Tag: movies

Film: Monsieur Batignole

Monsieur Batignole (France 2002) is a simple, deeply satisfying feature film about one man’s efforts, despite his otherwise unheroic life, to rescue three children from the Nazis. Batignole, a middle-class butcher in wartime Paris, hardly seems to care when his upstairs neighbours, the Bernsteins, are deported for being Jewish; after all, it was his own…

Documentary resumes Oslo-era dialogue despite Intifadah

Israeli police officer Benny Herness and Palestinian journalist Adnan Joulani had planned to keep in touch after returning from a joint Israeli-Palestinian peace mission to Japan in 2000 that was the focus of the Israeli documentary film “Sleeping With the Enemy.” But the intifadah erupted a week after the film’s debut and the two lost…

Schmelvis: the ‘King’ as Jewish

Evan Beloff, co-producer of a new documentary that demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that American rock idol Elvis Presley was Jewish according to halakha or Jewish law, was only half-joking when he said that the film uses Elvis “as a metaphor for identity — I think it’s a quest film about Jewish identity.” Titled “Schmelvis:…

House of Sand and Fog’s Vadim Perelman

Vadim Perelman, the Hollywood commercial director who has made a remarkable debut as a feature-film director with the recently-released House of Sand and Fog, grew up in Kiev and immigrated as a teenager with his mother to Edmonton, where he finished high school and attended the University of Alberta. In a recent interview with the…

Exodus Decoded features Toronto’s Indiana Jones

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…

Palestinian ‘Paradise Now’ — box office bomb

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

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

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

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

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…