The Other Son (***)

A drama about two families who learn that their now-teenage sons were switched at birth. The extra twist is that one family are Jews living in Tel Aviv and the other are Palestinians living on the West Bank. The two mothers are most understanding. The men, the two fathers and especially the Palestinian boy’s older brother, have a more difficult time with the situation, perhaps more so than the seventeen-year-olds in question. A minor flaw for me was that the actors don’t look more like their biological parents than the ones who raised them,

The drama (along with much of the cast) is French and so features the small contrivance that the Israeli family has a French mother (Emmanuelle Devos, best known for the thriller Read My Lips) and the Palestinian boy has just returned from studying in Paris, so much of the film is in French (but also Hebrew, Arabic, and English). The plot isn’t much, but provides a way into the issue of identity and its source. Is it instilled at birth, and so can be taken from you, or is it something you can choose?

IMDb link

viewed 10/31/12 7:35 pm at Ritz 5 and reviewed 10/31/12

Ajami (***1/4)

Tel Aviv natives Yaron Shani and Scandar Copti collaborated on this Oscar-nominated debut feature. Shani is a Jew, but Copti (who acts, too) is a Muslim, and their interwoven stories explore the ways that Jews and Arabs interact in Israeli (and occasionally the Palestinian territories). Almost always, the dramatic thriller avoids we’re-all-the-same-under-the-skin platitudes, or the we’re-all-connected pretensions, of movies like Crash or Babel. The main characters, to the extent there are main characters, are Arab brothers trying to come up with money to avoid the (undeserved) consequences of a family feud, an illegal restaurant worker trying to pay for his mother’s operation, and a police officer trying to solve the stabbing of a fellow Jew.

I doubt that you could make a movie about Israeli Jews and Arabs and not have it reflect the deep tensions between the two peoples, but there are no suicide bombers and no military incursions here, mostly the day-to-day transactions among people who are partly separate and partly intertwined. The politics are those of everyday life in an inherently political setting. The directors play tricks with the chronology, and between that and the large slate of characters, I got confused a few times, and maybe not as emotionally involved as I would have been had they stuck with a couple of major characters. But the inside look at the cultural practices of the Palestinians was intriguing, particularly where a Bedouin elder calculates the monetary payment that can potentially end the cycle of retribution that started with a restaurant shooting.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 3/18/2010

You Don’t Mess with the Zohan (***)

Adam Sandler gets in touch with his Jewish roots—and applies highlighting—in this tale of an Israeli commando whose secret dream is to become a hairdresser in the model of the great Paul Mitchell. (Unfortunately, his inspiration is a Mitchell book illustrated with 1980s styles.) I confess I’ve not been a fan of most of Sandler’s star vehicles, which typically combine Screenwriting 101 plotting, schoolboy humor, and blubbery sentimentality. Though it was directed by Dennis Dugan, Sandler wrote the screenplay with Robert Smigel, creator of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and the ubiquitous Judd Apatow (Knocked Up). The result isn’t necessarily a more adult comedy, but perhaps his collaborators kept his worst excesses in check. Considering that the Dugan-directed I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry was a 110-minute gay joke, I feared this would be more of the same. The topic does come up, but the movie is at least as much of an action-film parody as a hairdresser comedy. The Zohan winds up pursuing his dream on the same street in New York City as some Palestians, so the Arab-Israeli conflict is also the subject of some mild satire.

The Zohan is a caricature of male virility. He not only does one-handed push-ups, but no-handed ones. And in the salon, he’s a caricature of Warren Beatty in Shampoo, providing the middle-aged female clientele with a full-service experience. (For a PG-13 movie, this is about as raunchy as it gets.) It would have been interesting to see him wind up with one of the chubby, middle-aged housewives more permanently, but the love interest is more conventionally young and slim. Since Sandler and Dugan have never met a cliché they didn’t like, everything about the story is pretty conventional. When Sandler’s not doing his comic schtick, it can be tedious. A primary storyline, in which a big developer wants to buy up the block Zohan’s salon is on seemed nearly lifted from Barbershop, another comedy about hair. Still, it’s not as corny as the very worst of Sandler comedies, like, say, Big Daddy.

You have to be a fan of broad humor to like this movie. It’s the sort where Zohan can tell his American friend that he’s “half Australian, half Mount Everest” and it’s not questioned. And there’s a running gag about hummus, which has more uses than Windex does in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. I’m usually annoyed by such silliness, so maybe Sandler’s accent, or the input of Smigel and Apatow, made it seem clever enough that I didn’t mind.

IMDB link

viewed 5/28/08 (screening at Ritz Bourse); reviewed 6/5, 6/6, and 6/15/08