It's been really interesting to follow the media coverage of the security breach that occurred last night at the first White House State Dinner of the Obama administration. Two reality-TV wannabes walked through a Secret Service security checkpoint and had their pictures taken with Katie Couric, Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel, and the Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden. I kid you not. The couple - who are being looked at by a production company for a new Bravo-TV series "The Real Housewives of Washigton, DC" - even posted their pictures on Facebook! The story is dominating the American media tonight, but one is hard pressed to find more than a single mention of this embarrassing diplomatic and security Keystone Kops amateurism in all of the Indian media. What an international embarrassment!
CNN yesterday made a big deal of the fact that Jennifer Hudson would be performing a quartet of "American standards." Ho hum. Of far greater importance was that A. R. Rahman performed (he too was photographed in a joint shoot with the party crashers). For Harold & Kumar fans, our old onscreen stoner buddy Kal Penn was "in the House." Jai Ho!
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Monday, November 23, 2009
Bad rabbis
Take a look at the article I wrote, just published in my colleague Silk's Religion in the News. The article is entitled "Airing the Syrian Laundry."
Friday, November 13, 2009
The Flood: 2012 Movie Review
Roland Emmerich's latest disaster movie "2012" opened today, and -- nerd that I am -- I relived some of my happier midnight showing escapades (various Star Trek, Star Wars, and Matrix movies) last night by going to the 12:01 am showing. Fortunately it was in the large Odyssey theater, so the screen was gigantic and the 15,000 watts of sound was crystalline. The movie clocks in at a whopping 2 hours and 38 minutes, and reportedly cost Sony Pictures $260 million to make. Order the large popcorn, and make sure to get a refill during one of the predictably dull exposition scenes that pock the movie every 15 minutes or so.
I like most of Emmerich's stuff. I like end of the world movies, and the genres are endless. There are the nuclear war movies; the alien movies; the natural disaster movies, even the evangelical Christian movies. Emmerich has done some of the best. He tells stories well and has the vision to concoct fantastic special effects. It's always entertaining.
This new movie is no different. It was entertaining. But it wasn't very good. The reason I walk away from the movie with such ambivalence is that on the one hand it delivered the goods; but on the other hand it was an exercise in derivative conceits and winks. It broke new ground visually and it was totalistic in its vision; and at the same time it felt tiresome and uninspired.
All the tricks and plot lines of the genre were out in full force. Most of the acting was believable and convincing (save for Danny Glover's wooden performance as the last President of the United States), and the story moved from Act to Act at a reasonable pace. But nothing any of the actors did or said was intriguing or worth remembering. All that mattered was the CGI.
One thing I could not get out of my head: how could people use cell phones as all the world's infrastructure was blown away? The cell networks are the first thing to go. But there we are with everyone jabbering away on what seemd to be the exact same phone. Product placements abounded: Bentley got a shout out, and it was no surprise that every scientist seemed to have a SONY VAIO laptop. Just more creative financing for a quarter of a billion dollar movie.
In the end, the movie is a fantasy-day flood epic, giraffes and all (though like all things today, the ark is "Made in China" -- not in Mesopotamia). It doesn't rain for 40 days and 40 nights, but there's even a character named Noah. None of it makes any sense.
Bottom line: it's not worth the $12 (.000000046 of $260,000,000). Watch the free trailer, and wait for the BluRay rental, or the torrent. That way, with a good remote, you can treat it like porn (which it is): skip through the crap, and reduce 158 minutes of tedium to 40 minutes of fun.
I like most of Emmerich's stuff. I like end of the world movies, and the genres are endless. There are the nuclear war movies; the alien movies; the natural disaster movies, even the evangelical Christian movies. Emmerich has done some of the best. He tells stories well and has the vision to concoct fantastic special effects. It's always entertaining.
This new movie is no different. It was entertaining. But it wasn't very good. The reason I walk away from the movie with such ambivalence is that on the one hand it delivered the goods; but on the other hand it was an exercise in derivative conceits and winks. It broke new ground visually and it was totalistic in its vision; and at the same time it felt tiresome and uninspired.
All the tricks and plot lines of the genre were out in full force. Most of the acting was believable and convincing (save for Danny Glover's wooden performance as the last President of the United States), and the story moved from Act to Act at a reasonable pace. But nothing any of the actors did or said was intriguing or worth remembering. All that mattered was the CGI.
One thing I could not get out of my head: how could people use cell phones as all the world's infrastructure was blown away? The cell networks are the first thing to go. But there we are with everyone jabbering away on what seemd to be the exact same phone. Product placements abounded: Bentley got a shout out, and it was no surprise that every scientist seemed to have a SONY VAIO laptop. Just more creative financing for a quarter of a billion dollar movie.
In the end, the movie is a fantasy-day flood epic, giraffes and all (though like all things today, the ark is "Made in China" -- not in Mesopotamia). It doesn't rain for 40 days and 40 nights, but there's even a character named Noah. None of it makes any sense.
Bottom line: it's not worth the $12 (.000000046 of $260,000,000). Watch the free trailer, and wait for the BluRay rental, or the torrent. That way, with a good remote, you can treat it like porn (which it is): skip through the crap, and reduce 158 minutes of tedium to 40 minutes of fun.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
A Serious Man, A Serious Movie
Let's get the important stuff out of the way. A Serious Man is good; but it ain't up there with Fargo and The Big Lebowski. It's right around No Country for Old Men. A solid three on the Coen brothers' pantheon of great movies.
That's not to say that this new movie will not become my most often-watched Coen brothers' film. How could it ever be otherwise? The movie captures in an inviting and wondrous way part of my own childhood. I was born the same year as Joel Coen in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. I attended and was bar mitzvahed in the very synagogue used in the movie for interior shots. I sat on the same Talmud Torah buses, and had the same teachers and principal in TT as they both did. So I will forever be captivated by this movie, insofar as it serves as that very rare public artifact that speaks intimately to my own life memories.
But beyond these unusual attachments, as a professor of Jewish Studies and as an occasional blog-only film critic, I want to say something more about the movie. This cinematic rendering of the biblical Book of Job has quite a bit to offer the film goer. This is not the first time the Coen brothers have tackled a Western classic by way of film: O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000) was a glorious retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, set in the 1930s. A Serious Man is a dark and playful representation on film of an infinitely more dark and playful God.
The opening quote from the medieval sage Rashi - "receive in simplicity everything that happens to you" (from his commentary to Deuteronomy 18:13) - is then followed by a 10-minute bubbeh maiseh (grandmother's tale), appropriately acted out in Yiddish with subtitles. Take that, Mel Gibson with your phony Aramaic dialogue! Here's the real deal - a chance for 3 fine Yiddish-speaking actors (Allan Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and the incomparable Fyvush Finkel) to ham it up, telling the tale of a dybbuk, a possessed spirit of the dead Reb Groshkover. To the horror of her husband, who doubts that Reb Groshkover is a dybbuk, a wife takes matters into her own hands and plants an icepick in the heart of Reb Groshkover. For a moment the wife is vindicated, as no blood emerges from the wound and the rabbi prattles on. But then the dybbuk (?) bleeds and weakens, he takes leave of the couple's house and stumbles off into the howling wind. The husband is convinced her wife has murdered a fellow Jew - "We are ruined...all is lost" - the wife looks out the open door into the wind and with equal conviction says: "Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to all evil."
After the prologue's blackout, we are transported to the Upper Midwest to 1967, and to a collection of suburban Jews. We meet Professor Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) and his family, and almost from the moment we are introduced to the players trouble ensues. Gopnik's wife and her lover seek to manipulate Gopnik into a divorce he doesn't want, despite his wife's infidelities. His career may be in shambles. His puss-bearing ne'er-do-well brother (played by Richard Kind) lives on the couch, and later in the motel room after he has been thrown out of the house, on the next bed over. Gopnik seeks out the wisdom of three wise men, three rabbis each more senior than the next. None provide solace, though one tells a fantastic extended Jewish story about magical teeth, all to serve up a classic Jewish joke.
The only bright spot in Gopnik's miserable life is his son Danny (Aaron Wolff), whose bar mitzvah ceremony provides the modern-day Job with a moment of contentment and nachas. While Gopnik himself receives no worthy answer from the three rabbis, the most senior of the rabbis has some bar mitzvah advice (drawn from the soundtrack's theme song) for Danny:
"When the truth is found. To be lies.
And all the hope within you dies....."
Then what?
Things even look up for Gopnik when pressures at work begin to disappear. But God is testing Gopnik, and when the pressure becomes too great, and the debts too overwhelming, Gopnik snaps and in a moment of weakness commits a trespass against the norms he has set for himself in his desire to be a good (aka "serious") man. And with that, God indeed provides his dark and playful answer.
There are laugh-out-loud funny moments in the movie. When an older man lifts the Torah scroll in synagogue and wavers slightly under the load, he grimaces out a curse under his breath. A sacred space of Jewish ceremonialism in the heart of the Upper Midwest, and a congregation member - so thoroughly acculturated in the mannerisms of his good neighbors - blurts out the expletive of "Jesus Christ." Perfect.
The Jews of Minnesota - we might call them "the Chosen Frozen" - are people who try to do the right thing. They are haunted by their burdensome past, and by their sardonic God, and yet they try to methodically live out their lives as menschen. We were taught to "receive in simplicity all that happens to you." No one told us what to do or think "when the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies." The world is a bit more complex than the idyllic suburban lifestyle our parents tried to create for us in St. Louis Park, MN. Modeled on Norwegian and Lutheran values, suburban Minneapolis was a cheerful and simple place and time. But that fantasy world of idyllic Midwestern suburbs gave way to a complicated life of travail and compromise. Is it any surprise that the Coen brothers - masters of the jaundiced eye - would be any less relentless when engaging the story of Job and the God on high who plays darkly with his creatures below?
That's not to say that this new movie will not become my most often-watched Coen brothers' film. How could it ever be otherwise? The movie captures in an inviting and wondrous way part of my own childhood. I was born the same year as Joel Coen in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. I attended and was bar mitzvahed in the very synagogue used in the movie for interior shots. I sat on the same Talmud Torah buses, and had the same teachers and principal in TT as they both did. So I will forever be captivated by this movie, insofar as it serves as that very rare public artifact that speaks intimately to my own life memories.
But beyond these unusual attachments, as a professor of Jewish Studies and as an occasional blog-only film critic, I want to say something more about the movie. This cinematic rendering of the biblical Book of Job has quite a bit to offer the film goer. This is not the first time the Coen brothers have tackled a Western classic by way of film: O Brother, Where art Thou? (2000) was a glorious retelling of Homer's The Odyssey, set in the 1930s. A Serious Man is a dark and playful representation on film of an infinitely more dark and playful God.
The opening quote from the medieval sage Rashi - "receive in simplicity everything that happens to you" (from his commentary to Deuteronomy 18:13) - is then followed by a 10-minute bubbeh maiseh (grandmother's tale), appropriately acted out in Yiddish with subtitles. Take that, Mel Gibson with your phony Aramaic dialogue! Here's the real deal - a chance for 3 fine Yiddish-speaking actors (Allan Lewis Rickman, Yelena Shmulenson, and the incomparable Fyvush Finkel) to ham it up, telling the tale of a dybbuk, a possessed spirit of the dead Reb Groshkover. To the horror of her husband, who doubts that Reb Groshkover is a dybbuk, a wife takes matters into her own hands and plants an icepick in the heart of Reb Groshkover. For a moment the wife is vindicated, as no blood emerges from the wound and the rabbi prattles on. But then the dybbuk (?) bleeds and weakens, he takes leave of the couple's house and stumbles off into the howling wind. The husband is convinced her wife has murdered a fellow Jew - "We are ruined...all is lost" - the wife looks out the open door into the wind and with equal conviction says: "Blessed is the Lord. Good riddance to all evil."
After the prologue's blackout, we are transported to the Upper Midwest to 1967, and to a collection of suburban Jews. We meet Professor Larry Gopnik (played by Michael Stuhlbarg) and his family, and almost from the moment we are introduced to the players trouble ensues. Gopnik's wife and her lover seek to manipulate Gopnik into a divorce he doesn't want, despite his wife's infidelities. His career may be in shambles. His puss-bearing ne'er-do-well brother (played by Richard Kind) lives on the couch, and later in the motel room after he has been thrown out of the house, on the next bed over. Gopnik seeks out the wisdom of three wise men, three rabbis each more senior than the next. None provide solace, though one tells a fantastic extended Jewish story about magical teeth, all to serve up a classic Jewish joke.
The only bright spot in Gopnik's miserable life is his son Danny (Aaron Wolff), whose bar mitzvah ceremony provides the modern-day Job with a moment of contentment and nachas. While Gopnik himself receives no worthy answer from the three rabbis, the most senior of the rabbis has some bar mitzvah advice (drawn from the soundtrack's theme song) for Danny:
"When the truth is found. To be lies.
And all the hope within you dies....."
Then what?
Things even look up for Gopnik when pressures at work begin to disappear. But God is testing Gopnik, and when the pressure becomes too great, and the debts too overwhelming, Gopnik snaps and in a moment of weakness commits a trespass against the norms he has set for himself in his desire to be a good (aka "serious") man. And with that, God indeed provides his dark and playful answer.
There are laugh-out-loud funny moments in the movie. When an older man lifts the Torah scroll in synagogue and wavers slightly under the load, he grimaces out a curse under his breath. A sacred space of Jewish ceremonialism in the heart of the Upper Midwest, and a congregation member - so thoroughly acculturated in the mannerisms of his good neighbors - blurts out the expletive of "Jesus Christ." Perfect.
The Jews of Minnesota - we might call them "the Chosen Frozen" - are people who try to do the right thing. They are haunted by their burdensome past, and by their sardonic God, and yet they try to methodically live out their lives as menschen. We were taught to "receive in simplicity all that happens to you." No one told us what to do or think "when the truth is found to be lies, and all the hope within you dies." The world is a bit more complex than the idyllic suburban lifestyle our parents tried to create for us in St. Louis Park, MN. Modeled on Norwegian and Lutheran values, suburban Minneapolis was a cheerful and simple place and time. But that fantasy world of idyllic Midwestern suburbs gave way to a complicated life of travail and compromise. Is it any surprise that the Coen brothers - masters of the jaundiced eye - would be any less relentless when engaging the story of Job and the God on high who plays darkly with his creatures below?
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Rolling Obama
A day after the empty photo-op between President Barack Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and West Bank President Mahmoud Abbas at the UN, and the Israelis are clucking that they are "satisfied" with the outcome. And why not? Obama put on his stern face, chided the two sides for failing to bridge their differences, used the verb "restrain" instead of "suspend" with reference to the settlements, and instructed both sides to send emissaries to Washington to continue the pre-talk talks. From Netanyahu's perspective, this outcome was a victory. Pressed by US special envoy George Mitchell right up to the eve of Rosh ha-Shana to announce a suspension of settlement construction in Israeli-occupied territories, Netanyahu just said no, and even so got to meet Obama in a testy meeting in New York. For his part, Abbas stood firm on his demands, and still got a meeting with Obama. OK, the two adversaries had to shake hands for the cameras with Obama looking on - but we've seen frustrated American presidents supervise such meaningless gestures in the past.
Middle East leaders watch the same cable news organs and read the same newspapers we do. They see that President Obama can be rolled by Republican senators over his domestic agenda. Even with a 60-seat majority in the Senate, the Democratic president seems constitutionally incapable of pushing through on his own with health care reform. Obama's calm, take-it-slow chase after "bipartisan" concurrence; his abdication of the role of chief executive in favor of legislative proceduralism; and his quixotic pursuit of an elusive congressional consensus have resulted in nothing more than Beltway gridlock. Deadlines pass, arguments fester, and nothing gets done.
Netanyahu understands all this, and figured quite simply that if the weak Republicans can smack down the stall on Obama over health care, he can do no less on behalf of his domestic voters over Israeli settlements.
Message to world leaders, broadcast every day throughout the world: there is no apparent downside to saying no to Barack Obama. This president can be rolled.
Middle East leaders watch the same cable news organs and read the same newspapers we do. They see that President Obama can be rolled by Republican senators over his domestic agenda. Even with a 60-seat majority in the Senate, the Democratic president seems constitutionally incapable of pushing through on his own with health care reform. Obama's calm, take-it-slow chase after "bipartisan" concurrence; his abdication of the role of chief executive in favor of legislative proceduralism; and his quixotic pursuit of an elusive congressional consensus have resulted in nothing more than Beltway gridlock. Deadlines pass, arguments fester, and nothing gets done.
Netanyahu understands all this, and figured quite simply that if the weak Republicans can smack down the stall on Obama over health care, he can do no less on behalf of his domestic voters over Israeli settlements.
Message to world leaders, broadcast every day throughout the world: there is no apparent downside to saying no to Barack Obama. This president can be rolled.
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