Israel

THE GATEKEEPERS: winning tactics make for a losing strategy

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The Gatekeepers: This Israeli documentary is centered around interviews with all six surviving former chiefs of Shin Bet, Israel’s super-secret internal security force.   We get their inside take on the past thirty years of Israeli-Palestinian history.  What is revelatory however, is their assessment of Israel’s war on terror.  These are hard ass guys who went to the office every morning to kill terrorists.  But upon reflection, they conclude that winning tactics make for a losing strategy.

Filmmaker Dror Moreh also makes file footage pop off the screen with 3D effects, and shows us the night vision helmet cam view of an Israeli military raid on a houseful of terrified Palestinians.  It’s powerful stuff, and a Must See for anyone with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the American War on Terror.

The Gatekeepers is available to rent on DVD from Netflix and for streaming on Amazon Instant, iTunes, Vudu, YouTube, Google Play and Flixster.

The Matchmaker: a character-driven gem from Israel

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Fascinating characters make good stories and good movies, and the Israeli gem The Matchmaker has them aplenty.   A middle class teenager falls into a very unusual summer job – the “spy guy” for a matchmaker based in a Haifa neighborhood where prostitutes and smugglers ply their trades.  His job is to shadow prospective brides and grooms to verify their suitability for a match.  The kid is a pretty normal teen with an affection for detective fiction and an emerging talent for writing, and we see the other characters through his prism.

The Matchmaker is set in 1968, when many Israeli adults were Holocaust survivors who refused to talk about the Holocaust.  Ironically, the adult conspiracy of silence means that the teen characters know less about the Holocaust than do other kids around the world.  Almost all the adult characters are emotionally scarred in ways the kids really can’t understand.

The matchmaker himself is a shambling, secretive and somewhat shady guy, with unexplained facial scars.  He is an uncanny, but not always perfect, judge of human foibles.  He advises his clients, “I find you what you need, not what you want”.  It turns out that matchmaking is his passion, but he makes his living from another, less legal business.

The matchmaker himself pines for a charming but extremely emotionally fragile woman who works with him.  There’s also a kind, beautiful and lovelorn woman who owns a theater and is a dwarf.  We also have an obsessive librarian who is even more tightly wound than we see at first.  Oh, and the kid’s best friend’s American cousin comes for a visit, and she’s smokin’ hot.

So The Matchmaker is a coming of age movie, but one unlike any you have seen because of the singular characters.  Credit goes to Director Avi Lesher, who adapted the screenplay from a novel by Amir Gutfreund.

Footnote: a comedy of awkwardness reveals two guys choosing misery

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A rising Talmudic scholar sees his career-topping prize accidentally awarded to his grumpy father.  This potentially comic situation reveals a character study of the two men.  At the beginning, we see the father as bitterly sullen.  As the story peels back the onion, we see the pomposity and narcissism in both men.

As you would think from watching the trailer, the first two-thirds of the film is very funny.  In fact, the scene of an academic meeting in a cramped office is one of the funniest moments you’ll see in any movie this year.  However, once the father makes a discovery, the movie darkens as the two men miss every chance to grasp selflessness.

As the end of the movie nears, the filmmakers create tension that makes the ending too abrupt for me, with too little payoff.  I think that the filmmakers of A Separation, by winding down the end of the movie, created a much successful ambiguous ending.

I admired Footnote more than I liked it, and, indeed, the critical consensus warmed to the film more than I.  Footnote won the screenplay award at Cannes and was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Oscar.

Capturing the essence of the film perfectly, Roger Ebert wrote, “The Talmud provides guidance to Jews about how to lead their lives, but these two Jews have learned nothing that helps them when they find themselves in an impossible situation.”