Cinemascope

Who does a better Tom Cruise?

Ben Stiller

Miles Fisher

Vote here for the Tom Cruise impersonators showdown.

The London Times asked renowned film composers about the state of the craft in recent years and they seem to agree: it’s shit.

Hans Zimmer dismissed the majority of contemporary screen compositions as unmemorable. “They drift around like cows grazing. So many scores sound like nobody really thought about them.”

But on the other hand they include Anne Dudley in this survey. Dudley - who’s done her best work as member of The Art of Noise - has won an Oscar for scoring “The Full Monty” but I’m afraid her scores are as bland as the the ones she’s pooping on. And while one indeed misses the greatness of yesteryear’s film scores, and while indeed there were few memorable film scores in the past few years, it was lazy of The Times to neglect mentioning some of the best of the younger generation composers: Jon Brion and Jonny Greenwood’s work for Paul Thomas Anderson, Michael Giacchino’s work on Brad Bird’s movies, anything by Alexandre Desplat and Clint Mansel, two of the best composers in the universe this minute. Can you think of any other young composers that are doing outstanding jobs at present?

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Julliette Binoche, who won an Oscar for The English Patient, has written a poem in memory of that film’s director, Anthony Minghella, who died suddenly last Tuesday. She sent her poem to EW.

To Anthony

I shall learn to live without you.
With all we’ve done and undone
with all the missing parts I’ll have to carry on hoping
you were the bedrock of fun, the laugh that made me laugh
and your hand came with love and care
I could see your thoughts going faster and faster
ahead in their curved complex understanding
your excitements became my excitement in the joy of sharing
my friend of art
you’ve gone missing
we shared a heart beating in this inner world of creation
and your ideas became real to me
I was your angel and you opened my wings
and you were the words I could fly into
my friend of heart
I will carry the unsaid
I will cherish my forgiveness until I see you
and please forgive me for my painful silence
magnetic eyes of yours with its sparkling needles
we dared a gift to the unknown
the search for truth in the battle of being
we attempted a glimpse on the other side
with joy with joy

JB

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Eric Rohmer - once a New Wave director, now an Old Wave - is 87 years old, but still likes to utilize the latest technology in his movies. Although he feels his latest film could probably be his last:

The method of shooting with a small crew and using the latest equipment is typical of the 87-year-old. “I’ve always been interested in new technology,” he asserts. “The first article I ever wrote, even before Cahiers, was for a journal called Revue du Cinéma. In was on the use of colour over black and white. It was at a time when people preferred black and white, but I liked colour and also the use of direct-sync sound.”

Sad as it is to report, he intimates that The Romance of Astrea and Celadon is likely to be his swansong: “I haven’t got plans to make another film, it’s not easy for me to make films now. These days it takes me much longer to prepare a film then when I was younger.”

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Gene Wilder, a comic genius in my eyes, was honored in San Fransisco last week. In this phoner he reveals the truth about the origins of “Young Frankenstein”’s Frau Blucher:

since I wrote [”Young Frankenstein”], I think that was the best realization of what I intended of all the other films that I did or wrote.
When I was writing the first draft, I said, “I wonder if anybody would get it when someone said “Frau Blücher” and the horses neigh. Mel (Brooks) said, “Keep it in.” Well, the audience loved it in the previews.
Actually, I chose the name because I wanted an authentic German name. I took out some of the books I had of the letters to and from Sigmund Freud. I saw someone named Blücher had written to him, and I said well that’s the name. Later on, I heard from about two or three sources, who said Blücher refers to a horse going to a factory and being turned to glue. I just thought it was a funny name.

This is one of the single greatest examples of comedic acting in the history of cinema:

(Gene Wilder’s segment in Woody Allen’s 1972 “Everything You Always Want to Know About Sex”)

Israeli movie “The Bubble”, directed by Eythan Fox (”Walk on Water”), won the GLAAD media award for best movie in limited release.

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“The Band’s Visit” has become the widest Israeli movie release ever on US screens, after expanding to 105 screens this past weekend (the widest release for an Israeli movie in the States so far has been the 48 screens of “Ushpizin” in 2004. Palestinian movie “Paradise Now” got as much as 68 screens after winning the Golden Globe). “Band” is also only the fourth Israeli movie to gross more then a million dollars at the US box office, and if it holds steam, it will surely become - within a month or so - Israel’s top grossing movie in the States ever, beating out 2004’s “Walk on Water”, directed by Eythan Fox, which grossed 2.7 million dollars on 47 screens.

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Ricky Gervais launched a hilarious blog chronicling - in print, audio and side-splitting video - the production of “This Side of the Truth“, his first movie as director (along side Matt Robinson).

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Abe Karpen, a Hassidic Jew from Williamsburg, had to drop out from playing Natalie Portman’s husband on a short film she’s directing. Orthodox jews are not allowed to watch TV or movies, let alone play in one.
Karpen, reports Gothamist, was asked to hold Portman’s hand but refused, “It’s against our religion. You can’t even hold your wife’s hand on the street.”
Next thing they’ll tell me Kelly McGillis wasn’t really Amish.

(Hat-tip: Miri)
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Arthur C. Clarke beamed off this mortal coil into the netherworlds of the heavens, where he will catch up with star-children Stanley Kubrick (director of his “2001″ adaptation) and Roy Scheider (star of his “2010″ adaptation), who have gone forth before him.

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It was a week of Minghellas in the news: Hanna Minghella was promoted to be president of production at Sony Pictures Animation. Her new boss is Bob Osher, who replaced ex-pat Israeli Yair Landau as president of the digital production division of Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Her brother, Max Minghella, an up-and-coming actor, started principal photography Monday on Alejando Amanebar’s historical epic “Agora”, alongside Rachel Weisz. The film, set in 4th century Egypt, has a plethora of Israeli and Palestinians actors in supporting roles.
But then yesterday, Max and Hanna’s father, director Anthony Minghella, died suddenly, at age 54.

Oh dear, I love Anthony Minghella’s movies (well, almost all of them). I adored his screenplays. The news of his sudden death at London’s Charing Cross Hospital this morning of brain hemorrhage is utterly tragic. I honestly believed the man still had at least one great film in him.

It was exactly a month ago, right before the Oscars that I wrote this, mentioning him:

Anthony Minghella is Oscar’s lucky charm.
He executive-produced “Michael Clayton” (and reportedly helped Tony Gilroy polish the script), and had a tiny cameo at the end of “Atonement” (as Vanessa Redgrave’s TV interviewer). The “write without adjectives” line in “Atonement” is lifted from Minghella’s Oscar winner, “The English Patient”. Now both “Michael Clayton” and “Atonement” are Best Picture nominees.

Not so lucky after all, I guess.

The irony is that Sydney Pollack, who’s fighting cancer, was supposed to be the gravely ill, soon to depart, producer of “Michael Clayton”. But he’s still with us. Minghella, on the other hand, is no longer.

Even more chilling: Minghella got his first break as a screenwriter when he wrote the absolutely brilliant TV series “The Storyteller”, created and produced by Jim Henson. Henson died suddenly in a New York Hospital of pneumonia. He was 54 years old as well. Spooky coincidence.

I loved Minghella love for words and language. He’s the only screenwriter I know who made one movie about adverbs (”Truly, Madly, Deeply” and one movie about adjectives (”The English Patient”). Even his almost-bland “Mr. Wonderful” included great exchanges where the romantic leads try to analyze their love affair while searching the proper words for it. His movies traveled between different scapes of reality: memories, fantasies, stories, imagination. Most of his characters pretended to be someone they are not. Most of them used words to survive.
Minghella’s philosophy was clear: words are deceitful. And his wordsmanship, hence his deceitfulness, was exquisite.

Oh dear 2: Jeffrey Wells’ Minghella obit is absolutely heartbreaking.

Alejandro Amenábar (”The Others“), one of my favorite international directors of late, is at the helm once again for the first time after is Oscar winning “The Sea Inside”. His new film, “Agora”, starts principal photography today in Malta, and will last 15 weeks. The plot - and here I must convey some fear - is set in Roman occupied Egypt of the 4th century AD. But interestingly for me, Amenábar utilizes several Israeli and Palestinian actors: Ashraf Barhoum (”The Kingdom”), Yousef Sweid (”The Bubble”), Sami Samir (”Munich”) and Oshri Cohen (”Beaufort”).

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I found this link via GreenCine: you can hear BBC Radio 4’s Film Programme in full online. This edition which discusses “No Country For Old Men” with the Coen Brothers, at their most verbal, and Javier Bardem, is the best of the bunch. Latest editions include a chat with SFX Godfather Ray Harryhausen, and Mike Figgis and Robert Benton discuss “Bonnie and Clyde”, on it’s 40th anniversary. Great stuff.

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Asian humorist Nury Vittachi (AKA Mister Jam) wrote a hilarious piece the other day, about the way American movie titles are translated in Chinese by fast-buck hungry distributors, who have little respect for the product they release, and even less respect for their audiences. Although one has to wonder whether some of the titles he writes about actually sound better, or more culturally relevant, in Chinese.

Some of his examples:

- “The Sparrow Becomes the Empress” is “Pretty Woman”
- “Don’t Ask Who I Am” is “The English Patient”
- “This Hit Man Is Not As Cold As He Thought” is “The Professional” (but wait! “The Professional” is the English translation for the original French title “Leon”).
- “Six Naked Pigs” is “The Full Monty”

But more outrageous are the way broad American comedies are translated. After the Success of “Ace Ventura” all of Jim Carrey’s movies afterwards were titles as variations of The Ace (or Trump Card) as if they were spin-offs of the same character, and thus “Cable Guy” has become “Trump Card Specialist” and “Liar Liar” turned into “Trump Card Big Liar”. But this next bit tops it all:

The logic veered off track when the first “Austin Powers” movie was released in East Asia as “Trump Card Big Spy”. It starred Mike Myers rather than Jim Carrey, but distributors apparently thought that the fact that it was a completely different human being was too subtle a difference to worry about. Why be fussy? Deranged white guys are deranged white guys.

All white people look the same to the Chinese, don’t they.

Thing are just as sad funny in Israel

Vittachi’s bit reads like a great piece of cultural humor in the States, but foreign movie-goers can only sigh in identification. Most countries translate American titles, especially those based on localized idioms, into something that rarely resembles the source.

Israeli moviegoers, for instance, went into an uproar last summer when Judd Apatow’s heartfelt adult comedy Knocked Up was translated into “The Date That Screwed Me” in Hebrew. Local distributors were overheard saying that the vulgar, teen oriented title, harmed the movie’s box office in Israel. Later, when posters went up publicizing the release of “Superbad” with the Hebrew title of “Super-Horny” film goers protested and persuaded local distributor to reconsider and order up a new batch of posters, leaving the film with its original English title.

Things in the title-translation world in Israel are so bizarre and outrageous that a Facebook group titled “Deport the Hebrew Movie Titles Translators” was formed - 1441 members joined as of February - in which nearly 200 titles are listed where the Hebrew translation either absurdly distorts the original title or just turns it into a bland or vulgar run-of-the mill title.

Some botched-up Hebrew titles:

The Savages is “Closing the Circle” (or “Closure” if you will)
Evan Almighty is “A Flood of Trouble”
In The Land of Women is “Go Figure Women”
Man About Town is “How To Succeed in Life and Stay Married”
Groundhog Day is “Wake Up Yesterday”
Employee of the Month is “Super Blond”
Are We There Yet? is “Mom is in Love”
The Naked Gun is “The Gun Died Laughing”
George of the Jungle is “The Jungle Died Laughing”
BASEketball is “The Ball Died Laughing” (yup, you guessed it: once one awful title is successful, similar movies will be name-raped in the same manner).

Israelis, one discovers, are nuts for movies with the word “Love” in the title:

Top Gun is “Love in the Sky”
No Reservations is “Love on the Menu”
Swingers is “Love or Sex”
Jesus of Montreal is “Of Love and Hypocrisy”

Metaphors, for instance, are unwelcome on Israeli billboards and marquees.

Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the Western Civilization was named “Dirty Conversations”. His follow up The Barbarian Invasion was named “Soulful Conversations”. Butterfly on a Wheel is “Shattered”, Martian Child is “A World of His Own”, August Rush is “Dancing in the Moonlight”.

And sometimes distributors spit on a what they regard as a piece of art and try with all their might to turn a thoughtful movie into an action thriller. That’s how No Country for Old Men turned up here as “Tough Country”, as if it were a Charles Bronson movie (depressingly, Cormac McCarthy’s novel was translated into Hebrew, while keeping the original title intact, but local distributors didn’t care. And although the Coen Brothers are very much beloved in Israel, the movie, released wide, flopped).

Sometimes Israeli distributors are almost prophetic in their translations:

The Luis Mandoki romantic drama White Palace was translated into “When a Man Loves a Woman” in Hebrew. But then that very same director made the Meg Ryan alcoholic drama, When a Man Loves a Woman forcing local distributor to turn it into “The Love of a Man to a Woman” as to not confuse with the similarly named, though quite different older movie.

Last year, local distribs shortsightedly translated the Richard Gere flick The Hunting Party into “Wanted”. It is still unclear how the upcoming Angelina Jolie actioner, titled Wanted in English, will be named over here.

Sometimes one feels that movie titles in Hebrew are pulled out of a hat, to the enormous amusement of older generation distribs, who are clueless as to how to relate to teens and tweens.

And so The Cell was spiced up into “The Lethal Cell”, Deep Impact is “Lethal Impact”, F/X is “Lethal Stunt”, Poison Ivy is “Lethal Seduction”, Silent Fall is “Lethal Silence”, Soldier is “Lethal Soldier”, and Terminator is “Lethal Mission”.

But Fatal Attraction? That’s “Fateful Courtship”. Damage is “Fateful Attraction”. Total Recall is “Fateful Memory”. Executive Decision is “Fateful Decision”.

The list goes on and on, and sometimes one gets the notion that distributors simply misread (Scarred City turned into “Scared City”) or misunderstood (West Side Story is better known in Israel as “Suburban Story”, even though the story is set-up in midtown Manhattan).

And ironic to the point is parody is the Hebrew title “Lost in Tokyo” which was how Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation was translated. Lost indeed.

A fortnight has passed since the “Once” duo of Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova won an Oscar and for writing and performing “Falling Slowly” from John Carney’s movie, and I have, exclusively, their brand new track, which is also taken from the soundtrack of a bittersweet boy-meets-girl foreign movie.

Liron Levo and Lubna Azabal in “Strangers”

The song is called “One More Word” and it’s from the independent Israeli movie “Strangers“, that played the Sundance festival in January and will be shown next at the Tribeca Film Festival. Hansard sings lead vocals, Irglova does background vocals.

Hear it here:

Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, “One More Word”
(not the final mix)

Guy Nattiv and Erez Tadmor wrote and directed this low budget globe-trotting Israeli Romeo meets Palestinian Juliet, where passion runs high during the soccer world cup of 2006, and then turns into hostility as the second Lebanon war breaks out that same summer. Variety’s John Anderson went ga-ga for the movie at Sundance.

I saw “Strangers” last July at the Jerusalem Film Festival and admired it’s wide-screen DV camera work, in which Ram Shweky (DP for “Frozen Days”) plays the docu-style urban vistas like a latter day Raoul Coutard. The movie’s second half, improvised on set to follow the real war that broke during filming, feels forced, but the movie’s beginning, bitterly noting that Israeli and Palestinians can live in perfect harmony as long as they are not in their home state, is utterly lovable.

Hansard and Irglova (aka The Swell Season) recorded the track in early February 2008, two weeks before they won the Oscar for “Once”. The song, as well the entire score for the movie, was written by Israeli musician Eyal Leon Katzav. Czech director Jan Hrebejk, who used Hansard’s songs in his previous film, introduced Hansrad to Nattiv and Tadmor. They sent him the song, he loved it and agreed to sing it. A week later he and Irglova recorded the song in a Czech studio, and then flew to the Los Angeles to win the Oscar. Tadmor tells him that Hansard loved the fact that “Strangers” was produced in a similar fashion to that of “Once” and wanted to support the movie. Tadmor and Nattiv now plan to shoot Hansard and Irglova for the music video of the song.

“Let My People Go”, yelled the Stone-Age Moses

Rushing over to the cinema without reading anything about the movie you’re about to see can lead to some amusing, yet unfounded, expectations. In the weeks leading to “10,000 BC“’s opening weekend I was sure this was Roland Emmerich remaking Hammer Studio’s Ray Harryhausen (or Raquel Welch, depending on what kind of film geek you are) dinosaur flic, “One Million Years BC”. How shocked was I to realize I wasn’t even close. Instead, Emmerich remakes Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto”, with a plot that is almost identical, though lacking in “Apocalypto”’s bravura filmmaking (plus off-shooting the time period in some 11,500 years). Though many expect “10,000 BC” to do big business stateside this weekend, I see this one tanking like a woolly mammoth with a spear through its heart. For anyone trying to compare “10,000 BC”’s commercial prospects to previous springtime hits such as “300″ (the CGI-laden historic adventure epic) or “Ice Age” (another woolly mammoth starrer), I have only two words to say: “Rapa Nui“.

In “10,000 BC” an Epipaleolithic era young warrior (Steven Strait) sets out to save his loved one (Camilla Bell) - looking like a de-freckled Lindsay Lohan who’s been outcast from ” The Village of the Damned” - who has been captured by slave traders. Before they part he quotes from Michael Mann’s “The Last of the Mohicans” to her, promising he will find her. By journey’s end our reluctant hero will discover he’s the star of three different prophecies for three different tribes and cultures. Although alarmingly, none of these prophecies warned him of how slow and boring his story would be, before getting into three or four decent set-pieces, that arrive too late to save the movie from crumbling under its own weight.

Warner Brothers would have you believe that “10,000 BC” is this year’s “300″. It’s not. I was enormously entertained by “300″’s vision of mythology, turned into a campy rock opera, that was as ironically filled with over the top tongue-in-cheek self referential humor as it was stunning to watch. But “10,000 BC” is completely devoid of any humor and takes itself way too seriously for its own good. And this coming from someone who had a blast with “The Day After Tomorrow”. It’s Emmerich’s The Day Before Yesterday that I found to be a grandiose bore.

As the film’s title establishes WHEN it is happening, there is still the mystery of the WHERE. Logic places the film’s plot in Africa. Starting at the lush south, traveling north then following the Nile into Egypt where the pyramids are built. This makes sense since Emmerich has even enlisted Egyptian born actor Omar Shariff to serve as the film’s narrator. But when our posse gets attacked by a flock of Phorusrhacids (aka terror birds) I lost track of time and place: not only were terror-birds (honestly, they should star in a movie of their own) found only in South America, but they were also extinct nearly 2 million years before the movie’s self proclaimed timeline. Which made me wonder whether our heroes crossed over Emmerich’s Stargate - another movie obsessed with Pharoas and Pyramids - and jumped back and forth continents and millenia.

Getting over the Oscars is like getting rid of a nasty hang-over. It was fun, but in excess it makes one vomit. And losing sleep on Oscar night needs one to take time to adjust to. Yep, the Oscars are like jet-lags. But all in all it was a pleasant flight.

So, who won “Cinemascope”’s Oscar quiz? Amazingly three of you scored 17 out of a possible 24 (And although I aced nearly all of the top categories, including the two actresses upsets, my tech balloting was less than stellar and I ended up with a total of 14 of 24). Also amazingly, two of you hit the bull’s eye with the tie breaker, guessing correctly that the winning movie will walk away with 4 awards (note to self: come up with a more difficult tie-breaker next year).

Here are the winners:

Honorable mention: Leire Vaz
First Place (tie): Rob and Nicholas Plowman

So who’ll get the DVD? A good old-fashioned coin toss called it. What do you stand to win? Everything. And the winner is Mr. Plowman. (If I’ll get my hands on a second copy of “Beaufort” Mr. Rob will get one as well, scout’s honor).

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I launched this blog on December 1st, three months ago. It was after many of my stories on my Hebrew blog got picked up and was followed up upon by such bloggers as Jeffrey Wells, Nikki Finke, David Hudson and Anne Thompson. Variety’s middle-east desk, headed by the astute and brilliant Ali Jafaar, came calling. Israeli cinema made headlines this past year (and is on track to make some more in 2008 and 2009), and Hollywood and Foreign movies sometimes get realed over here day and date, and sometimes well ahead, odf their American release, so even my reviews can go online as quickly as my those of my American colleagues.
I, for example, was the first to break the news way back in September that “The Band’s Visit”, the charming Israeli movie that’s turning out to be a minor hit in the States right now (and is doing incredible business in Europe), might have qualification issues at the Academy Awards because of the amount of English dialogue. It was indeed disqualified but has since marched on to win two awards at the European Film Awards and a nomination at The Independent Spirit. It turns out that Sony Pictures Classics, “Band’s” distributor, walked out with a foreign language Oscar nevertheless: it also handles Austria’s “The Counterfeiters”.
I also predicted, way back last February, that Israel’s “Beaufort” will be nominated for an Oscar (but that it would ultimately lose the prize itself to either Austria or France’s submissions). Little did I know what an odd road the movie, and indeed this entire category, will take before my prophecy would come true.
But all this - the headlines, the exclusive reporting and a bizarre run of spot-on prognostications, made me realize late in 2007 that an English blog, quotable by international media, was a necessity. Not that I had an idea how such a blog would fit in my schedule: I have a full time print critic job, a hyper-active Hebrew blog (one of the most popular blogs in Hebrew), a teaching post at two of Israel’s leading film schools, two baby girls to raise and a brand new out-of-the-blue career as a screenwriter. I shall never sleep again, I guess.
My intent was to post stuff up, in hopes that slowly Google will point readers my way. I was ready for years of zero traffic, until some one would notice. But to my astonishment US bloggers, such as Sasha Stone, Scott Feinberg and David Poland (and - again - the generous Mr. Wells, Mr. Hudson and Ms. Thompson), took notice of the blog and helped direct traffic this way. In virtually no time readership exploded. I’m in no way a traffic threat to any of the established bloggers but my Google Analytics chart, and my Alexa and Technorati ranks zoomed.
So, for all the readers and colleagues out there: thanks. Thanks for proving me that my instict was right: that with movies being such a global event, even a film columnist stuck all the way across the world in sunny Israel can produce content that’s relevant to American and European media and readers.

I took some breathers since the Oscars, to think of what’s coming up. And now I’m back in full force. I’ve got some great stories lined up for the next few days. Keep checking back.