Picture if you will the screenwriter: hunched over a keyboard, mainlining caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, or all of the above, exploited by a stupid and greedy industry, but rebelliously, vainly proud. And very often, Jewish. Vulture has paid homage to the humble screenwriter, compiling a grand, ranked list of the 100 Best Screenwriters of All Time….
Although Monty Hall, who died on September 30 at the age of 96, is chiefly remembered for co-creating and hosting the long-lasting TV game show “Let’s Make a Deal,” first broadcast in 1963, his most enduring legacy may be service to Jewish charities. Born Monte Halparin in Winnipeg to Orthodox Jewish parents, Hall would follow…
I had unconsciously trained myself, as an observant Jew living among other observant Jews, to watch all television at a remove. McDonald’s ads didn’t affect me; the sandwiches on screen barely registered as food. I wore a yarmulke, but had no expectation that anyone on screen would do the same. I identified with characters and…
There’s a scene toward the end of Jerry Seinfeld’s new Netflix special “Jerry Before Seinfeld” where the man himself is sitting cross-legged in the middle of a street just behind a single accordion folder. The road surface is paved with notepad paper taken from that folder in which he stored every single stand up joke…
I chose to see Darren Aronofsky’s latest film, “mother!” without reading anything about it. All I could infer from its posters was that it would be scary, and all I could tell from Facebook was that my friends had strong opinions about it. Little did I know that I’d be watching two hours of mystical…
They may never get around to writing the Great American Novel, but in the meantime if people need to get a sense of what it’s like to live in this country, they could do a lot worse than to have a close reading of the films of Frederick Wiseman. Since the late 1960s, the indefatigable…
Shelley Berman, who died on September 1 at age 92, was the Gregor Samsa of American comedy. Like the protagonist of Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” Berman was alert to the insectification of modern life, whatever removes humanity and sparks rage. Focusing on petty occasions for anger made him the spiritual forefather of comedians, especially Larry David,…
Before she was a filmmaker, Yuliya Solntseva was the Queen of Mars. As the title character in the 1924 silent film “Aelita,” she vamps and struts her way around elaborate constructivist sets representing her kingdom on the Red Planet. Decades later, she would take her place in history by directing a trilogy of dazzlingly virtuosic…
As Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un engage in nuclear brinkmanship, very real fears of a nuclear Armageddon have emerged. Given that Armageddon has a Hebrew origin (via the Greek translation of Har Meggido), it is not surprising that Jews have had a considerable interest in nuclear apocalypse. Consider the title of MAD magazine, echoing 1950s…
Spoiler Alert: If you don’t want to know how “War for the Planet of the Apes” ends, you probably should stop reading this article halfway through.) A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a science-fiction movie pitting humans against non-human enemies was unleashed upon the world, and from that moment on, the…
The playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who died on July 27 at age 73, was to all outward appearances as non-Jewish as may be imagined. Yet his writing hovered around such American Jewish creative spirits as Arthur Miller, Bob Dylan and Joseph Chaikin, among others. In such plays as the “Curse of the Starving Class”…
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