Toronto filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici, in conjunction with Ontario-born film producer James (“Titanic”) Cameron, has produced a slick new two-hour television documentary about the Biblical Exodus that has more offbeat theories than The Da Vinci Code and more wizardry than anything you’ve ever seen in Harry Potter. The Exodus Decoded, which is scheduled for viewing on…
Category: Movies, Theatre
Palestinian ‘Paradise Now’ — box office bomb
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There’s “nothing unusual about cinema portraying the psychodrama of real-life events torn from headlines,” Toronto Star writer Rosie Dimanno observed in a January review, noting that many films (such as Monster, In Cold Blood and Silence of the Lambs) traffic “in murder verite and the particular pathology of killers without conscience.” Dimanno was in the…
Prince of Egypt transforms the Exodus story
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Based on the Biblical story of the Exodus, Dreamworks Studio’s visually stunning animated musical The Prince of Egypt opens across North America during the lucrative Christmas market (1998), and the studio hopes to see profits on the $70 million production soon. The first full-length animated film to focus on a Biblical narrative, The Prince of…
Film: A Treasure in Auschwitz
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The Polish town of Auschwitz is known primarily as the site of horrific Nazi death camps, and its previous history as a town with a once-thriving Jewish community comes as a surprise. Stirred by an old storekeeper’s eyewitness account and his precisely-drawn map, Israeli Yariv Nornberg mounts an archeological expedition in search of some Torah…
Barenboim confuses music baton for magic baton
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Seven years ago the Argentine-Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim and his close friend, Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American intellectual, jointly established an orchestra with talented young classical musicians from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Lebanon and Syria. Unable to meet in their home countries, the participants spent several summers making music in Spain, where the experience…
Conversation with screenwriter Len Blum
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Sitting in the study of his Forest Hill home, Len Blum hands the visitor a paperback copy of Howard Stern’s scatalogical memoir Private Parts, whose cover bears the promise, “Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.” Then Blum — the 45-year-old, award-winning screenwriter who commutes regularly between Toronto and New York — admits that he’s…
Al Waxman is ‘Lost in Yonkers’
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With the production of Lost In Yonkers that opened Feb. 4 at the Atlantis Theatre, director Al Waxman has delivered his third theatrical hit in as many years to the Toronto theatre-going public. This production of Neil Simon’s Tony and Pulitzer prize-winning 1990 play is solidly put together, delivering all the laughs, drama, pathos and…
Gilbert Gottfried is a scream
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American comedian Gilbert Gottfried, whose most celebrated role was the voice of the parrot in the Disney movie Aladdin, brought his quirky brand of stand-up humor to Canada recently (1997) for two sold-out shows at Yuk Yuk’s Comedy Superclub as part of the Toronto Comedy Festival. Gottfried responds to the audience’s welcoming applause by pleading…
Interview with playwright Jason Sherman
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Although his current play It’s All True is based on a “labor opera” from the 1930s, and though many of his previous plays have been highly critical of Israel, Toronto playwright Jason Sherman told an audience at Harbourfront recently, “I don’t think of myself as a political playwright any more than I do a Jewish…
Profile: Gail Carson Levine
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For New York-area author Gail Carson Levine, fairy tales sometimes do come true. The highly successful children’s author, who gave a reading recently (2004) at Toronto’s Bialik Day School, is the creator of Ella Enchanted, a young person’s novel that has been turned into a movie by Miramax Films. The film stars Anne Hathaway and…
