Tuesdays in September on Turner Classic Movies: The Jewish Experience on Film

Posted on September 1, 2014 at 9:21 pm

This month, TCM has an excellent series of films about the Jewish experience, every Tuesday.

TCM proudly presents The Projected Image: The Jewish Experience on Film, a weekly showcase of movies focusing on Jewish history and heritage as portrayed onscreen. Co-hosting the films each Tuesday is Dr. Eric Goldman, an expert on Yiddish, Israeli and Jewish cinema, and founder and president of Ergo Media, a video publishing company specializing in Jewish and Israeli video. Goldman is also the author of The American Jewish Story Through Cinema (2013) and Visions, Images and Dreams: Yiddish Film Past and Present (2011).

The screenings are divided into themes, which air each Tuesday beginning on September 2 at 8pm with The Evolving Jew, featuring two versions of The Jazz Singer, the story of a young American performer who defies the traditions of his devout Jewish family. Al Jolson starred in the revolutionary early sound version from 1927, and Danny Thomas took over the role in the lesser-known 1953 remake. That same night, The Immigrant Experience focuses on Joan Micklin Silver’s Hester Street (1965) and Barry Levinson’s Avalon (1990), telling of Jewish families from Europe and Russia who settle in, respectively, the Lower East Side of New York City and a neighborhood in Baltimore, Maryland.

Among films dealing with The Holocaust on September 9 are two powerful classics from the 1960s: Stanley Kramer’s all-star Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), about the trial of war criminals in 1945-46; and Sidney LumetÕs The Pawnbroker (1965), starring Rod Steiger as a concentration-camp survivor. Also screening are Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946), in which he plays a Nazi fugitive, and Edward Dmytryk’s The Juggler (1953), with Kirk Douglas as a Holocaust survivor.

September 16 sees Israeli Classics including two TCM premieres, Thorold Dickinson’s Hill 24 Doesn’t Answer (1955), the first feature film produced in Israel; and Ephraim Kishon’s Sallah (1964), a satire that became the most successful film in Israeli history. Also showing are a pair of films focusing on The Jewish Homeland: George Sherman’s A Sword in the Desert (1949, TCM premiere), which deals with the immigration into Mandatory Palestine during the mid-1940s; and Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), which concerns the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.

Tackling Prejudice on September 23 are three absorbing films based on novels about anti-Semitism: Laura Z. Hobson’s GentlemanÕs Agreement (1947); Crossfire (1947), based on John Paxton’s 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole; and Arthur Miller’s Focus (2001, TCM premiere). A fourth film, The House of Rothschild (1934), was taken from George Hembert Westley’s play about the celebrated Jewish banking family and its struggles for dignity and equality in the European financial world.

Among Coming-of-Age stories on September 30 are The Young Lions (1958), with Montgomery Clift as a soldier coming to grips with anti-Semitism during World War II; The Way We Were (1973) with Barbra Streisand as a Marxist Jew who shares a bittersweet romance with a handsome Gentile (Robert Redford); and Hearts of the West (1975), with Jeff Bridges and Alan Arkin in a comedy about a young writer who stumbles into a career as a cowboy star.

Related Tags:

 

Movie History Neglected gem Television

Contest: Hey Arnold! The Complete Series

Posted on August 29, 2014 at 12:20 pm

hey arnold
Copyright Nickelodeon
The football-headed Arnold and all his pals are here in this box set with all 99 adventures from the beloved Nickelodeon series. It’s available exclusively at Walmart, but I have a copy to give away! Send me an email with “Arnold” in the subject line and tell me your favorite teacher. Don’t forget your address! (US addresses only) I’ll pick a winner at random on September 5, 2014. Good luck!

Related Tags:

 

Contests and Giveaways Television

See Great Directors — in TV and Music Videos

Posted on August 28, 2014 at 3:46 pm

Top directors do more than movies.  Take a look at these clips from Emmy-nominated television series and these music videos made by some of the most talented directors working in Hollywood, including Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”), David Fincher (“Fight Club”), and Paul Thomas Anderson (“Boogie Nights,” “The Master”).  Taylor Swift’s new Shake it Off video was directed by Mark Romanek, who also directed Johnny Cash’s classic “Hurt” and Michael Jackson’s “Scream” as well a films like Robin Williams’ “One Hour Photo” and the haunting “Never Let Me Go.”   He said that the ideas were Swift’s, but explained how he added his own thoughts.

We met and she told me that she wanted to make a sort of paean to the awkward ones, the “uncool” kids that are actually cooler than the “cool” kids. She said she wanted to shoot all these styles of dance and then be the individualist dork in the midst of these established genres. And that she somehow wanted her fans involved. I loved that idea, so over the following week or so, we narrowed down our choices for styles of dance. I think she imagined it in more natural settings and I suggested giving it a starker, more minimalist look. And I suggested the idea of incorporating her fans as a climax, for the ending as a kind of surprise.

Did you know that Fincher directed Madonna’s “Vogue?”  It is a lot of fun to see directors freed from the structure of narrative arcs, having fun with the visuals and the music.

 

Related Tags:

 

Directors Shorts Television Understanding Media and Pop Culture

HUB Network Switches Parents and Kids in the Freaky Friday-ish “Parents Just Don’t Understand”

Posted on August 25, 2014 at 3:56 pm

Joey Fatone hosts the new HUB Network reality series “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” a real-life “Freaky Friday,” with parents and kids switching places.  It airs Saturdays at 7 (6 Central).

Related Tags:

 

Elementary School Television Tweens

The Simpsons Binge Watch: Every Episode Plus the Movie

Posted on August 20, 2014 at 3:59 pm

Get your food delivery menus ready.  Unplug your phone.  All 552 Simpsons episodes will be broadcast in order, starting tomorrow. They include scenes cut in syndication that have not been on television since the original broadcast. And of course they include some remarkably prescient moments that predicted the future so accurately we can only watch again to guess what other developments in the series are still ahead of us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qq4w74r8HKY#t=27

The new season starts September 28.

Related Tags:

 

Animation Comedy Television
THE MOVIE MOM® is a registered trademark of Nell Minow. Use of the mark without express consent from Nell Minow constitutes trademark infringement and unfair competition in violation of federal and state laws. All material © Nell Minow 1995-2024, all rights reserved, and no use or republication is permitted without explicit permission. This site hosts Nell Minow’s Movie Mom® archive, with material that originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies, Beliefnet, and other sources. Much of her new material can be found at Rogerebert.com, Huffington Post, and WheretoWatch. Her books include The Movie Mom’s Guide to Family Movies and 101 Must-See Movie Moments, and she can be heard each week on radio stations across the country.

Website Designed by Max LaZebnik