Gedenkstu vi ikh hob dikh gelernt haltn a shpayer in di hent?

[sovay]

Some thoughts on returning from Defiance (2008):

1. What idiot let Liev Schreiber get away without an Oscar nomination?

2. I felt there should be a koan for the Bielski Otriad: if two Jews have a philosophical argument in the middle of a forest, when is the third going to pitch in (and is he going to punch someone)? This is not a complaint. A Holocaust film without hagiography is one that works for me.

3. Now that we've proved that general audiences will watch a film with Jewish partisans, who can we get to adapt A Verse from Babylon, please?

I wish I could play my formerly purchased music from iTunes. "Yisrolik" and "Shtil di nakht" are both locked. strange_selkie?

Comments

[xterminal.livejournal.com]

Leap based on Stalag 17 and my having seen Billy Wilder Speaks a couple of hours previous. Aside, of course, from being one of the greatest directors America has ever seen.

He had got both the sensitivity and the sense of the fantastic to pull it off. And, for some reason, I keep thinking of the almost absurdist carnival atmosphere from Ace in the Hole. (I could be getting my wires jammed here with Mephisto, whose director I can never remember, as well as Herzog's Invincible, which I seem to have liked a heck of a lot more than anyone else did... which, of course, brings us to Herzog. Who is, of course, still kicking.)