Movie and Television Reviews

Prager and Goldstein at the screening. I only had my cell phone camera so I used this one from the web site.

I attended a Liberty Film Festival screening last Thursday at the Golden Theater in Hollywood and, like last years' event, had a wonderful time. Dennis Prager co-hosted the evening along with the beautiful Govindini Murty, her lucky husband, Jason Apuzzo, and filmmaker Brooke Goldstein. Murty's enhanced her hosting skills by providing my wife and me with soda and cheese. Dennis impressed the audience with his sense of humor (he occasionally googles "prager asshole" to keep himself modest and kidded about how he won't eat ham, "but shrimp, that's something else.") and graciousness towards the audience- even to the ones who were, unfortunately, sometimes quite rude to Ms. Goldstein (it always pains me to report less-than-polite behavior from people I largely agree with).

Follow up:

The worst flare-up occurred after an English lady in the audience objected to Goldstein's optimism about the Palestinian-Israeli situation. Specifically, Goldstein said that she found hope in the Palestinian mothers' grieving. Prager didn't agree, but didn't press Goldstein on the matter.

Prager managed to make some digs at the left-sometimes when he didn't have to-showing that the left-right battle is never far from his thoughts.

On to the movies:

Making of a Martyr

Making of a Martyr anchors itself on Hussam Abdu, a fifteen-year-old suicide martyr who accidentally lives after he tries to blow himself up near an Israeli checkpoint on March 24th, 2004. Or, so he says one year after the event. For, at the beginning of the movie, shortly after being taken captive, Hussam claims that he decided not to detonate his explosives vest because he feared death and loved his family. An interview with the Al-Aqsa Martyrs brigade leader, who calls Hussam a coward and a failure, conversations with Hussam's fellow inmates and family, and the assessment of Palestinian sentiment that flows from them leads one to conclude that Hussam blames his life on a faulty bomb because of peer pressure. In other words, Hussam changes his story because he wants the respect Palestinians give to suicide bombers.

The filmmakers, Goldstein and Alistair Leyland, expand beyond Hussam's story, giving other examples of the Palestinian terrorists' practice of recruiting teenagers as suicide bombers to show that Hussam incident isn't isolated- that it's part of the Palestinian strategy to enlist teenagers as suicide bombers. And not the all-Palestinian, popular kids, but the dregs and outcasts amongst them. The feeling one gets is that martyrdom is the way the un-elite get respect (wouldn't that, in itself speak well for Palestinian sanity? It means they recognize, at some level, that there's something wrong with the practice.) This message reminded me of John Kerry's “joke” admonishing students to study lest they end up in Iraq. Imagine the pressure for students taking the Palestinian SAT!

Women can also redeem themselves through death. Wafa Idris' husband divorced her because she couldn't have children. To remove her shame (some also say that her embarrassment stemmed from an affair), Wafa killed an old man and injured over 100 people.

Goldstein and Leyland go to Jenin, Ramallah, Tulkarem and Nablus to get their interviews. Goldstein is Jewish (bad for a documentarian in Palestine) and Canadian (not so bad -unless you mention bacon).

The movie's effectiveness depends on the Westerner's shock that people willfully blow each other up. It meanders a little, going back and forth between incidents, and MOAM can use some further editing.

During the movie, Goldstein shows kids playing "army" while attending a “jihadi” school. The audience is made to feel that it's a bad thing. “Hey! Wait a minute,” I thought. “American kids play at war and attend military schools- as have boys since the beginning of the world. I play at war with my own kids.”

Some questions occurred to me: Is war-play and military/patriotic education bad in and of itself? Or, is the Palestinians' misdirected goal the problem? Perhaps, we recoil because the kids are just on the wrong side from our perspective? And, don't Americans honor their dead warriors? Does this mean that a liberal-relativist position can be partially valid (nooooooo! What's happening to me?)?

I wanted to ask these during the question and answer period with Dennis Prager and Goldstein, but Dennis didn't call on me.

The Road to Jenin:

I met the Algerian/French/American director of The Road to Jenin, Pierre Rehov last year at the Liberty film Festival. He's a nice man. Last year, he made the movie Suicide Killers which is very similar to MOAM. In fact, it features the same Hussam. Except for the boring pshycho-babble, I consider Suicide Killers to be slightly superior for its interesting focus on the life and thoughts of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails.

Road to Jenin

The Road to Jenin is more of an expose' than a documentary. It gives the pro-Israeli view of the Jenin incident, which Palestinians and their sympathizers throughout the Arab world and Western universities think a “massacre.” Or, maybe not. I looked at the leftiest of left magazines, The Nation, and found skepticism even there. My left friends also didn't know about Jenin. The movie, like MOAM, can stand some editing. The parts where media-savvy Palestinians coach Jenin residents are very funny. In one scene, a man stands beside a bombed house for a cameraman and says, “but, this isn't my house.”

Suicide Killers

Palestinian doctors are caught in lies as are journalists, one of whom convinces a couple to say that Israelis prevented the wife from giving birth in a hospital. It's all very good, but Rehov doesn't give the impression of subjectivity and the cheerleader quality may be a little much. In TRTJ, the saintlyvIsraelis would give their last can of rations to a Palestinian terrorist. Perhaps some interviews with some pro-Palestinian Westerners would have been nice. As it is, TRTJ feels like a Michael Moore documentary (without the lies and mocking hatred of ideological enemies).