Courtesy Penka Kouneva // From left to right, Jeremy Borum, Penka Kouneva and Nathan Furst working on the Dreamworks feature “Need for Speed” At six, Penka Kouneva was playing piano in her hometown of Sofia, Bulgaria. At 12, she was composing music for children’s theater. At 17, a song of hers won a Japanese competition…
Hollywood has embraced God in a big – and lucrative – way. The movie “Heaven is for Real,” which depicts the story of a young boy who claims to have visited heaven during a near death experience, is the fourth faith-based film this year to stir movie-going audiences with impressive box office numbers. Made for…
A Montreal man skipped both of his mother’s seders to advance in a poker tournament in which he won more than $1 million. Eric Afriat on April 16 won the World Poker Tour/Seminole Hard Rock Poker Showdown in Hollywood, Florida. He missed both seders at his mother’s home in West Boca Raton, Fla. as he…
An Israeli soldier who lost his arm in a Hamas terror attack proposed to his girlfriend from the stage of a Friends of the IDF event in Florida. Capt. Ziv Shilon proposed on Thursday in front of about 1,000 people at the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces’ Greater Miami Chapter Solidarity Gala in Hollywood….
It is depressing to read so many articles decrying the historical inaccuracies in recent movies, whether dealing with outer space, the southern slave trade, Somali pirates, or Walt Disney, articles in which the least deviation from the historical record or “reality” (a word Nabokov insisted routinely belongs within quotation marks), is held up against the…
Observers of the convergence of Jewish and mainstream American culture will be keeping a close watch on this year’s Academy Awards in which — for the first time in movie history as far as the Forward can tell — the two leading contenders for the Best Actor award are non-Jewish actors playing Jewish characters. In…
This year’s Oscar nominations are stirring angst in certain corners of the Internet, because of something that looks suspiciously like a new trend: movies about Jewish con men. Granted, it’s just a couple of movies. Hollywood makes all kinds. Everyone knows they’re fake. That’s why it’s called the Dream Factory. Sure, some movies try to…
I discovered “Girls” when it was well into the second season. I had lived in New York for several months to attend the Columbia University School of Journalism. The initial excitement of being in the City That Never Sleeps had waned. I had gotten used to discovering that almost every other person I met was…
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