Between the Temples 2024 with Jason Schwartzman Movie Review

 

Between the Temples 2024

A New Film Comments on Jewish Identity

Between the Temples is a 2024 traumedy feature film. "Traumedy" is a genre term for a film that mixes trauma and comedy. Between the Temples stars Jason Schwartzman as Ben Gottlieb, a depressed, middle-aged cantor living in upstate New York. He has retreated to the basement of a home belonging to his mother Meira and his mother's wife Judith (Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon). Ben's wife died over a year before the film begins. Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) allows Ben to assume his cantor's chair in front of the congregation during synagogue services, even though Ben has lost his ability to sing. Carla O'Connor (Carol Kane) was, decades earlier, Ben's grade school music teacher. She is now his septuagenarian bat mitzvah student.

Between the Temples was directed and co-written by Nathan Silver. Silver has made low-budget independent films that play at film festivals rather than obtaining wide release. He has often featured friends and relatives in his casts. Between the Temples is an hour and fifty-one minutes long. It was released in the US on August 22, 2024.

Temples has a distinctive look. The film stock is color and it is grainy. Silver shot on 16 mm of "rare Kodak film stock … we pushed at two stops" to make the film "less contrasty and it kind of gave it this look of these Soviet films that we used as our our guide." Silver says he wanted the film to have an "analog" look, to mirror Carla, an older character who was in her prime back in the 1970s. The movie poster's New Spirit Condensed font is also a throwback to the 1970s, and the soundtrack includes Hebrew language songs by Boaz Sharabi, who was popular in Israel in the 1970s.

The camera is handheld and shots are often jerky. Shots focus tightly on human faces. In one scene all the viewer sees is a person's nostrils, lips, and teeth, as the character eats. In a low-budget film, such tight close-ups eliminate the need for set design.

Professional critics lavish the film with praise. Audiences not so much. Rottentomatoes awards Between the Temples a proud 86% score from professional reviewers. Amateur reviews at the site, though, average out to a failing 40% score.

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans. Review.

 

Hitler's People: The Faces of the Third Reich by Richard J. Evans
Even if you've read many books on the topic, you'll want to read this one

I'm sitting on the couch, next to my brother Greg. I'm about five years old. The TV is our magical portal to old movies. The elegant dancing of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The wit and romance of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. John Wayne's righteous action hero. But not today. I am witnessing horrors that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Naked, skeletal bodies stacked like firewood. Even worse, some still live, in a nether world that strips them of any concept of human dignity. They stare at the camera and at me and Greg sitting there on the couch in suburban New Jersey.

My mother is furious. "This is what they did to us!"

"Am I Racist?" Yes, Matt Walsh, You Are.

 

Am I Racist?

New Daily Wire Film Wants to be the next What Is a Woman?

Am I Racist? is a one-hour-and-forty-minute documentary from The Daily Wire. It was released in the U.S. on September 13, 2024. It stars Matt Walsh. Walsh had previously starred in the Daily Wire's 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman? That film interrogated trans extremism. Woman enjoys a high 78% score from professional reviewers at the Rottentomatoes site, and an even higher 86% score from amateur reviewers. For this reviewer, What Is a Woman? is a must-watch film that makes important points in sometimes funny ways. Am I Racist? is merely so-so. A key difference between the two superficially similar documentaries lessens the impact of the newer work. More on that, below.

Kevin Costner's "Horizon" and "Fly Me to the Moon" with Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. Reviews.

 

Horizon and Fly Me to the Moon
Two films worth seeing in a theater

I want you to go to the movies. Specifically, I want you to see Horizon: An American Saga Chapter One and Fly Me to the Moon, even though both films received some bad reviews.

First, let me explain why I want you to go the movies at all. I'm a teacher, and I'm noticing among young people increasing difficulty in the ability to behave appropriately with other human beings. Families are smaller. Kids are growing up in Brutalist condo developments with no personality, no sidewalks, no churches, no downtown, no community centers. They spend their time alone staring at devices. Many young people today are effectively crippled. They don't make eye contact. They don't say, "Excuse me."

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church by Christopher J. Kellerman, SJ. Book Review

 

All Oppression Shall Cease: A History of Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Catholic Church
Sometimes the best defense of Western Civilization is a thorough confession

When I was a kid, Western Civilization seemed as eternal as the ancient granite hills threading through my hometown. Christian churches were packed on Sunday. Even forms as minor and ephemeral as jokes and song lyrics assumed, in the hearer, proficiency in a cultural heritage from Ancient Greece to Shakespeare to NASA. You couldn't understand Cole Porter or Johnny Carson without having been baptized into this heritage. The day began with the Pledge of Allegiance and no one sat that out or even made rude comments or eye-rolls. Classroom walls featured silhouette profiles of Washington and Lincoln.

That everything had changed hit me hardest when I was teaching. I might casually allude to a line I assumed everyone knew, like, "In the beginning … the earth was without form, and void … and God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Or, I might use a phrase like "ex nihilo," or "fiat lux." And I would be met with complete incomprehension. The Vietnam War. Nothing. The Greek Miracle. Blank stares. Normandy Beach. Huh?

Green Border 2023 Agnieszka Holland's New Film

 

Green Border
A new film about Europe's migrant crisis is making headlines

 

Green Border, in Polish, Zielona Granica, is a 2023 feature film. The film depicts the Belarus – European Union Border Crisis that began in 2021 and continues today. Polish film industry veteran, 75-year-old Agnieszka Holland, directed Green Border, co-produced it, and co-wrote the script. Polish government officials condemned the film. Holland has received death threats and she requires security. Green Border champions activists who provide food, medicine, foot massages, and legal advice to migrants. This reviewer believes that Green Border is well-made and well-meaning but incorrect.

A Man Is Ugly. A Woman Is Fat. Are We Still Allowed to State These Facts?

 

A Man Is Ugly. A Woman Is Fat.
Are we still allowed to state these facts?

Anouk Aimee, the exquisite star of the classic 1966 French film A Man and a Woman, passed away on June 18, 2024. She was 92. Willie Mays, the "Say Hey Kid," who hit 52 home runs in the 1965 season, also passed away on June 18, 2024. He was 93.

I joked to a friend, "Death comes in threes. Now another long-lived celebrity from the 60s must die."