Around this time of year I get screeners from Hollywood film
companies to view in conjunction with the New York Film Critics
Online (NYFCO) awards meeting in December. Generally, the most
interesting are those from Magnolia Pictures, whose CEO is Mark Cuban.
Despite the last name (originally Chabenisky), Cuban is a Jew and
an interesting character to say the least. He sold a website
featuring live webcasts of basketball games to Yahoo in 1998 for
$6 billion dollars just before the dot.com crash. He then went on
to buy the Dallas Mavericks basketball team and is also involved
in various online, cable TV and film businesses. Like a lot of the
other nouveau riche including the character who runs Whole Foods,
he is a libertarian and donated thousands of dollars to Republican
Senator Orrin Hatch’s election campaign. But he also has a rugged
individualist streak which in his film business is manifested by
the production of “Redacted”, Brian De Palma’s unwatchable movie
about American soldiers raping and killing a 14 year old Iraqi
girl, based on an actual incident. He also produced “The War
Within”, which made an attempt to understand the motivations of a
Pakistani suicide bomber, thus prompting the outrage of Frontpage
magazine and other ultraright forums.
With that kind of mindset, it is not that surprising that the 8
movies I received from Magnolia were envelope-pushing attempts to
one degree or another. Unfortunately, the results were mixed, to
say the least. Here are brief takes on them, with links to longer
reviews for those I found outstanding.
(Titles in red are available from Netflix.)
1. Two Lovers:
This was directed by James Gray, who despite his last name is a
Russian Jew like Cuban. He grew up in Queens, New York and
developed a fascination with the Russian-Jewish neighborhood in
Brighton Beach, inspiring his first movie “Little Odessa” in 1994.
I found “Little Odessa”, a tale about a hit man suffering from
weltschmerz, so pretentious that I walked out after 15 minutes.
Also set in Brighton Beach, “Two Lovers” is something of an
improvement but not by much. It stars Joaquin Phoenix as a Russian
Jew, suffering an even deeper case of weltschmerz, who develops
relationships with a woman from the neighborhood with his own
ethnic background as well as with a gentile woman played by
Gwyneth Paltrow (in Yiddish, referred to as a shiksah.) One
reviewer referred to this as an “Annie Hall” without the comedy. I
would only add without the intelligence as well. I was at first
surprised to see Phoenix cast as a Jew, but in fact he is
half-Jewish, as is Paltrow.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/11/13/magnolia-movies-2009/
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