Film
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The Schmooze Watch Woody Allen’s ‘Blue Jasmine’ Trailer
Another year, another Woody Allen movie. Allen’s latest picture, “Blue Jasmine,” is scheduled for a July 26 release, but we can get a sense of it now thanks to a trailer that was released this weekend. With Cate Blanchett starring as a trophy wife whose husband (Alec Baldwin) turns out to be a Bernie Madoff-esque criminal,…
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The Schmooze The Banality of Movies About Google
WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange stole my intended headline for this post: “The Banality of ‘Don’t Be Evil.’” Or maybe it was a New York Times copy editor, who gave that title to Assange’s opinion piece accusing Google of technocratic imperialism. Either way, now I can’t use it for fear of plagiarism… or at least, a…
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The Schmooze Texas Jews and Hollywood Jews
Craig Zisk’s first feature film, “The English Teacher,” which opened on May 17, starts out as a lighthearted inspirational comedy. It stars Julianne Moore as Linda, an unmarried 40-year-old high school English teacher in a small town. Linda lives her life vicariously, through the heroines of the literary novels she reads and teaches. But her…
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Culture Hannah Arendt Biopic Offers Rare Onscreen View of Political Philosophy
Biopics about philosophers are rare, and they favor activists over ivory-tower thinkers. The life of the mind, unless it directly shapes social action, is not easily captured in film. Hence, Richard Attenborough’s film “Gandhi” exposed the Indian independence leader’s ideas on nonviolent struggle through his political activism, not through his writings. Likewise, Margarethe von Trotta’s…
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The Schmooze There Will Be No Second ‘Lebowski’
Jeff Bridges, with his new “The Dude and the Zen Master” book, may be having a hard time saying goodbye to his “Big Lebowski” alter-ego. But that is not at all the case with the Coen brothers, who recently said quite definitively that there would be no sequel to the 1998 cult classic, whose popularity…
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The Schmooze Is There an Orthodox Film Industry?
Orthodox filmmaker Rama Burshtein is a special case. Not only does she come from a community that frowns on film-watching — never mind film-making — but she has managed to create “Fill the Void,” a movie that has won awards and acclaim around the world. (You can read my recent profile of Burshtein here.) Burshtein…
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The Schmooze Coen Brothers’ Latest Draws Raves at Cannes
I have a lot of faith in the Coen brothers. But when I heard that their next film, “Inside Llewyn Davis,” was going to be about a singer-songwriter in Greenwhich Village during the folk revival, I was a little worried. If there’s a period ripe for nostalgia among beardy folk music types, this one is…
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Culture Orthodox World Provides Backdrop for Rama Burshtein’s Universal Story
The night before Rama Burshtein shot the last scene of “Fill the Void,” she couldn’t sleep. It was going to be her last day on set, and a large group of extras was scheduled to arrive, including her own children. More daunting, she was going to be shooting a wedding scene, one of the film’s…
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