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The Schmooze Jack Abramoff’s Religious Escape Hatch
Before Jack Abramoff was an American super-lobbyist, half-successful restaurateur, and convicted con man, he was a movie producer, known for bankrolling the 1989 Dolph Lundgren actioner “Red Scorpion” (part of Cold War cinema’s deconstructionist, though still violently anti-Soviet phase). It’s appropriate then, that George Hickenlooper’s Abramoff biopic, “Casino Jack,” which premiered last week at the…
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The Schmooze Museum of Tolerance Honors Clint Eastwood
In the movies, Clint Eastwood’s cowboys, inspectors and emotionally wounded tough guys made him a cultural icon of American manhood. In real life, the Oscar winner will soon be honored for another role: bringing justice and tolerance to the big screen. As “Dirty” Harry Callahan said, “Go ahead, make my day.” On November 14, Eastwood…
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The Schmooze Charlie Chaplin’s Jewish Barber
For 70 years, fans of Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” now widely available on DVD, have marveled at the prescience of the comedian’s anti-Nazi satire. Filmed before America actually entered World War II, when some Hollywood movie moguls still soft-pedaled critiques of Hitler, “The Great Dictator” continues to fascinate today. Recently published by Les éditions…
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The Schmooze How Dustin Hoffman Rescues a Movie About Marriage and Misery
If “Barney’s Version” does one thing really well, it’s recreate the blithe comic tone of the Mordecai Richler novel on which it is based. This faithfulness has everything to do with casting. Director Richard J. Lewis and producer Robert Lantos’s big screen “Barney’s Version” — which premiered at the Venice Film Festival last week and…
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The Schmooze A German Sniper’s Silent Love
“Den Zverya,” a new film by Russian director Mikhail Konovalchuk, must be one of the few foreign films screened this year at a North American film festival without subtitles. That’s because the movie, which runs 84 minutes and is titled either “The Sniper” or “The Day of the Beast” in English, is completely without dialogue….
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The Schmooze How an Actor Died of the Blacklist
Fifty-five years ago today, union activist and thespian Philip Loeb checked himself into the Taft Hotel in Midtown Manhattan under a false name and took a fatal dose of sleeping pills. Targeted by the insidious blacklist, Loeb could no longer find work in his beloved acting profession and had reached rock bottom. Tonight, a panel…
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The Schmooze Mrs. Goldberg, Media Queen
Before Beaver Cleaver introduced television watchers to his suburban boyhood, before Lucy and Desi’s domestic misadventures became ingrained in the consciousness of the American household, and before the world had even heard of Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Gertrude Berg was the queen of the American sitcom. As the head writer, producer and leading actress of…
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The Schmooze Holocaust Filmmaker Responds to R Rating
In May 1942, around three months before some 300,000 Jews were sent from the Warsaw Ghetto to Treblinka, Nazi filmmakers shot 62 minutes of propaganda footage intended to illustrate the inhumanity of their victims. Staged scenes showed rich Jews living in luxurious indifference to the poverty and death around them, purportedly demonstrating their callousness, even…
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