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Gedenkstu vi ikh hob dikh gelernt haltn a shpayer in di hent?
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.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
strange_selkie?
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?
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This tickles me.
who can we get to adapt A Verse from Babylon, please?
Seconded.
And "Soldiers Three" is an excellent soundtrack, even if it's not in Yiddish.
Nine
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I'm sorry to hear that iTunes is thwarting you.
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The movie has its share of missteps—almost all in places where the scriptwriter or the director didn't trust the story to carry its own power, and of course it does—but Liev Schreiber is not one of them. I have loved him ever since I saw him in, God help me, Kate & Leopold, where his immature, amateur, not-really-an-asshole ex-boyfriend was the best thing in the film aside from Hugh Jackman accompanying himself on "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General," but this is the first time I've seen him in a role that I thought gave him anywhere near the breadth he can command. Daniel Craig isn't a misstep, either. For anyone who still thinks he can play only handsome thugs (one of whom happens to be James Bond), Defiance should be an effective rebuke. But he wasn't the one I thought was going to melt a hole in the screen.
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It's one of the aspects of the film I loved most. A refugee professor and a political pamphleteer unhandily constructing a pine-bough shelter in the middle of the Belorussian wilderness, in mortal danger simply for being alive and arguing unstoppably about socialism, fascism, and FDR—that's a crystallization of the tragicomedy that one can argue has defined Yiddish literature since it evolved out of Mittelhochdeutsch and whatever other languages it got near. The answer to "Why is it so fucking hard being friends with a Jew?" is, "Try being one." Not all stories of survival are nothing but solemnity, the alchemy of sacrifice. In the Naliboki Forest, saints you don't get.
And "Soldiers Three" is an excellent soundtrack, even if it's not in Yiddish.
It really is what I'm listening to. This semi-new version of iTunes doesn't winnow out songs from the search window according to the same rules as the old one, so when I look for Sid Griffin and Billy Bragg's "Sailors and Soldiers," I get June Tabor as well. Tragically, with never a penny of money turns me right back to Brandeis and the Rose Art Museum.
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I do not know if it was the best movie that could have been made from the story of the Bielski partisans, but right now I consider it fairly awesome. If it had been a novel, I would have stopped at a bookstore afterward and bought it.
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That sounds to me like a good argument for it.
There was a reviewer in some newspaper (the Fairfield country free rag, maybe?) who seemed to be thinking that the movie was based on one in particular non-fiction book about the Bielski partisans and that it didn't do the story justice on that grounds.
As I think about it, that paper seems to have a general policy of tearing on things, to show how sophisticated they are, or perhaps how feral and edgy--I'm not sure why I should take anything they say seriously in the first place.
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I would really love someone to adapt my little book. I found new pictures online -- from the Kuvik archive? Which did not exist in the early 2000s -- and I'm semi-excited about their provenance.
I've debated, though, giving the film of my book a modern soundtrack in addition to the songs that get sung in the course of making theatre, because creative people are never living in a way that wants time to stand still.
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*beams*
Cookie?
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Thank God someone around here has tech-karma that doesn't suck yea unto the vacuum deeps of space. Thank you.
from the Kuvik archive? Which did not exist in the early 2000s -- and I'm semi-excited about their provenance.
Oh, cool. What are they?
giving the film of my book a modern soundtrack in addition to the songs that get sung in the course of making theatre, because creative people are never living in a way that wants time to stand still.
Yes. What kind of modern?
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What do you think I am?
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Develop a time machine. It needs Billy Wilder.
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This is not an argument—why him?
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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.)