Documentaries and socially-relevant foreign films are sexy, too! Here are my picks for five international hotties who, no matter the plot, create a private porn of their own.
Sociopolitical Drama: Lior Ashkenazi, Walk On Water
Who is Lior Ashkenazi? I have no idea. What I do know is that finally getting around to watching American-born Israeli director Eytan Fox’s 2004 Walk On Water, starring the incredible Israeli hunk Ashkenazi as a Mossad agent who finds himself intertwined in the lives of the grandson and granddaughter of a fugitive Nazi he’s assigned to capture, I realized I haven’t wanted to lay a movie star this bad since I first laid eyes on Daniel Craig’s 007. The sturdy-bodied, raven-haired Marlboro Man with magnetic eyes and a chin both chiseled and Travolta dimpled is so mesmerizing I can’t get his image out of my head – like a catchy techno tune stuck on endless repeat. The film itself is a fascinating character study for the first hour – until the characters leave the Holy Land for Berlin, wherein the plot descends into ludicrous soap opera melodrama complete with Deutsche drag queens and Jean-Claude Van Damme damage (and Bruce
Springsteen’s annoying “Tunnel of Love” stuck on endless repeat). But none of this really matters because it’s also got – Lior Ashkenazi! (And just to make me more hot and bothered he even gets naked, the camera caressing his hirsute chest – before he soaps up another man. And the character is straight. Continue reading while I take a cold shower.)
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This review first appeared in slightly different form during the 2007 Toronto Film Festival. Operation Filmmaker opens in New York tomorrow.
As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of another recently released movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance. That director Nina Davenport chooses to resolve the story on a pat, inappropriately jokey note is thus maybe a fitting way to end a story of conflict between the self-oblivious and a master manipulator, but it’s still a disappointment.
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Do edgy American filmmakers of yesteryear go soft after living in Hollywood for a few decades? We look at Neil Jordan’s new film The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, and ask how it measures up to her grittier predecessor, Taxi Driver. Also, Karina shares her picks from the Toronto Film Festival, including the much-buzzed western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control, and two fresh Iraq-umentaries, Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Operation Filmmaker.
FilmCouch #37
The Brave One, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Operation Filmmaker
As a portrait of post-Sadaam Iraqi youth, Operation Filmmaker doesn’t have the “wow!” factor of that other Toronto movie about Iraqi kids looking for refuge in American popular culture. But although I have some issues with director Nina Davenport’s treatment of her subject, for a film that began life as a vanity project designed to document an act of kindness on the part of a Hollywood star, it’s a surprisingly evocative examination of privileged, well-intentioned ignorance.
In 2004, an MTV documentary featured a nine-minute segment on Muthana Mohmed, a twenty-something Iraqi with a passion for Hollywood film. MTV’s cameras followed Muthana as he toured a giant street market, searching in vain for cinema books; they captured a pile of bombed-out bricks, which Muthana said was once the site of a school in which he was studying film. Actor Liev Schreiber saw this documentary as he was preparing to travel to Prague to shoot his first film as a director, an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Holocaust-memories-as-cultural-bridge novel, Everything is Illuminated. Schreiber decided to contact Muthana and invite him to come to Prague and work on the set of the film as an intern. Undoubtedly wanting a document of his own cross-cultural generosity for the Illuminated DVD, Schreiber hired filmmaker Davenport to trail Muthana and document his experiences on set.
Schreiber and his producer Peter Saraf undoubtedly went into the Muthana endeavor with the best intentions, but their cultural naivete is apparent from the outset. Schreiber says he wants to encourage Muthana’s filmmaking ambitions because “Baghdad needs artists”; Davenport lets the obvious follow-up question of, “Yeah, but don’t they need, like, safety, running water and electricity first?” hang in the air unsaid. When Muthana chooses an evening of clubbing over working on an editing assignment, Saraf begins to doubt Muthana’s true ambitions. The producer notes that if he really wants a Hollywood career, he should be making himself “invaluable” on the set by making sure the actors never lack for coffee. But Muthana, who has never spent a night outside of Iraq or away from his childhood home, has no concept of the Hollywood ladder and has a hard time seeing how fetching snacks is going to improve his art. The conflict is compounded by politics: both Schreiber and Saraf are self-professed “left-wing American Jews,” and both are visibly distressed with Muthana’s insistence that he “loves George Bush.”
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In this second-to-last installment of ReelerTV from Toronto, Stu sits down with the legendary Phil Donahue, who is in town promoting his first documentary effort, Body of War. The film tracks the recovery of Tomas Young, a young American soldier paralyzed from the waist down after serving just days in Iraq. And Karina takes a look at Operation Filmmaker, Nina Davenport’s portrait of a young Iraqi wannabe-filmmaker who takes advantage of liberal Hollywood guilt to get his foot in the proverbial door.
