally to hell.

• Up for: Picture; Original Screenplay.

• Will win: In a just world, both of them (and Michael Stuhlbarg would have an Actor nomination). In this world, probably nothing.

•Jew rating (out of 10): 10. If it were just that all the characters were Jews, and that the comic climax took place at a bar mitzvah, then it would be an 8, maybe a 9. But this movie wrestles with what it is to be Jewish on the most profound level; short of Yom Kippur services, nothing will make you reflect on your Jewishness like sitting through it. The day after A Serious Man gets no love, go see it, even if it’s your fifth time.

Nominations [The Oscars]

Related: Painfully Good [Tablet Magazine]
Inglorious Indeed [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: The Jews’ Oscar Nominee

The film, co-directed and –written by an Israeli and a Palestinian, was submitted after winning Israel’s Ophir Award for best picture. It is set in Ajami, the largest Arab neighborhood in Jaffa, and begins with a 13-year-old Arab boy witnessing a revenge murder.

The Israeli nominee in 2007 was Beaufort, and in 2008 it was Waltz With Bashir. Senior Writer Allison Hoffman wrote about both last October. And Sara Ivry interviewed Bashir director Ari Folman for the Vox Tablet podcast.

Nine Foreign Language Films Advance in Oscar Race [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences]

Related: War Movies [Tablet Magazine]
Soldier’s Story [Tablet Magazine]
Sources of Hope, Amid A Divide [NYT]

Earlier: Israel Submits Arabic-Language Film for Oscars

The real story of Hanukkah is not about oil; it’s about factionalism and human suffering. When I first read that grisly story, the one in the apocrypha, my feelings about my ancestral religion slid a notch away from disinterest and toward dyspepsia.

In the book of 1 Maccabees, the gentiles have desecrated the Jews’ Holy of Holies, the Temple at Mount Zion. A family of badass Rambo Jews—the Maccabees—retake the Temple by force. They re-sanctify the altar by lighting a menorah, and the oil lasts eight crazy nights. That’s the part they teach you in Hebrew school.

But then, having made their omelette, the Maccabees go on breaking eggs. The tale of the magic fuel starts and ends in chapter 4 of 1 Maccabees, but for the rest of that book (chapters 5 through 16) and for the entirety of 2 Maccabees (15 more chapters), the Rambo Jews go on kicking ass. They slaughter gentiles and lapsed Jews alike. “They forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys they found within the boundaries of Israel,” says the book. They burned their enemies alive and “divided a very large amount of plunder.” They decapitated the enemy king and impaled his head on a pike, “a clear and conspicuous sign to everyone of the help of the Lord.”

At best, the Maccabees were fundamentalist freedom fighters. At worst, they were terrorists—the Bible clearly reports that they targeted civilians. When the Maccabees were triumphant, they made sacrifices unto God; when times were tough, they went on praying and retreated to the mountains, sleeping in caves and growing scraggly terrorist beards. These are the heroes of the Hanukkah tale: the Taliban without dialysis.

This is where I normally put down religious texts and start reading Thoreau. What good is a Holy Book if it lavishes praise on guerrillas? What good is monotheism if it countenances murder?

This is also where most big-budget action movies lose me. The screenwriters are so eager to start the carnage that they don’t spend much time justifying the conflict. And, of course, they don’t have to. This is the compact audiences make by entering the multiplex: we’ll be on Will Smith’s side from the moment he steps on screen, and the badder you make the bad guys, the louder we’ll cheer when they blow up. All of which leaves tree-huggers like me alone with our incongruous gripes: wouldn’t this be easier if nobody started shooting in the first place? I am especially impatient with popcorn flicks that hinge on vague, quasi-religious morals. Onscreen, the most irrational solution is always tried first, everything is possible if you just have faith, and righteousness prevails against all odds. It’s infuriating.

Avatar does not shy away from that Hollywood formula. The jungle people are a variation on the “noble savage” stereotype, the villains are relentlessly, one-dimensionally villainous, and the heroes utter groan-worthy battle cries (“You’re not the only one with guns, bitch!”). But you don’t groan. At least, I didn’t, because by that point I was literally on the edge of my seat, fists clenched, praying for the evil humans to die.

“The last time I came out of a movie feeling that way it was the first time I saw Star Wars,” Steven Spielberg has said. I wasn’t alive in 1977, so I’ll just say that Avatar is the first blockbuster that ever made me reach catharsis. Cameron’s pacing is flawless, and the visuals are as stunning as everyone hoped they’d be. Moreover, Cameron takes the time to set up his conflict. He doesn’t take for granted that you’ll side with the hulking azure aliens against the greedy humans. Rather, he shows you the world through the aliens’ eyes.

Their world is a lush DayGlo jungle, a decadent mushroom trip of a place. So when the capitalist war criminals start eying the precious metals under the forest floor, you feel it like a punch in the gut. “But you haven’t been there,” you want to yell at Giovanni Ribisi. “It’s so pretty!”

I won’t spoil too much, because I’m expecting everyone to see this movie. Let’s just say that Avatar lets you walk a mile in the broad prehensile feet of a proud race whose connection to their ancestral land is in danger of being brutally severed. Cameron draws on several real-world scenarios, sometimes ham-handedly, sometimes movingly, sometimes both at once. Politically minded viewers will recognize parallels to Afghanistan, Iraq, Native Americans, colonial Africa, and present-day Gaza. But I think what allowed me to empathize so easily with the blue guys was that they reminded me of yet another people—my own. What is it like to belong to a tribe whose central shrine has been ravaged, who live in fear of persecution, who zealously—perhaps overzealously—guard their fragile slice of holy land? I don’t have to guess. I already know.

And, through the blue guys, for the first time in my life I found myself empathizing with the Maccabees. They were right about some things, at least: Antiochus was a tyrant, and he did not seem open to diplomacy. The Maccabees saw only one way to stand up to power and they did so bravely. If it weren’t for the Rambo Jews, who knows? Perhaps the rabbis would have been killed off, the Hellenized Jews would have named their uncircumcised sons Alexander, and Judaism would have become nothing more than a memory.

I don’t think the Temple at Mount Zion was worth killing and dying for 2,000 years ago, and I don’t think its memory is worth killing and dying for now. I’m a lover, not a fighter. But as much as I want to, I cannot categorically dismiss the possibility that there some things in the universe worth fighting for. Even Thoreau believed that.

These are wild-eyed and fuzzy sentiments—the kind one might have after, say, a three-hour romp through a supernatural CGI forest. I know things are more complicated than they appear in the movies. Avatar will clean up at the Oscars, but I don’t expect it to solve any geopolitical conflicts. What it can do, though, is expand our collective narrative vocabulary. Humans understand the world as much through stories as through reason. The real story of the Middle East is not about oil; it’s about factionalism and human suffering. Perhaps Cameron’s story can help us empathize with the creation myths of national identity, both others’ and our own.

Andrew Marantz is a freelance writer who lives in Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Slate, Heeb, New York, The New York Times, and other publications.

Murphy’s most famous role was also, in a way, her most Jewish. In the 1995 smash Clueless, Murphy played Tai, a streetwise but fashion-unconscious teenager from New York. Though that character isn’t necessarily Jewish, her clashing, ambivalent relationship with the movie’s protagonist, Cher Horowitz (who is necessarily Jewish), is a hilarious and memorable illustration of one Jewish archetype (the L.A. princess) conflicting with another (the outer-borough ethnic).

Our Loss, By Brittany Murphy’s Family [Jewish Chronicle]
Brittany Murphy, Actress in ‘Clueless,’ Dies at 32 [NYT]

In of itself, this is no big deal for most Manhattanites. Living on the Upper West Side, I sometimes find myself darting past piles of young actors playing corpses for the various Law & Order installments that have made the neighborhood their perpetual playground, and a star appearance on my block by George Clooney a few years back did more to acquaint me with my neighbors than had eight years of living under one roof. But that day downtown, things were different. The little yellow signs posted everywhere detailed the production’s title: Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps.

I am a child of the 1980s, and so the original Oliver Stone drama had a deep impact on my developing psyche. It taught me that it’s cool to be a greedy, self-obsessed moron with little or no regard for anything but his immediate material needs. This being the quintessential message 11-year-old boys everywhere yearn to hear, I spent considerable chunks of time in the sixth grade channeling my inner Gordon Gekko, the evil tycoon portrayed with much gusto by Michael Douglas. I borrowed one of my father’s tattered blazers, badgered my parents for a subscription to Globes, Israel’s premiere financial paper, and did my best to always sound as if I was on the cusp of launching a hostile takeover of a competing conglomerate. It didn’t do much for my social standing in elementary school; thankfully, a year later Big came out and provided me with a much more child-friendly model of a business executive.

Gekko’s famous catchphrase from the first film was “greed is good.” It’s a sentiment that echoes far more feebly in today’s America, ravaged as it is by the financial implosion of the last two years. Greed, we’ve all learned the hard way, may be many things, but good is never one of them. Stone knows that: According to reports, the new film recasts Gekko as a repentant capitalist working to warn the rest of the world of the coming economic disaster. If it’s not too late, the director may want to send his screenwriter a copy of this week’s haftorah. It’s a famous one: after asking the Lord for wisdom in a dream, King Solomon is approached by two women, each claiming that a certain baby is hers. Solomon famously orders the baby cut in half, and watches as the real mother surrenders her claim so as not to harm the child.

While we celebrate the king’s nimble mind, we too often ignore the story’s true, gritty meaning, namely that one woman was willing to let an infant be halved rather than admit defeat and let another woman triumph.

Little, it seems, has changed since biblical times. In it annual roundup of the year’s most notable ideas, The New York Times Magazine wrote about a phenomenon called Drunken Ultimatums, observed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and Duke. The scientists recruited two participants, and introduced them to a simple game: one participant would be given a sum of money, and would then have to offer a portion of that sum to his partner. If the partner agrees, both participants keep the cash; if he or she refuses, however, both walk away empty-handed. To make the experiment a bit more interesting, a bit of booze was introduced into the equation.

“The scholars were interested in drunkenness because intoxication, as other social-science experiments have shown, doesn’t fuzz up judgment so much as cause the drinker to overly focus on the most prominent cue in his environment,” wrote Christopher Shea. “The most prominent cue, in this case, being money, the hypothesis was simple: if people truly care more about their long-term goals, they’d take the money, no matter how much or how little was being offered. If, however, they cared more about revenge—similar experiments had shown that most participants tended to reject the monetary offer, finding it to fall short of their expectations—they’d reject the pay and take satisfaction instead in seeing their partner lose cash as well.

The results should come as little surprise. “In both setups,” writes Shea, “drunken players were less likely than their sober peers to accept offers of less than 50 percent of the total. The finding suggests, the authors said, that the principal impulse driving subjects was a wish for revenge.”

The evil mother, then, the one willing to see the baby cut in half, is not evil at all. She is human, acting like humans always have and always will. It is Solomon who is otherworldly and foreign. After he passes his judgment, the haftorah tells us, “all Israel heard of the judgment which the king had judged; and they feared the king; for they saw that the wisdom of God was in him to do judgment.”

Humbling words. Impartiality, which we might assume to be governing official human environments such as the courthouse, the state house, and the marketplace, is presented instead as something foreign, fearful, and divine. Like the social scientists with their boozy ultimatums, the Israelites, too, know that to be human is to be petty and vengeful, to sacrifice one’s own good for the pleasure of witnessing another’s misfortune.

Which, frankly, makes me miss Gordon Gekko. He, at least, was only greedy. And while greed may not be good, it is often be rational, even innocuous, as its sole interest is the continuous acquisition of more assets; put no major moral obstacles in its way, and it’s nothing but a never-ending treasure hunt. But revenge is mad, and maddening, and mercurial, delivering nothing but misery and horrors. Let us consider that the next time some offers us a stiff drink and cold, hard cash.

Radical Lawyer’s Appeal (and Rebuttal) [NYT]

Emily and Sarah Kunstler, Filmmakers [Gothamist]
Daughters of Infamous Lawyer Assess his Legacy in ‘Kunstler’ [Jweekly]

Arnon Milchan Moving Back to Israel [Globes]

Lebanese Critics Blast Israeli Director’s ‘Lebanon’ [AFP]

Israeli filmmaker Udi Aloni, who is part of the group calling for the boycott, called on Israeli filmmakers to join in. “Israeli filmmakers shouldn’t feel defensive,” Aloni told Haaretz. “They should say to their Canadian colleagues, ‘we stand with you, we don’t represent [Israeli foreign minister Avigdor] Lieberman, we represent the resistance.’ You can’t have it both ways.”

Toronto Festival: Directors protest Tel Aviv Tribute [Haaretz, in Hebrew]

The same critics, though, have engaged deeply with what the film means, comparing it (often negatively) with movies by Ernst Lubitsch, Charlie Chaplin, Mel Brooks, and Steven Spielberg. “Here is an alternate World War II, in which Jews terrorize and slaughter Nazis—a just Holocaust,” Hoberman writes. “Schindler’s List comforted audiences with similar, albeit less outrageous, reversals.… However devoted to movie magic, however, Spielberg would never be so tasteless as to admit the excitement he experienced in asserting his will over history.” In Slate, Dana Stevens agrees that “Tarantino’s rewriting of the war’s ending is audacious and perversely enthralling,” but asks, “Is the best way to work through the atrocities of the 20th century really to dream up ironically apt punishments for the long-dead torturers?” Denby sums it up: “Tarantino may think he is doing Jews a favor by launching this revenge fantasy…but somehow I doubt that the gesture will be appreciated.”

I grew up in Israel, which meant that, as a kid, I idolized soldiers. How could I not? My homeland, after all, gained its independence thanks to the sheer bravery of a few armed men, an army, we were told repeatedly, dedicated to self-defense and deeply beholden to ethical standards.

But I grew up in the 1980s, which meant that the objects of my infatuation shifted, along with popular culture, from the Israel Defense Forces to the crafty commandoes of that most awesome military outfit, G.I. Joe. How could they not? The action figures were the ultimate status symbols for every self-aware 10-year-old out to make a good impression at recess, and the cartoons they inspired were followed and analyzed more closely than most reality-based events.

And although we didn’t know it at the time, there might have been one more element drawing me and my friends to the world of Joe: known stateside as real American heroes, the cartoon characters, dubbed into Hebrew, sounded suspiciously like native sons of the IDF.

Consider this: in 1987, at the peak of the G.I. Joe craze, Hasbro produced a feature-length animated film to promote its miniscule plastic warriors. Far from a towering cinematic achievement, the film relied heavily on a musical credit sequence, which showed Cobra, the evil organization bent on world domination, trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

In its original English, the sequence sounded like this. By the time the film made it to Israel, however, the significantly altered theme song instead sounded like this.

Some changes are immediately evident. As the notion of G.I.’s made little sense outside the United States, some international editions of the popular cartoon went by the more universal title Action Force. Similarly, the Israeli theme song presents Joe not as America’s saviors but rather as the world’s top-secret, top-notch counter-terrorism team.

But Joe’s conversion into the particular world of Israeli military lore didn’t end there. Here’s how the theme song, in its Hebrew version, begins:

Action Force fights a just war for mankind
For peace!

There are no equivalent lines in the English version. In America, G.I. Joe is

Fighting for freedom
Wherever there’s trouble
Over land and sea and air

The Hebrew version includes a direct translation of these lines, but they appear much later in the sequence. For us Israelis, the important concepts were always these: a just war, a fight for peace.

It’s hard to overstate the centrality of these ideas, at least in theory, to the IDF’s understanding of itself. Even as children, we could all effortlessly parrot our parents, teachers, and older relatives in reciting what many Israelis still take to be the army’s mantra: we never fight if there’s another way. We adhere to the just war theory, picking our battles carefully. The ultimate goal of conflict is to bring about peace. Israeli Joe expressed these values elegantly and succinctly. The animated soldiers might’ve been named Gung Ho, Hardball, and Backblust, but we saw in them every Ariel, Ehud, and Yitzhak we ever revered. In the American-exported action figures, we saw the best of ourselves.

This verse, however, wasn’t Israeli Joe’s sole departure from the American original. An even more daring feat of cultural conversion occurred regarding that dastardly nemesis, Cobra. Both the American and the Israeli versions present Cobra as an evil terrorist organization trying to take over the world. But whereas the American version begins with a menacing montage of Cobra’s faceless soldiers parachuting over New York (“Armies of the night / Evil taking flight / Cobra! Cobra!”), the Israeli version eliminates nearly every mention of the enemy.

This, again, was art imitating life: in the 1980s, mere mention of the PLO, Israel’s most bitter foe at the time, was considered taboo. Israel’s soldiers, therefore, were brave men who fought against a shadowy rival best left unmentioned, and Israeli children watching G.I. Joe were immersed in a similar reality, a world of concrete heroes and amorphous villains with unclear goals and aspirations.

When Cobra was mentioned, however, the Israeli translators chose a telling adjective to describe the organization. It wasn’t simply an evil terrorist organization: it was nifsha, a Hebrew word connoting criminality that is still reserved, in the national vocabulary, for describing terrorists and other villains posing an existential threat to the Jewish state.

Unsurprisingly, the word has biblical origins. It is first mentioned in the book of Proverbs, chapter 18, verse 19, translated into English as rebellious. “A nifsha [rebellious] brother,” the book tells us, “is deprived of a strong city.”

By describing Cobra not only as evil but as rebellious, the theme song’s translators assigned Destro, the Baroness and their cabal of no-goodniks not only worldly malice but celestial blame. Because they rebelled against justice, and waged war on God’s chosen people, they’re forever doomed. It’s a potent theology for a cartoon, and even more so in real life.

What we imagine to be the trailer:

INTERIOR, A (SURPRISINGLY SPACIOUS) DUTCH ATTIC. DAY.

ANNE:
The thing is…

OTTO:
Yeah?

ANNE:
It’s that…

OTTO:
What?

ANNE:
It’s that I still believe…

OTTO:
Great.

ANNE:
I still believe, in spite of everything…

OTTO:
There’s a lot of shit out there.

ANNE:
There is. But I still believe.

OTTO:
I know, you believe.

ANNE:
No, what I’m saying is…

OTTO:
What the hell are you saying?

ANNE:
I’m saying that I still believe, in spite of everything…

OTTO:
Yeah?

ANNE:
That people are truly good at heart.

OTTO:
Oh yeah?

ANNE:
Yeah.

OTTO:
Fucking fool.

Mamet Takes on ‘Anne Frank’ [Variety]
Related: Anne Frank’s Diary, As Interpreted by David Mamet [Vulture]

It’s no secret that Natalie Portman, a half-Israeli Long Island girl turned Harvard grad, has long been a favorite crush-slash-fetish object of dorky, smart, devoutly secular boys, the real-world antecedents of Zach Braff’s Garden State smitten doofus. But now she seems poised to perhaps serve the same role for those boys’ more observant bretheren. The newly released trailer for this fall’s forthcoming New York I Love You, a star-studded compilation of short films about love in the Big Apple from the people behind Paris, Je T’Aime, offers a glimpse of Portman’s character, this time a young Hasidic woman. You’ll find her wedding scene at about 1 minute, 8 seconds into the clip.

New York, I Love You-Trailer [YouTube]

Writer Budd Schulberg Dies at 95 [Hollywood Reporter]
Budd Schulberg Dies at 95; Author of ‘What Makes Sammy Run?’ [L.A. Times]
Budd Schulberg, Screenwriter, Dies at 95 [NYT]

Harry Potter: Wizards and Racism [Washington Post]
There’s Something Familiar About ‘Half-Blood Prince’ [The Wrap]
Harry Potter and the ‘Half-Blood’ Jews [Jewish Journal]
Is Harry Potter the Chosen One? [Christianity Today]

Current Edition [Forward.com]

After a screening, Gliksberg told me he was “a bit upset” with how the film had turned out. Rather than undercutting the notion that anti-Semitism is everywhere, he said, it suggests that alarmists are right to believe the world is out to get them. It’s a reasonable self-criticism of a highly unreasonable film.

It’s quite the pitch, even before you try to imagine the Crossroads star in a lead role. But Tablet has gotten hold of a top-secret script treatment, direct from Hollywood. Here’s how the movie will go (or so we’d like to think):

Sophia’s time machine lands in the camp’s shower room. Water’s not coming out of those shower heads, of course, but because she’s in an air-tight vehicle, our heroine is safe. Her hair shaved off by a disturbingly sexy German soldier (negotiations are underway for Madonna to take the role), Sophia is interrogated under an austere hanging lightbulb. She defies the torture, crying out, “Hit me, baby! One more time!” Then, she faints from exhaustion. While passed out, Sophia dreams of her older sister, Lina LaMont, and, in her reverie, starts singing in the rain, splashing, and, yes, grinding in the muddy puddles of the camp while belting out an auto-tunes enhanced version of “Here Comes the Rain Again.”

Meantime, Eton (Adrien Brody is eager to play the part, we heard), cursed with a name that looks like that of a British prep school but is pronounced Eitan, knows he shouldn’t fall for Sophia, because she’s not from the old world. Eton’s father, a dairy farmer from Anatevka, mumbles something about tradition. Eton’s not hearing it. Sophia’s hawt! And she’s got a time machine! And maybe these crazy kids can get out alive! (Cue an above-middle-C piano version of “Stayin’ Alive”). Sadly for the doomed lovers, Nazis like time machines as much as anybody, and this particular group of villains really wants to check out the city of Porto, circa the Inquisition. They foil the lovers’ plans for escape (cleverly anchoring the time machine with chains), and kill the heroes. Sophia lets out a final farewell as she takes her last breath. “Auf wiedersehen, y’all.”

Fin.

Britney Spears—The Movie [National Ledger]

In 1949, an English soldier named Bernard Beacham was posted to Israel. To fight off boredom, he brought a movie camera with him, and he captured scenes, in color, of the Jewish State in its nascent year. The footage is stunning. It also contains a shocking revelation: folks in Israel used to wear ties.

Shearwater – Leviathan, Bound (Israel, 1949, in Color) [YouTube]

In 1964 Melville Shavelson set out to make a Hollywood epic about an American military man who helped establish the state of Israel. Though Cast a Giant Shadow had a generous budget, the full cooperation of the Israeli government, and a star-studded cast including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Frank Sinatra, Yul Brynner, Angie Dickinson, and Senta Berger, it flopped. But something great came out of it: Shavelson’s hilarious, groundbreaking 1971 book about the experience, How to Make a Jewish Movie. That his friends suggested a better title would have been “How Not to Make a Jewish Movie” gives a hint of what to expect.

By the 1960s Shavelson was well-known in Hollywood as a maker of comedies. He’d received Oscar nominations for co-writing two films he also directed: the Cary Grant-Sophia Loren romance Houseboat and the Bob Hope vehicle The Seven Little Foys. His association with Hope was his entry into the entertainment biz: Shavelson began writing for him in 1938, and didn’t quit for 20 years. How to Make a Jewish Movie reads like the work of an expert comedy writer. Practically every paragraph ends with a punch line; nearly every sentence has an ironic kick. Shavelson is talented enough to make the story of creating a flop irresistible, and humble enough to accept at least some of the blame. And while the pleasure of How to Make a Jewish Movie comes from the funny stories of difficult actors and shattered $40,000 camera lenses, the book is also a milestone: quite possibly the first book by a Hollywood director devoted entirely to the making of his own movie. Lillian Ross’s Picture and John Gregory Dunne’s The Studio had already given readers vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of Hollywood filmmaking, but Shavelson pulled the curtain back firsthand and revealed, humorously and memorably, the industry’s machinations, long before the public became well-versed in box office figures and books like You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again shot up the best-seller list.

How to Make a Jewish Movie is primarily a chronicle of everything that can go wrong in the creation of a big-budget film, from rights acquisition to the ad campaign. But Shavelson, who was born in Brooklyn, opens with a confession: “I have never entered a synagogue of my own free will, except for the ceremonies attendant on birth, death, or marriage.”

So how does a comedy writer—especially one who says he was “ashamed” of being Jewish—wind up making an earnest biopic about the founding of Israel? At the suggestion of a friend at MGM, he reads Ted Berkman’s book Cast a Giant Shadow: The Story of Mickey Marcus, Who Died to Save Jerusalem (MGM had just dropped its option on the book, so his friend called to say it was up for grabs), and something is awakened in him:

After reading Ted Berkman’s book I knew I had to make that movie if it killed me. . . . I literally ran to Paramount’s front office and pantingly laid this hot project on the desk of the head man. Would Paramount buy it for me? 

He was kindly, intelligent, shrewd, and went to Temple regularly every Rosh Hashonah. Who, he asked me, would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?

Since, at the moment—and ever since—I couldn’t think of an answer, I decided to buy the rights to the book myself.

The story of David “Mickey” Marcus is indeed awe-inspiring. He was a Brooklyn-born West Point graduate who served as an infantry lieutenant in the ’20s, then returned to New York City to become a gangbusting U.S. attorney and Commissioner of Correction. At the outbreak of World War II he rejoined the army. According to Shavelson’s screen treatment (which he prints in full in the book) Marcus wrote Army training manuals, made his first parachute jump into Normandy on D-Day, drafted the terms of surrender for Italy and Germany, and “was at Roosevelt’s side at Cairo, Teheran, Quebec, and Yalta.” In Germany, General Patton appointed him liaison officer with liberated concentration camp survivors. He was made second-in-command in occupied Berlin, and organized the Nuremberg trials and Japanese war crimes trials. In 1947, having returned to New York to work as a lawyer, Marcus was quietly asked to guide the untrained and ill-equipped Jewish troops of Palestine in their fight for independence. He did it under an assumed name, with the secret blessing of the Pentagon. Against all odds he led Israel’s army to victory upon the nation’s birth—and was mistakenly killed by an Israeli sentry just a few hours before a truce was declared.

Shavelson’s own story of putting together Cast a Giant Shadow is heroic, too, in its way: he’s a mensch in the face of disaster. He makes the film sound like the most troubled shoot since Cleopatra, but does it in an avuncular, anecdotal way that anticipates Sidney Lumet’s 1995 book, Making Movies. Needing the involvement of a star—preferably a non-Jewish one—to make his project viable, whom does Shavelson go to first? The least Jewish man in Hollywood, John Wayne. Shavelson had co-written a movie for Wayne in the past, but they had squabbled on the set. Undeterred, he pitches Marcus’s story, ending by reading a eulogistic telegram to Marcus’s widow from David Ben Gurion. Wayne (known to all as Duke) lights a cigarette and says:

“That’s the most American story I ever heard.” 

I wasn’t sure I understood him correctly. Ben Gurion had signed that telegram—not Ben Franklin.

“Everybody’s knockin’ the United States today,” Duke said, pacing the floor and covering half an acre of carpet with each stride. “Claiming we’re sendin’ in troops all over the world to knock over some little country where we’ve got no right to be. They’ve forgotten who were are and what we’ve done. At a time like this, we need to remind them of how we helped the littlest country of all get its independence. How an American army officer gave his life to do it.”

“Mickey was Jewish,” I insisted on reminding him.

“Don’t gimme that crap,” said Duke, “Jesus Christ was Jewish, too, and he didn’t even go to West Point.”

So, in a gesture of grand patriotism, Wayne agreed to appear in the picture. Not as Marcus—that role would go to Douglas, an actual Jew—but as a Patton-like general whom Shavelson would insert into his as-yet-unwritten script. Shavelson then took his pitch to the Mirisch brothers, Harold, Walter, and Marvin, “collectively the world’s largest independent producer of films,” and a deal was made. Soon after, in a location scouting trip to Israel, Shavelson got an early warning of the difficulties to come: The army’s commander-in-chief—none other than Yitzhak Rabin—demanded script approval. And, “in the event that the script should be approved, he went on to say, all film shot in Israel would have to be reviewed by the military authorities before being shipped out of the country.”

Luther Adler and Kirk Douglas in Cast a Giant Shadow

In 1965 filming got under way in Tel Aviv with 125 crew members, 800 Israeli soldiers, and a thousand extras. The problems began immediately: During a shot, Israeli tanks left abruptly when the army learned that Syria had invaded; nearly all the trucks in another shot stalled when the desert temperature hit 126 degrees; the two technical advisors provided by the army clashed over key details; Israel’s Communist Party dropped leaflets from a roof into the middle of a crowd scene. Along the way, Brynner went unrecognized by Ben Gurion (“The King and I. . . which one were you?”), and Shavelson and Douglas bickered repeatedly over the script. On the last day of filming in Israel, 200 extras shot half of a scene, disappeared while the next shot was set up, and sent in a representative to proclaim that they had united as the Israel Screen Extras Guild and would not return until their salaries were tripled. After examining the footage, the Israeli Defense Forces sent a detailed critique, which included: “In Scene 327, the girl with a flowery skirt doing the Hora is completely out of step. Change this.”

When Cast a Giant Shadow was released in 1966 the question “Who would want to see a picture about a Jewish general?” loomed over the national advertising campaign, which lacked, Shavelson writes, “all mention of the nation of Israel, the War of Liberation, the Jews, or Colonel Mickey Marcus.” Relating this fact, he seems understandably peeved. What he doesn’t say (perhaps it was a sore point) is that Otto Preminger’s Exodus, which also concerned the founding of Israel, was the fourth-biggest box-office draw of 1960. Cast a Giant Shadow didn’t earn back the cost of its negative.

So, how’s the movie? Kitschy. Its dialogue sounds, not coincidentally, like the work of a comedy writer. When Marcus tells Ben Gurion (played by Luther Adler, in a ridiculous white wig that makes him look more like Martin Van Buren) that Jerusalem has no strategic value, and that trying to save it doesn’t make sense, Ben Gurion says, “Did it make sense for a fellow with a nice, steady job building pyramids to march his friends into the Red Sea?” When it’s serious, it’s worse. A didactic argument between Marcus and Wayne’s American general about Israel’s future ends with Wayne—John Wayne!—raising his glass and declaring, “L’chaim.” (He pronounces it “la kime.”) Sinatra is amusing as a New Jersey pilot who drops seltzer bottles on the Arabs when the Israelis run out of bombs. Douglas is suitably rugged, and Brynner pontificates impressively. But Shavelson himself calls it “a not-very-good movie.” Pauline Kael’s assessment was more blunt: “Even those willing to accept the hours of incoherence and banality may recoil at the obscenity of being asked to experience the horrors of Dachau as reflected in John Wayne’s bleary eyes.”

In his 1988 autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, Kirk Douglas still sounds disappointed when he writes of Shavelson: “Though Mel was Jewish, he was not Jewish enough. The movie needed to be done by someone with deep conviction.” If he didn’t have conviction when he started the picture, Shavelson says he did by the end. Like his film’s protagonist, he comes to find Israel’s stubborn citizens exasperating but admirable, and his months among them turn him into something of a Zionist. Halfway through the book, at a seder, he has an epiphany: “The escape had taken place, not in some mythical land with an impossible alphabet no one could ever learn, but only a few miles from here, across the desert where tanks had recently rumbled out of that same land of Egypt, only to be turned back in defeat by the descendants of those who had written the very songs the children were singing.” He’s finally proud to be Jewish, proud to have made a movie about Jewish pride. The fun of the best making-of movie books, such as Final Cut (about Heaven’s Gate) and The Devil’s Candy (about The Bonfire of the Vanities), often comes from schadenfreude—the pleasure of witnessing the payback for megalomania and excess. But you feel for Shavelson, because his intentions are so pure, and because he seems like such a nice guy. He also seems to have learned, as an entertainer, that the story of a nice Jewish filmmaker who finds himself while shooting a $5 million flop has more potential in the hands of a comedy writer than the story of a Jewish general who gets killed.

Shavelson continued making movies into the 1970s—comedies, mostly. In 1990, more than 50 years after he began writing for Bob Hope, they wrote a bestselling book together, Don’t Shoot, It’s Only Me. Now 90, Shavelson is finishing up a memoir, which he’s calling How to Succeed in Hollywood Without Really Trying—P.S., You Can’t. Asked over email about How to Make a Jewish Movie, he pooh-poohed the idea of it being a literary milestone: “I wrote it in part to counter all the negative reviews the film inspired, and to show how a bad film can be explained by circumstances, as well as lack of talent….My old friend Julius Epstein, co-writer of Casablanca, always said the Academy should stop restoring old negatives and start destroying a few. Cast A Giant Shadow might be a candidate.”

Cast a Giant Shadow is available on DVD. How to Make a Jewish Movie is long out of print.

Falafel restaurant owners face off in West Bank Story

The short, which has played at more than 100 festivals including Sundance, reimagines Tony and Maria as David and Fatima, star-crossed lovers whose dueling families own neighboring falafel restaurants. The cast sing, dance, and snap their way through an allegory of the current political situation: After a Kosher Kitchen employee installs a falafel machine that crosses the property line, a Hummas Hut worker throws a rock into the gears. In response, the Kitchen owner decides to erect a wall between the two establishments. Threats and angry words are exchanged. Can David and Fatima’s love overcome their families’ mutual animosity? Does Maria feel pretty?

Sandel, a California native and USC film school graduate who has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, says that he made a comedy about what many consider to be a categorically unfunny subject to “counteract the multitudes of negative documentaries and news reports that, while very informative, usually seem to be skewed to one side and always leave the viewer feeling like this conflict will go on forever.” He wanted his film to be a hopeful one. “I truly believe that peace between Israelis and Arabs will be achieved and don’t believe it is a hopeless endeavor,” he says. “We wanted to make a film that would convey that feeling.”

Over the years the Academy has honored many movies dealing with Jewish themes: Schindler’s List, The Pianist, and five of the last 11 best documentary winners, including One Day in September, about the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. The Academy also regularly rewards performances in such movies—as perennial nominee Kate Winslet, playing a fictional version of herself on Ricky Gervais’ show Extras, put it, “if you do a film about the Holocaust, guaranteed an Oscar.”

Dance scene in the Hummus Hut

Needless to say, none of these pictures have been musical comedies. Did the Academy think they were nominating your straightforward drama about the West Bank? How did a movie about a group of Israelis and Palestinians sporting hats shaped like kebabs and pitas score a shot at an Oscar?

Nominated shorts tend to be on the idiosyncratic side—this year’s crop, for example, includes films about a Mormon, a young African girl, an abandoned husband, and an old man who locks himself in an armoire—but increasingly the Academy has favored politically relevant subjects, just as it has for features: Best picture nominees in the last two years have included Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Crash, Good Night and Good Luck, and, of course, Munich. Compare that to the 1997 nominees: As Good As it Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting, L.A. Confidential, and Titanic—five perfectly good movies that don’t have anything more political between them than an iceberg.

Like many of the Jewish-themed films that have been nominated before, West Bank Story has a positive “message.” Schindler’s List and The Pianist, though devastating, ultimately gave viewers something to take heart in, a lesson about humanity’s capacity for good even in the most brutal, debased circumstances (a moral embodied most fully in Holocaust “comedy” Life is Beautiful, which, of course, snagged Roberto Benigni an Oscar in 2000). West Bank Story has a similarly upbeat message, advising us, it seems, “take heart, peace might be as easy as making falafel.”

But is making peace (or falafel, for that matter) so simple? At the end of West Bank Story, both the Hummus Hut and Kosher Kitchen have been destroyed, and the Israelis and Palestinians realize they must work together to stay in business and keep their customers fed. After screaming at each other for most of the film, each family dancing as the other’s storefront burns to the ground, the two sides reconcile in about a minute.

This warp-speed resolution has struck many viewers as overly simplistic, a criticism Sandel acknowledges is accurate. He says the film has to be simple—it’s a comedy, after all—and besides, it’s “not meant to be a learning tool for the situation in the Middle East. It is not an historical explanation, or a political solution on screen. It is a movie about hope and peace and that is it.”

For critics who find the film to be in poor taste, Sandel points out television shows such as Israel’s Wonderful Country, a kind of Daily Show-Saturday Night Live hybrid. “Palestinians and Israelis joke about this all the time. [They] are a little more comfortable with it because they’re in it and they’re close to it, whereas sometimes American Jews and Arabs feel an obligation to speak on behalf of.”

Still, it’s difficult to take heart in the film’s “hope,” when the situation it presents so faintly resembles the one unfolding in that “multitude of negative documentaries” we’ve all seen. By forgoing the complexities of the conflict, we’re being given hope about a problem we don’t have. It’s like having a mechanic fix your tire, when what you need is a whole new engine—it’s nice, but really not the point.

Despite this, and the fact that only a fraction of the jokes in West Bank Story actually land, the movie has an ineffable goofiness that makes it easy to dismiss but hard not to enjoy. As Sandel says, “In a world of hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of news reports, articles, and documentaries that are all very serious, surely there’s room for a comedy here and there.”

When I was fourteen years-old, a friend of my parents, although a serious journalist, a woman not remotely lacking in a sense of humor—despite the Vreeland-esque, aphoristic, guillotine-sharpness of her following pronouncement—said to me, “I wouldn’t waste Henry James on anyone younger than twenty-five,” when she heard what we were reading in my ninth-grade English class. I can’t say I disagreed with her. The Turn of The Screw did very little for me back then (whereas now, I could coitainly use one….rrrrrimshot!). Radio Days is just such a surprise, where adulthood yields a bounty of appreciation. I liked it well enough when it came out in 1987. It had seemed amusing, if not a tad close an homage to Amarcord. But I had no memory of the movie’s near perfection.

Maybe its due to my middle age, my nostalgist’s love for New York, or just an ever-present personal fragility of late, but near the film’s beginning Woody Allen shows us the waves crashing in upon a stormy and rainswept Rockaway as a piano rendition of Weill’s September Song plays (it wasn’t always this romantic but “that was it at its most beautiful,” he says in the supple voice-over), and I stay misty-eyed essentially for the whole film, even through some marvelously funny stuff.

The film is a forked creature, with one side being the story of Allen’s own childhood growing up in a bustling, multi-generational household of his mother’s family, while on the other is a cultural survey of the radio stars of his youth: the crime-stopping heroism of the Masked Avenger; Roger and Irene, the Lunt-like couple purring tales of opening nights and Rialto gossip; and the apocryphal tales of Sally the Cigarette Girl (a stellar Mia Farrow). The radio serves as the lifeline for both sets of characters. Solace for one, employment for the other.

Visual depictions of radio generally just show the artifice of it all. The ungainly headphones and bulbous, depending mics. The snood-wearing close-harmony singers, and those dissembling Foley artists, shaking their tin sheet rain storms or consuming family barns in infernos of crackling cellophane while coconut-shell horse teams furiously clop to the scene. And Radio Days certainly has its share, but the thing that is so lovely, perhaps loveliest about radio—a medium I’ve done a fair amount of work for and, as my television has no cable and lives out the majority of its days in the closet, save for the odd viewing of Broadway Danny Rose on Channel 13, a medium I listen to a great deal, as well—is its sensory potency. Despite the fact that you can’t dance on it (as gigglingly observed by lovably bubble-brained Mia Farrow), radio is more visual than film in precisely the same way that smell evokes memory in an exponentially more complex manner than a picture can. That each voice and song and commercial is a madeleine for Allen is conveyed in every frame.

Another marvel is how unapologetically Jewish a film Radio Days is. Compare it to that anti-Semitic-by-omission piece of drek Avalon, also essentially a memory-film—although Barry Levinson imbued his family with not actual Jewishness so much as a box-office-hedging general ethnic quality (you know, a propensity for voluble argument along with a concomitant lack of boundaries, all wrapped up in pronouncing “turkey” as “toikey.”). Allen’s family are genuine Jews. They fast on Yom Kippur. His childhood act of larceny is effected by stealing money from Jewish National Fund boxes. Even the casting seems revolutionary. An actress I have never seen before or since, one Mindy Morgenstern, has a twenty-second role as a teacher overseeing show-and-tell. A magnificent schnozz she has, dark eyes, her hair a barely tamed wire brush. Despite Mel Gibson’s protestations about our ubiquity and media stranglehold, a face like that is an unapologetically beautiful thing to see and a rarity on film. A face straight from steerage. A relic of the decades before rhinoplasty became the default sweet sixteen present. When being Jewish still meant quotas. Back when we were Other. Dare I invoke the title of this here blog, back when we were interesting.

The film ends on New Year’s Eve. The pantheon of radio stars have gone to the rooftop of the impossibly chic King Cole Room—whose gold and white Deco interior is already looking like a bit of a 30s relic—to usher in 1944. The years go so quickly, one of them observes, feeling the first twinges of panic as his livelihood sails into obsolescence. “Then we get old and we never knew what it was about.”

It’s cold on that rooftop as they all file back downstairs. Wallace Shawn, the counterintuitively milquetoast-y Masked Avenger, calls out his trademark line to the unhearing mobs celebrating down in the street: “Beware evildoers, wherever you are!” Evildoers. Once just an overblown locution from an implausible radio drama full of unnuanced portrayals of Pure Good and Pure Evil.

And the President couldn’t even wake up.

With this knowledge I see the whole experience with new eyes. Things seem fresher. Why, there are even some new selections on the pre-show tape: Take The A Train and The White Cliffs of Dover. I watch Maxi-Length Down Jacket’s back intently while the latter song plays. Its history seems so distant for me as to be medieval (even though I was born less than 20 after the end of World War II, the last year of the Baby Boom according to some demographers), but for her it must take her back. She was, at the very youngest, in her late teens when this wishful picture of peace and bluebirds was in rotation on the radio. People needed such rosy visions back then, I suppose, what with everyone aware of the war that was consuming the attention and resources of the public at large, with everyone worried sick about sons and brothers and husbands and friends fighting overseas. Good thing those days are past and we have NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO WORRY ABOUT!

I’ve been trying to parse the recondite logic behind pairing these two films today. It’s quite bizarre because they contradict. One is a direct refutation of the other. Good news out of the way first: Bullets Over Broadway is fabulous! Exponentially better and funnier and more beautiful to look at and terrifically well-acted than I remember. Dianne Wiest’s grande dame Helen Sinclair and Jennifer Tilly’s lollapalooza gun moll Olive are sublime. And the script (co-written with Doug McGrath) is tight and funny and has none of the runny, maddening, improvisatory quality of other films. If this is what having a collaborator does for Woody Allen (Manhattan and Annie Hall were written with Marshall Brickman), then he should never be without one.

Chazz Palminteri, playing mob henchman Cheech, assigned to guard Olive while she mangles her way through a Broadway part, is soon helping playwright John Cusack rework his script, turning it from serviceable into a work of art. But Olive is ruining everything with her proactive lack of talent. So he whacks her with the final words, “You’re a horrible actress.”

This central contention of the movie—that he has killed her with neither qualm nor remorse because art and the making of same is not subject to the morals of man (a deadly serious belief albeit played for comedy here)—seems noteworthy in light of Everyone Says I Love You, which is a lousy, shitty movie in precisely the way that would involve a thug’s slug. Everyone Says I Love You is a sloppy insult whose cracks and flaws are spackled over with fistfuls of money and sundry diversions in the form of real estate porn (it’s a love letter to the Upper East Side, right down to the immigrant nannies and Jamaican nurses of Mt. Sinai), some calling-in-favors flashy cameos (Itzhak Perlman on violin!), and Drew Barrymore’s astonishing (even to this fag) breasts. As my friend, Nextbook regular Jesse Green, when we saw the film together when it was first released, said about an ice-pink, boat-neck satin number Drew wears, “Who was the nipple wrangler for that dress?” They are truly amazing. Why are all the straight boys not still talking about them? I cannnot get them out of my mind!

But I digress. The movie is a musical wherein otherwise non-musical characters break into song. It’s like a pageant of the Post-Skill era. This is one time Woody Allen’s characteristic elitism fails him, and in completely the wrong way. One can almost see him responding to the unctuous wheedling of casting directors, persuading him to employ this hot young thing or that one. So there are dewy and delightful Natalie Portman and Edward Norton! Almost to a person—with the exception of kittenish Goldie Hawn—these actors can’t sing. Warhol was at least being ironic when he dubbed his rag-tag troupe of semi-talents Superstars.

Put aside, if you can (you won’t be able to, trust me) the aneurysm-inducing faux-roistering You Can’t Take It With You cacophony of the spoken scenes with their halting and muddled improvised dialogue. Forget the afterthought that is the camera work. The film’s cardinal sin isn’t even Allen’s brazen plagiarism of creator Dennis Potter’s unique twist on musical theater of having characters break into song, (although that’s pretty chutzpahdik). No, what so rankles is that Allen misses the point of the entire art form. What Potter was trying to achieve—and what every musical director and producer from Vincente Minelli to the Freed unit, even up to the massively annoying Lars von Trier, knew and executed by employing stars anointed with actual talent—is that the impulse to sing, that almost unendurable groundswell of emotion that would lead one to break the Fourth Wall of space-time and open one’s throat also by definition, according to the physics of the musical theater universe, possesses a transformative power. One becomes a perfect instrument of the emotion moving through one’s body. You are made beautiful, at least in voice. So that in those moments that you realize that if you were a bell you’d go ding-dong-ding or you can’t help lovin’ dat man of yours, what pours out of you are the perfect phrasing and honeyed tones of Howard Keel and Dinah Shore (or if you’re Natalie Wood, Deborah Kerr, of Audrey Hepburn, of Marni Nixon) Not, emphatically NOT the croaky documentary stylings of Edward Norton (who further appalls during a number set to My baby Just Cares for Me set in Harry Winston, where he dances self-consciously and like a goofball, as if to say “This is stupid and aren’t dancers just a stupid bunch of homos?”). Otherwise, you’re just in the shower.

Play It Again, Sam was actually directed by Herbert Ross, who went on to make the approximately perfect Pennies From Heaven. What? Were they not speaking by this point? Why didn’t Allen consult him. The generally very talented Kenneth Branagh made a similar travesty of the movie musical with the mediocre numbers with which he peppered his lousy Love’s Labour’s Lost. It’s a mystifying infraction for both these men, since no one’s sensibilities would be more mortally offended if you said to either Allen or Branagh, who clearly revere the respective realms to which they have devoted their lives, “I’m just gonna turn on the camera and shoot some shit,” or “I dunno, it’s just Shakespeare…how hard it be?”

The answer of course is Very Hard! It takes effort and rigor. That’s why we don’t generally spend more than five seconds watching children who have put thumbtacks on their shoes to “tap dance,” unless it is our own eight-year-old. Otherwise, it’s Cheech’s bullet for you, my friend, and there’s not a jury in the land that would convict you. (In truth, I’ve always had a bit of trouble with that pronouncement about art and artists being immune to the petty concerns of morality, or the need to be kind or fair or anything other than obliteratingly self-involved. It has always struck me as the rationalization that goatish, flesh-pressing painters, writers, and musicians trot out in order to cheat on or sock their long-suffering wives and girlfriends.) But the rigors of creativity—the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude—do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn’t for everyone. At the end of Bullets, John Cusack’s character realizes it’s not a price he’s willing to pay. “I’m not an artist. There, I’ve said it and I feel free.”

We’re becoming quite the little tribe. I’m starting to see regulars (not terribly surprising in the art house demimonde of Manhattan. A years-long stint of being entirely shut down during renovation wasn’t enough to eradicate the atomized cadre of hissing, angry Hebrews who populated the Titus theater in the basement of MoMa. Go see a movie there today and there they are, newly sprung up like mushrooms, as if the place hadn’t even been closed for a day). Downtown at Woody, there is me, the white-haired Hummer (meaning man who hums, not hypertrophic military vehicle repurposed for a greedy consumer market), the surly cinéaste, the old woman in the maxi-length down jacket, the fellow who could be doing some sort of Marcel Duchamp Dada experiment on his own body, so conspicuously ill-fitting is his…no, I will go no further with this unkindness. At one point, he dips his raisin bagel into his coffee, spilling some on the floor, and in the space of a half-second at the longest, my interior snarl of impatience transforms into a wave of such empathy for the passing parade of malformed humanity, myself included, that it’s like being hit in the face with a frying pan.

Along with Young Frankenstein, Love and Death was an absolute touchstone of hilarity when I was ten/eleven. I must say, the filmmaking is beautiful and the humor mostly holds up in all its silliness. And there are things that my younger self (an inordinately sophisticated if not high-strung and unpleasant little pansy) didn’t even get. I understood that the shot of the soldier on the battlefield with the broken glasses was an Eisenstein reference, but I had had no idea, for example, what the “hygiene play” that Woody’s regiment was shown just before being sent to fight in the Napoleonic Wars was. Similarly, the tsunami-like force of the love-making between Woody and a Countess almost destroys her boudoir; furniture is upended, dishes are broken, linens scattered, and all of it in the course of five minutes. Again, lost on me.

Not picking up on all the sexual references might have been what interfered with my optimal enjoyment of Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) when I saw it as a child, but seeing it again as an aging grown-up, I’m not so sure. It’s Love American Style, albeit with dirtier talk (“snatch,” “beaver,” “tit”) and less satisfying resolutions to its sketch format.

Sequences just peter out in a half-cooked whimper. Although there is a fantastic, pitch-perfect riff on La Dolce Vita, delivered entirely in un-subtitled Italian wherein Woody/Mastroianni wonders what to do about his frigid wife (a completely counterintuitive Louise Lasser as an icily elegant, almond-eyed, neurasthenic blonde). And What’s My Perversion?, a What’s My Line? spoof, done with actual panelists (including a young Regis Philbin), shot on black-and-white kinescope is marvelous if only for its coda wherein Rabbi Chaim Bauml is that week’s lucky viewer to have his fantasy fulfilled on national television. It involves silk stockings, being tied up, whipped by a miniskirt-clad model (“You’ve been a baaaad rabbi!”) and the coup de grace, his wife, the Rebbetzin Bauml, who will sit at his feet and eat pork. Now that’s dirty!

A Django Rinehart number plays followed by the through-the-front-teeth whistle of “Big Noise From Winnetka.” (“Quick! Who played the original?” one of the film geeks in front of me fires at his seatmate. A brief word about film geekdom, or for the purposes of this pointlet, fanaticism, and I only bring it up because this particular double-feature is predicated on the almost Lourdes-like curative powers of movies. Play It Again Sam’s opening shot is the same as Purple Rose’s final one: a close-up of a face, rapt in a movie house. I’ve certainly felt that in my life. I’ve been known to cry watching Gene Kelly. A too-persistent romanticism tempered by its disappointed evil twin, cynicism, caused me no small amount of trouble in my younger days. But let’s face it: professing a deep interest in movies, the absolutely dominant global art form of the last century, is at this point like professing an interest in air. Passion is nice. Erudition is admirable. But it’s like that moment when good manners cross over into meaningless etiquette. The former are designed to make people feel comfortable, respected, welcome. To prevent the embarrassment of others, one of the few Talmudic principles I actually know about and one I can heartily get behind. Whereas the coded gestures of the latter are used to exclude. When someone tells you how “deeply they care about movies” more often than not, what they are really saying is “…in ways you cannot possibly begin to appreciate.”)

Play It Again Sam has Humphrey Bogart advising Woody’s character, Alan Felix, in the proper comportment befitting a rough and tumble manliness. Ironic, given the real-life Bogey’s own relatively cosseted, borderline blue-blood Manhattan upbringing compared to Mr. Konigsberg’s own much more hardscrabble Brooklyn boyhood. The further irony is that, just as Jacqueline Onassis never needed a Jewish girl to show her how to get what she wanted from a man (my mother’s brilliant explanation as to why we were forbidden from using the racist term “J.A.P.” in my house), Woody Allen doesn’t need anyone to teach him how to get the girl. He is the walking proof of that old stand-by from the Playmate questionnaires: a sense of humor may well be the most attractive thing for women (let this in no way serve as an endorsement of Christopher Hitchens’ recent idiotic theory that women aren’t funny. Clearly he’s never met Amy Sedaris, Jackie Hoffman, or Kristin Schall, among countless others…). Being funny might just be the great aphrodisiac (take that, jowly, shambling war criminal, Henry Kissinger!). Being a pale, translucent, unphotosynthesized schmendrick didn’t matter as long as you were smart and funny. Beautiful, leggy shiksas were just waiting to laugh and subsequently throw themselves at you. This was the myth of Woody Allen when I was growing up, indeed the abiding myth for all of us Jewish men (except for those of us who were more interested in the broad-shouldered, corn-fed shaygetzes). There was even a commercial for Hai Karate after-shave predicated on this amusing if not improbable disconnect, except in Woody Allen’s case, it just happened to be true.

Susan Anspach plays the first wife who leaves Woody’s character, claiming she wants more out of life. She wants to ski and laugh and ride a motorcycle. She cannot have known it, but it’s not far from the litany of missed regrets in the song about Lucy Jordan, sung by Marianne Faithfull that plays over the opening credits of the film in which Anspach later starred, Dusan Makavejev’s very good Montenegro. “At the age of 37, she realized she would never ride through Paris in a sportscar with the warm wind in her hair…” (I care really deeply about movies…) Similarly, when Woody’s character is trying to impress a date by playing the Oscar Peterson record, but also leaving the Bartok LP out for show, I was put in mind of the list of things that make life worth living in Manhattan, about which more later, when that film shows, I suppose.

29-year-old Woody looks like every Williamsburg hipster. Viva playing a self-professed nymphomaniac who then screams “What do you take me for?” when he pounces remains a delight (and I will always, always love Viva for her on-screen commentary in the documentary Nico/Icon. A deeply annoying film, it was an adoring portrait of the former model/sometime Velvet Underground singer. It went on and on about how “interesting” Nico was, how everyone for some inexplicable reason wanted to be with her and hear her views. Gee, it must have been because of her searing intellect and have nothing to do with the fact that she was a startling Teutonic beauty. Finally, Viva, the voice of reason, has had it. “She. Had. No. Interests!” she says to the camera. And like that, the fever is broken. Viva, Viva!).

When Woody eventually confesses his love for Diane Keaton and they kiss, extendedly and comically, it is played for laughs and intercut with images of Bogey and Bergman’s more legitimate on-screen lip-lock. What makes it touching is that these two clowns went on to be a cinematic coupling easily as romantic and immortal: the very ideal of modern movie love for many. “You’ve really developed yourself a certain style,” says Bogie, at the end. “What the hell. I’m short enough and ugly enough to succeed on my own,” says Woody.
Near the end of the film, Woody manages to echo the immortal “Maybe not now, maybe not next week. But soon, and for the rest of your life,” speech. “That’s beautiful,” says Diane Keaton. It’s from Casablanca, he admits. “I’ve waited my whole life to say it.” I feel like I know a little something about that. At least three times a week, I am overwhelmed with a wave of gratitude to New York City for providing me with a life. Not that my life is so great, although I think it’s pretty nifty: I don’t mine coal, I get paid to write. But just sitting in my seat reading Frank Rich and waiting for the next movie to start approaches a kind of ideal I only dreamed about when I was a young homo in the provinces. The wish fulfillment of it all can be almost uncoupling. But like I’ve said, I can’t be trusted when it comes to notions of the city. I’m a hopeless romantic.

An appropriate emotion when watching The Purple Rose of Cairo. “You kiss perfectly,” says Mia Farrow to the fictional character Tom, and it’s all you can do not to cry. I wonder why this movie’s not thought of as being as seminal as it actually is. There wouldn’t be any of that Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry stuff without this movie. Clearly it’s not the first to play with the notion of the screen and the unseen audience, to say nothing of the unseen hand of the creator. Max Fleischer was constantly doing it in Betty Boop cartoons. And the Daffy Duck Loony Tune where he draws the undermining ire of Chuck Jones’ vengeful pen is a classic. But Purple Rose is just magnificent.

There’s that old apocryphal chestnut about masters of Noh Drama who have such control over their instruments that they can turn their heads from left to right a full 180 degrees in such a slow, subtle, and sustained manner that you will not be able to clock them moving. Mia Farrow’s face in the final shot—watching Fred and Ginger dance to “Cheek to Cheek” on a set of such blinding white Deco cleanliness—goes from hopeless despond to luminous rapture and you don’t see it happening. It is a wonder.

Christmas tomorrow. God bless us everyone.

How many times have I seen this, I wonder? Unquantifiable. The film is canonical and familiar and memorized, almost to the point of ritual. Perhaps this is the spiritual solace the faithful find in the formulaic rhythms of liturgy. It’s as comforting as stepping into a warm bath. Diane Keaton is enchanting, there is no other word for it. She comes on the screen and you can hear the slightest creaking in the audience as corners of mouths turn up. There is Christopher Walken, a peach-fuzzed stripling. And there, doe-eyed, with drum-tight skin: Carol Kane playing Alvy’s first wife, Alison Porchnick.

Alison Porchnick. Oy. I am generally known as an unfailingly appropriate fellow. I have very good manners. But when I fuck up, I fuck up big time. Suddenly, I am reminded of how, three years ago, I was on a story for an adventure magazine, an environmental consciousness-raising whitewater rafting expedition in Chilean Patagonia (about which the less said the better. It’s really scary. Others may call it exhilarating, and I suppose it is, the way having a bone marrow test finally over and done with is exhilarating. And Patagonia, Chilean Patagonia at least, while pretty, isn’t one tenth as breathtaking as British Columbia). On the trip with me were Bobby Kennedy, Jr., hotelier Andre Balazs, and Glenn Close, among others. Everyone was very nice, I hasten to add.

After lunch one day, my friend Chris, the photographer on the story, came up to me and said, “I’d lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes if I were you.”

I laughed, but Chris reiterated, not joking this time. “No, I’d really lay off the Kennedy assassination jokes. The lunch line…” he reminded me.

And then I remembered. I had been dreading this trip (see above about how totally justified I was in my trepidation) for weeks beforehand, terrified by the off-the-grid distance of this Chilean river, a full three days of travel away; terrified of the rapids and their aqueous meat-grinder properties; terrified of just being out of New York. All of this terror I took and disguised as an affronted sense of moral outrage, that such trips were frivolous, given the terrible global situation. I explained it to Glenn Close thusly:

“I was using the war in Iraq to try and avoid coming down here,” suddenly, unthinkingly invoking the part of Annie Hall when Alvy breaks off from kissing Alison because he’s distracted by niggling doubts: if the motorcade was driving past the Texas Book Depository, how could Oswald, a poor marksman, have made his shot? Surely there was a conspiracy afoot. Then, with Bobby Kennedy, Jr. helping himself to three-bean salad on the lunch line not five feet away, I switched into my Carol Kane as Alison Porchnick voice and said, “You’re using the Kennedy Assassination as an excuse to avoid having sex with me.” Then I followed that up with my Woody Allen imitation and finished out the scene. Nice. No one pointed out my gaffe or was anything other than gracious and delightful.

* * *

Despite how well I know the material, the film feels so fresh. All the observations and jokes feel like they’re being made for the first time, or are at least in their infancy. By later films they will feel hackneyed (in the movie Funny Girl, the process of calcification is even more accelerated. You get back from intermission and Barbra Streisand already feels like too big a star, a drag version of herself), but here it’s all just terrifically entertaining. And current! Alvy tells his friend Max that he feels that the rest of the country turning its back on the city—It’s the mid-70s. Gerald Ford to New York: Drop Dead, and all that jazz—is anti-Semitic in nature. That we are seen as left-wing, Communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. And so we remain, at least in the eyes of Washington and elsewhere, a pervy bastion of surrender monkeys. There was an Onion headline that ran after a sufficient interval of time had passed post-9/11, that essentially read, “Rest of country’s temporary love affair with New York officially over.”

Rest of the country’s perhaps, but mine was just beginning when I saw the film at age eleven. By the time the voice-over gets to the coda about how we throw ourselves over and over again into love affairs despite their almost inevitable disappointments and heartbreak because, like the joke says, “we need the eggs,” (if you need the set-up to the punchline, what on earth are you doing reading this?) I am weepy with love for the city. Although, truth be told, it doesn’t take much to get my New York waterworks going.

Walking out, my friend Rick, thirty-plus years resident said, “I had forgotten how Jewish a film it is.” I really hadn’t noticed. But I’m the wrong guy to ask. It’s like saying to a fish, “Do things around here seem really wet to you?” I wrote a book that got translated into German a few years back. There was a fascination among the Germans with what they perceived as my Jewish sensibility; a living example of the extirpated culture. I’ve said this before, but I felt like the walking illustration of that old joke about the suburbs being the place where they chop down all the trees and then name the streets after them. At least a dozen of the reviews referred to me as a “stadtneurotiker,” an urban neurotic, a designation that pleased me, I won’t lie. Especially when I found out the German title for Annie Hall: Der Stadtneurotiker.

It’s hard now to imagine a time when Israel wasn’t “the most despised and also the most unattractive country in the world,” as Doron Rosenblum recently put it in a satirical piece in Ha’aretz. Hard to imagine a time when anyone really believed that just telling the facts of history straight would be enough to persuade the people of liberal Europe that Israel not only had the right to exist, but that the nation’s origins were not rooted in an ancient Jewish longing to perpetrate genocide on the Palestinian inhabitants of this stony land. Hard to imagine a United Nations that voted for Partition instead of passing yet another resolution against Israel, with the United States the lone voice of dissent.

JJ Feild as Bobby Goldman

Amazingly, into this unforgiving, forgetful contemporary landscape storms French film director Elie Chouraqui, complete with fabulous Jewfro and what some might consider a widely off-the-mark optimism. Last month, nearly thirty-five years after the publication of O Jerusalem, Chouraqui’s film version hit French screens. Okay, it didn’t last for more than a fortnight, got lukewarm reviews, and hardly anyone went to see it. But the film was made—and, perhaps more interestingly, France being a country generally known for its strong anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian sentiment—the book has been glossily reissued here as a tie-in.

Chouraqui has several romantic comedies and dramas to his name—like Harrison’s Flowers, a glossy Hollywood flick about the wars in former Yuogslavia—but has never made such an ambitious historical film before. In interviews he’s said that he wanted to make an “impartial” film about the birth of Israel. The film sets out to show the horrendous suffering and the heroism of both Jews and Arabs in that intense and fraught period following the Second World War, the friendships that overrode religious barriers, the sacrifices made by individuals, the ruptures of families, the hopes and dreams that were shattered by death and destruction and war. It’s an admirable ambition on Chouraqui’s part and to that end he frames the action by having two leads, New Yorkers Bobby Goldman, a Jew (JJ Feild), and his friend Saïd Chahïn, a Palestinian originally from Jerusalem (Saïd Taghmaoui), both of whom dash off to the Holy Land to fight against their respective enemies and thus determine the future of their peoples.

JJ Feild and Saïd Taghmaoui

The story opens just before the UN vote for Partition and unfolds during the ensuing War of Independence. Chouraqui flashes back and forth between scenes of Bobby and Said’s friendship in post-war Manhattan, the hustle and bustle of Mandate Palestine, and Saïd’s traditional family in Jerusalem. And, while Bobby and his Haganah friends are portrayed as an earnest, morally irreproachable bunch, Chouraqui is careful to remind us that there are also very bad Jews in their midst, like the Jabotinsky lot, who are introduced just after having slaughtered the inhabitants of the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin (today the Jerusalem suburb of Givat Shaul), leaving behind a monument to the Palestinian catastrophe and evidence that Jews are capable of comporting themselves shamefully during wartime.

Like the book, the film makes valiant claims to show both sides of the story, but like the book it ends up showing the Jews in far more detail than the Arabs, rendering the Arabs little more than textured background—women who ululate and cook and men in kafiyehs looking fierce. There are Arabs with guns and Arabs who live in picturesque villages and tend goats. There are murdered Arabs. But there are no three-dimensional characters aside from Saïd, who has to incarnate all possible sides of the Palestinian Arab character. He is both decisive and uncertain, Arab nationalist and citizen of the world, an Arab who has to avenge the death of his uncle (this is not a film to rise above cliché) and a man for whom friendship, even with a Jew, overrides all else. Saïd Taghmaoui does a terrific job incarnating Saïd the Ur-Arab, though Chouraqui refuses to let him relax. JJ Field’s Bobby and the other Jews come across as more jolly since there are lots of girls for them to have lots of 1940s fun with (no hanky panky, but plenty of soulful looking into each other’s eyes).

Ian Holm as David Ben Gurion

Good intentions only go so far. The film never manages to stop feeling like Exodus without Paul Newman, messily dubbed into French (Chouraqui made the film in English, presumably aiming for success on the other side of the pond). Its rose-tinted realism, its tedious impulse to tell both sides of the story, and its obsession with the chimera of impartiality bloat the film, while draining it of anything resembling real pathos as Chouraqui crams in detail upon endless detail. Even the wedding between Bobby and the mortally-wounded Hadassah, with Saïd as one of the witnesses (Of course! Even as Hadassah has been shot by one of his fellow Arab fighters!), while the hardy amateur fighters take shelter in a church in the Old City, is so labored that this potential moment of real drama ends up drowning under the weight of its own touching significance.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this kind of cinema—like this kind of history—is simply no longer fashionable. We have learned to crave the fragmentary truth of multiple viewpoints, of jagged unfinished narratives. We recognize that our heroes are complex, ambiguous figures. We need them thus, in our complicated world. Exodus, if made today—even with Paul Newman—would not be the same film that it was when it was made in 1960.

But, cinematic fashions aside, does anyone really believe today that there is an “impartial” tale to be told about the Middle East? The story that Collins and Lapierre dispatched 30 years ago has been revised many times since by historians such as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappé, and Benny Morris (to name just the Israelis). O Jerusalem (the book), while sympathetic to the Palestinians, did not challenge any of the foundation myths of the State of Israel—the notion of Israel as the weak David, set upon by the mighty Goliath of the combined forces of all the surrounding Arab countries who, with the Palestinian Arabs, were determined to destroy the fledgling state. At the end of the book Collins and Lapierre dealt briefly with the question of the Palestinian refugees. Chouraqui’s film echoes the major tropes of the Collins-Lapierre narrative, and then he closes with an historical account that could have been written in the 1970s, blaming the dispossession of the Palestinians on “Arab propaganda” and making a direct link with the Arab-ordered Palestinian exodus and the suicide bombers of today.

Yet since the 1980s, access to material in declassified archives has fundamentally changed our understanding of that specific question and demolished much of the narrative innocence that infuses Chouraqui’s anachronistic, naïve film. Benny Morris was the first to challenge the official Israeli claim that the Arab leadership ordered the Arab population of Israel to flee in his seminal 1988 book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949, in which he demonstrated convincingly that no such orders were given. Yet Chouraqui repeats the long-debunked official Israeli line. His failure to recognize that the state of knowledge has fundamentally changed makes the critical viewer realize that the film, for all its proclaimed impartiality, is no less political than today’s vicious anti-Israel rhetoric. Chouraqui isn’t so much trying to rewrite history as to unwrite it—to return to the prelapsarian knowledge of 1972, when such troubling issues had yet to be raised. None of this is to say that there were no heroes and idealists and villains as Chouraqui portrays them. As in any period of history, they existed. But today we recognize that history has as many truths as it has versions, and that the most truthful histories are not always—are never—impartial.

“It’s uncomfortable to see people out of their context,” Ariel Perelman (Daniel Hendler) says in the opening scene of Family Law, a new film by Daniel Burman. The Argentine director has made something of a career of training his eye on such discomfort. Like the first two installments of his fatherhood trilogy, Family Law is a loosely autobiographical coming-of-age tale about a young, Jewish Argentine man whose complicated relationship with his father causes him to grapple with his sense of self.

In Burman’s last film, Lost Embrace, a college dropout and lingerie salesman from Once—Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish neighborhood—harbors fantasies about his father, who abandoned his family to fight in the Yom Kippur war. This time, Burman’s alter-ego has found a steady job as a law professor, married a non-Jewish Pilates instructor, and entered into fatherhood himself. On the surface it appears that Perelman—Burman’s most stable incarnation, emotionally and financially—has escaped many of his predecessor’s insecurities. But when the young professor arrives at his office one day, he discovers the government building in which he works is literally collapsing under the weight of its files. The building requires a structural overhaul, and its occupants are barred from entering it during the renovation.

Ariel (Daniel Hendler) with father (Arturo Goetz)

Suddenly short of work, Perelman is thrown out of context. Never telling his wife about his new-found freedom, he wanders around Buenos Aires and meets up with his father. A charismatic lawyer whose practice is a bit shadier than his son’s, the father is a familiar Eastern European, diaspora type with a penchant for mussels and Zionist postcards. Whether it’s the elevator man in the court building or his longtime client, a restaurant owner repeatedly getting shut down for health violations, there isn’t a person with whom the elder Perelman can’t converse—”a Zelig among lawyers,” his son calls him. And while the younger Perelman doesn’t quite know what to make of his father’s numerous charms, he leans on him for help. The father still holds out hope that his son will one day take over his practice. More than one person comments on the similarities between the two men—to the pleasure of Perelman Sr. and the discomfort of Perelman Jr.—and the son finds himself, despite his ambivalence, peeking into the office once set aside for him.

Because of his tepid relationship with his father, Perelman is unsure of how to be a parent himself. Taking his son to preschool, he uneasily eyes the large Swiss cross adorning his son’s school sweater and later questions why his Jewish son is attending such a school. “Do you know what they did during Second World War?” he asks his wife, but then drops the subject. He’s even uneasy about his own identity: “We’re just a typical Argentine Judeo-Christian married couple,” he jokes.

Burman has often been compared to Woody Allen, a comparison he himself encourages. Like Allen’s overeducated, urban alter-egos, Burman’s creations are compulsively, often humorously self-aware. But Burman’s films are much more historically aware, closer to the work of Truffaut, particularly the series The Adventures of Antoine Doinel, which places Truffaut’s protagonist against the backdrop of political crises in France. (Indeed, Burman and his filmmaking peers—Martín Rejtman, Fabian Bielinsky, and Lucrecia Martel—have been called Argentina’s New Wave.)

Each one of Burman’s small, character-driven films mirrors a much larger narrative—that of a struggling Argentina. His first film, Waiting for the Messiah, takes place during the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and the resulting economic maelstrom that struck Argentina sets his characters in motion. The closing of the family restaurant forces Burman’s protagonist, Ariel Goldstein, to leave Once and find another job, where he meets a woman and rebels against his family’s expectations. Lost Embrace picks up Argentina’s story several years later—after the devaluation of the peso and the economy’s collapse—by documenting the petty commerce of a mall and its favorite bra salesman; Family Law follows a more mature protagonist in a new era when the debris of Argentina’s economic wreck is finally being cleared away.

As his characters and his country reach steadier ground, Burman, as a filmmaker, is also maturing. In his previous films, his handheld cinematography could sometimes be jerky and distracting, and some of the scenes overly emotional. But Family Law is unsentimental—sometimes ruefully self-deprecating—and captures ambivalence through understatement. The film does not end with father and son embracing, as did the previous installment, but with a son recognizing the fragility of life, and realizing that he can be a different kind of parent than his own.