Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival Wrap-Up to Bostonist
Exurberant French itinerant photographer Jean-Baptiste (Patrick Dell’Isola) visits Argentina in Camera Obscura. (National Center for Jewish Film. Used with permission) This year's Boston Jewish Film Festival closed yesterday, showing Camera Obscura in the afternoon and wrapping up with a showing of Within the Whirlwind in the evening. We had the pleasure of watching the former movie, adding to the list of films we enjoyed in this iteration of the festival. There are lots of...
Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival: Hello Goodbye to Bostonist
There's a scene in Daniel Burman's
Empty Nest--a film we reviewed
earlier this year for a screening sponsored by the
Boston Jewish Film Festival--where the two main characters, a husband and wife, arrive at Ben Gurion International Airport and are summarily subjected to a search of their possessions, the passport authorities doubting their intentions. Suddenly the wife puts a stop to it. "We're Jewish," she says, "I know the dances," and just as quickly she and the agents break into a rendition of an Israeli folk dance. It's a punctuated moment of glee in what had been a mostly tempered affair.
Posted Boston Jewish Film Festival: Opening Night with Eli and Ben to Bostonist
Eli and Ben, the opening film for this year's
Boston Jewish Film Festival, is a far more muted affair than
last year's The Deal. In this post-Madoff world, the showy tale of a Hollywood flim-flam man whose defining strength is his ability to talk story, the ability to effortlessly pile layers of lies on top of each other, is somehow out of step and no longer palatable. There's been too much artifice already. Times call for quieter, more restrained movies such as this one, a coming-of-age story that looks not so much at the loss of an innocence as a genealogy of morality. Bonus:
Eli and Ben also happens to be a pretty good movie.
Posted IFFBoston Preview: The Brothers Bloom to Bostonist
2005 was a great year for Meta Film Noir (if such a genre exists). Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang injected new vitality into the detective story with its use of humor and not-so-subtle breakdowns of the sexual roles found in the classic films of the thirties and forties. Noir always had rich parts for women, be they femme fatales or expanded damsels in distress, but the sexual potency of the protagonist was rarely questioned.