Word: film
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Should there be a moratorium on Holocaust movies? Stuart Klawans, the film critic of the Nation, says so in the Jewish magazine Nextbook (but not, oddly, in the Nation), and Ella Taylor tentatively endorses the suggestion this week in the Village Voice. Since these are two of the movies' most thoughtful commentators - who each happen to be Jewish - the proposal deserves consideration...
...minor that he scarcely notices them until it is too late, and their cumulative effect finally becomes inescapable. It is interesting to see Mortensen, normally an expertly rambunctious actor, hiding behind his wireless glasses, playing a dim and fussy man, but to place antiheroism at the center of a film is to invite a kind of indifference that vitiates our involvement and concern for its outcome - which, in any case, is obvious almost from its outset...
...mystery of that nation's behavior during the Nazi era remained so insolvable, so beyond the reach of art and scholarship, so beyond the reach, certainly, of earnest, inept works like Good, which remains, like most such works, on the anecdotal fringe of the problem. In film, the Holocaust has become a topic addressed by journeymen writers (Good was adapted by John Wrathall) and directors who seem to think that the importance of the subject will enhance the inherent modesty of their own gifts. But this is not so; we emerge from their movies frustrated by their failures to grasp...
...French to laugh at their more ridiculous characteristics. Notable among those comedians are the late antiestablishment humorist Coluche, the writers of the nightly satirical newscast Les Guignols de l'Info, Jules-Edouard Moustic - host of the black parody news show Groland Magzine - and the creators of the smash 1998 film Le Dîner de Cons ("The Dinner Game"), which depicts rich sophisticates falling afoul of their own cruel game of inviting low-brow rubes to swank dinners where they're ridiculed for entertainment. (See pictures of a French photographer's satirical work...
...Wild Party); but she didn't become the Broadway magnet she should have been. In the late '50s she had featured roles in The Mark of the Hawk, with Poitier, and St. Louis Blues, with Nat "King" Cole, and the lead in Anna Lucasta, a daring B film with Sammy Davis Jr. She cut a powerful figure in all these films, but they were small pictures that didn't lead to strong roles in Hollywood's top-line productions. As for the Catwoman gig, Kitt appeared in only three episodes. And before she could truly cash in, her addiction...