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The Jewish Year
In Film

Borat edges Mel Gibson's rant
for top movie story of '06.

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Michael Fox

Special to the Jewish News

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F

or the second time in three
years, Mel Gibson positioned
himself perfectly to be the
major Jewish movie story of the year.
Then another actor spouting anti-
Semitic slurs came along to pinch
the crown.
Gibson, as everybody with elec-
tricity knows, reacted to being
arrested for drunk driving near his
Malibu home in July by blaming all
the wars in the world (past and pres-
ent, presumably) on "the Jews."
Although the movies typically take
priority over off-screen activities, the
multimillionaire "religious scholar"
who made The Passion of the
Christ will always warrant our close
attention.
Mel must be sobbing in his ginger
ale because he was outwitted and
outmaneuvered by Sacha Baron
Cohen.
With Borat: Cultural Learnings
of America For Make Benefit
Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,
the British Jewish comic transported
his fictional Slavic character from
HBO to the multiplexes of America
and scored the biggest comedy hit of
the year.
Whether Cohen's broad satire

A scene from For Your Consideration

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44

December 28 2006

Lrtainim

provoked more or less reflection on
anti-Semitism in our culture than
Gibson's ignorant tirade is an open
question.
As is usually the case, one had to
look to European filmmakers for a
serious historical perspective.
Cinematographer Lajos Koltai
made a spectacular directorial debut
with Fateless, a stunning portrait of
a Hungarian boy's odyssey through
the camps that deserves a place
among the great Holocaust films.
And German director Marc
Rothemund explicitly made the
point in Sophie Scholl — The Last
Days, his heart-stopping study of
the White Rose student resistance
group in Munich, that it required a
willful act on the part of German
citizens to remain ignorant of the
mass exterminations that the Nazis
were carrying out.
On a lighter note, Go for Zucker!
marked the first German-Jewish
comedy in decades.
The only other foreign film with
a Jewish theme to make a splash on
these shores was Only Human, an
amusing interfaith romantic comedy
from Spain.
If you wanted to see Jewish char-
acters in American films this year,
you were pretty much limited to
independent films with a comedic