The author of this diary is annetteboardman. Her tip jar (she hopes) will be the one immediately after the Friday Night at the Movies auto tip one. Feel free to tip there. Or not.
A confession -- I was going to write a diary tonight about the best movies of the first decade of the new millenium. I went to the Salon pages to prepare, and realized I had seen only three of the movies, one of them an animated picture, and one the horribly painful A.I.. That was not the way I wanted to start a diary. If someone else wants to write that retrospective, go for it! I will learn something, certainly, like the fact I go to a lot of bad movies and good ones never come to the town I live in.
So because no one else seemed to want to write that, or about the best films of the year, for this evening, I thought about what else I wanted to talk about it one of these diaries. I have been thinking of writing a diary about Israel in the movies since last year's death of Paul Newman, who starred in my favourite of all this category -- Exodus, with Sal Mineo, Ralph Richardson, Peter Lawford, and Eva Marie Saint, who has kinda grown on me, as the love interest. This was a long movie -- 208 minutes -- and, honestly, not a particularly good one. It is pretty much black and white in its politics (the only Arab who has a major role was killed (martyred) for his cooperation with the Zionists, for example -- oh, and that Arab was played by the very non-Arab-looking John Derek with darkened skin). One really good thing, though, was that it helped to end the stigma of the blacklist -- Dalton Trumbo was hired to adapt the book for the screen. I have a friend who fell in love with Israel from the book, and hates the movie. I haven't been able to get through the book. It is tough going. I love large parts of the movie, but it is quite long.
This diary is not mostly about movies I would consider particularly good. There are some good movies about Israel. Look for those toward the end. You have been warned.
Another film about the fighting to establish the state of Israel starred Kirk Douglas. It is about the first general of the nascent Israeli army, David "Mickey" Marcus. The problem was, although he was apparently a fine soldier, he didn't speak Hebrew very well. As a result, he died when he was confronted by a guard, and couldn't answer properly/fluently. The movie is called Cast a Giant Shadow (1966), and it was pretty bad in my memory, but I just looked at the IMDB page and people there seem to think it was a pretty solid, if not great, movie. Along with Douglas you have Yul Brynner and Frank Sinatra (whose big scene consists of him dropping seltzer bottles out the window of an airplane -- no, it doesn't play any better than it sounds!) and Angie Dickinson. One person summed it up with the comment "Hollywood does it again, a great story turned average."
Kirk Douglas was a bit more impressive (to my taste) in a made for television movie whose distinguishing characteristic is how awful Pam Dawber's performance was (as his daughter). Douglas played a Holocaust survivor who was making a trip to Israel and hoping to find out what happened to his love from before the war in Remembrance of Love. The Holocaust and its aftermath is obviously an important element of Israeli society. There are movies about Holocaust survivors in Israel, and a whole bunch of tv movies that range from good to awful. Ambiguity is rare in them, however. And ambiguity can make for interesting drama.
One of the more ambiguous movie treatments of Israel recently has been Stephen Spielberg's Munich, in which a horrible precipitating event (the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics -- itself the subject of an Oscar-winning documentary) leads to a more and more problematic series of events, including assassinations, in the process of revenge. The character of Avner, played by Eric Bana, is an interestingly drawn one, although I could have done without the juxtaposition of sex and death that bookended the movie. A lighter treatment of the same kind of character (a Special Forces assassin) is found in a movie that I may be the only person who really enjoyed, You Don't Mess with the Zohan. This was a movie that didn't take itself too seriously, but was a terribly affectionate presentation of the overly-macho Israeli soldier that is presented in movies like Exodus or Operation Thunderbolt (I am not criticizing the outcomes or importance of the Operation; don't get me wrong -- but the character of Yoni Netanyahu as presented in this film is a stereotype that is quite entertainingly skewered by Adam Sandler, of all people.
Yes there were a whole bunch of really dumb things in the movie, and gratuitous sex with old ladies, and such, but there were some really interesting elements to the story as well (Judd Apatow wrote portions of the script, so maybe the interesting stuff was from him?). Adam Sandler makes an interesting contrast to Paul Newman, and it was tempting to do a presentation at a Women's and Gender Studies conference at which the theme was "Masculinity" with clips from the two movies, and others.
So how do Israelis present their own soldiers? One interesting approach is the presentation of gays in the military by Eytan Fox, whose films include
Yossi and Jagger and Ha-Buah (The Bubble), the latter of which is about the relationship between an Israeli and a Palestinean. Both are interesting, but the second, four years later, is a more interesting, less fantasy-like story (except for the end, where (spoiler) the two star-crossed lovers blow up in a suicide-bomber-kind-of-way, a modern version of Romeo and Juliet or such).
A more impressive film, and the only Israeli film to make it to many of the best 100 movies of the decade (to bring us back to where we started), is the 2008 animated film Vals Im Bashir. Animated, but most definitely not a children's film. This semi-autobiographical film is about the 1982 Lebanon invasion and the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. It starts from the premise that the narrator has blanked out in his memory what happened twenty years before. Over the course of the movie he tracks down people with whom he served to try and find out what happened to him. The animation is interesting and threatening and horribly beautiful in equal parts -- the first part of this video is a good song (imho), or at least music is good, but the lyrics are pretty awful. The second part is one of the most beautiful scenes in the movie, a patrol in an orchard.
There were a lot of other things I could write about Israel in the movies. The beautiful setting of Jesus Christ Superstar was in Israel (not just in concept, but in the film itself). There is the very fine film Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (The Band's Visit), which was denied submission as the best foreign-language film at the Oscars because over 50% of the dialogue is in English, as the characters in the movie speak either Hebrew or Arabic, and their only shared language for communication is English. Do you have a favourite Israeli film? Or a film set in Israel?
Or what do you think the best movies of the decade were? Or what will be remembered as the best movies of the decade in another ten years?