DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir [Blu-ray]: Ari Folman, Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon, Nili Feller, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli: Movies & TV

Jun23

DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir [Blu-ray]: Ari Folman, Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon, Nili Feller, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli: Movies & TV

Posted by admin | on 23 June, 10:56 PM

Amazon.com
Waltz with Bashir presents an intriguing riddle: is a documentary still a documentary if it’s animated? Taking over where fact-based animations like Waking Life and Chicago 10 left off, Israel’s Ari Folman tries to wrap his head around 1982’s Lebanon War (the title refers to Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel). Why do disturbing dreams plague his former army colleagues, while he remembers nothing? Folman meets with nine of them to find out. As they speak, animators recreate their experiences, but instead of rotoscoping or video-capture, Folman first shot his film on video and then assembled an animated version from the resulting storyboards. This graphic-novel approach suits their strange, surrealistic stories and parallels the work of Black Hole’s Charles Burns, who tends to walk on the shadowy side (as opposed to Marjane Satrapi’s more fanciful Persepolis). War may be hell, but moments of grace and beauty shine through, best exemplified by Roni Dayag’s recollection of a late-night swim away from the scene of a beachfront battle. Decades later, he still remembers the soothing peacefulness of the water. These reminiscences nudge Folman’s repressed memories back to the surface, culminating in a horrific massacre to which he bore witness. Arguably, he didn’t need to include actual footage of the deceased when stylized graphics get the point across fine. If Waltz with Bashir isn’t a documentary in the conventional sense, it doesn’t resemble most animated efforts either. What matters more is the harrowing narrative he constructs from out of the minds of these haunted men. –Kathleen C. Fennessy

Stills from Waltz With Bashir (click for larger image)

DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir [Blu ray]: Ari Folman, Ron Ben Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon, Nili Feller, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli: Movies & TV 200962410314429677801

A New Kind of Documentary,

By Amos Lassen (Little Rock, Arkansas) -
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Waltz With Bashir [Theatrical Release] (Theatrical Release)

“Waltz with Bashir”

A New Kind of Documentary

Amos Lassen

Israel’s entry in the Oscar race gives a new definition of the genre of documentary film. The idea of an animated documentary may seem to be paradoxical to some but this may be a whole new way to present an idea. Basically, the film rakes place in a bar, an old friend tells “Bashir” director, Ari Folman, about a nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. The dream comes to him every night and the two men decide that there is a connection between the dream and their connection to an army mission during the war on Lebanon in the early 80’s. Ari surprises his friend and himself when he realizes that he cannot remember anything about that period in his life. They decide to interview old friends and comrades all over the world in order to find out what really happened during that time and as Ari goes deeper into the matter and the mystery, his memory begins to return with surreal thoughts and images.
“Bashir” is a very disturbing look at war and its consequences on people and nations. It compares the atrocities of the Lebanon war to other wars as it mixes dream sequences with surrealism and real life events. The film thereby mixes reality with illusion. It is in your face and very powerful.
The event that is the center of the film is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila un which Palestinians were murdered by Christian Phalangists as revenge for the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel. Although the Israelis did not participate, or perpetrate the killings, they did nothing to stop them. The animation in the film is seen over the recorded speech of actual participants in the ‘82 war.
Folman’s journey of introspection begins with his lack of memory and it seems that all he and his fellow soldiers have left is their dreams. One of the former soldiers believes that the dream he has of the vicious dogs is subconscious punishment for his killing dogs on the mission. The film follows a stream of personal anecdotes and because much of these stories are dreams, Folman chose to tell them through animation with the exception of the final scene and this is the scene that gives justification for the film. Therefore the film has a feeling that is both evocative and down-to-earth. We see war as reprehensible and ugly and as the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is not about who won the war, who was right or who made mistakes. It is about how we, as people, react to war and how it affects people who are involved in it.
Primarily “Bashir” is about the trauma of conflict, memory and its repression but it is also about the specifics of Israel’s role in the Lebanon war and about war in general as it is experienced by fighting men. It revels truth by taking the viewer back in time through the memories of people who witnessed it. It devastates as it reconstructs how and why innocent civilians were massacred because those with the power to stop what was going on did nothing. We do see that Israel is not without guilt in acts of passive genocide which goes against the Israeli response to what Hamas provokes.
From the very first frame of film the movie grabs the viewer and will not let him go even after the film is over. The movie cuts deeply by using images of youth and this brings what he says home. This is more than just a movie, it is a total experience that will probably change the views of many.

An Israeli Journalist’s View,

By The Book Doctor “The Book Doctor” (NY, USA) -

This review is from: Waltz With Bashir [Theatrical Release] (Theatrical Release)

This review was written by Israeli journalist Gideon Levy. Mr. Levy has reported on Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for the newspaper Ha’aretz for many years.

Mr. Levy’s point of view is one that you are not likely to hear anywhere in the US media, but it is a perspective that should be read to fully understand “Waltz With Bashir”

Ira “Madison Bill” Glunts

Gideon Levy / ‘Antiwar’ film Waltz with Bashir is nothing but charade
By Gideon Levy, Haaretz Correspondent
Tags: israel news, walz with bashir

Everyone now has his fingers crossed for Ari Folman and all the creative artists behind “Waltz with Bashir” to win the Oscar on Sunday. A first Israeli Oscar? Why not?

However, it must also be noted that the film is infuriating, disturbing, outrageous and deceptive. It deserves an Oscar for the illustrations and animation - but a badge of shame for its message. It was not by accident that when he won the Golden Globe, Folman didn’t even mention the war in Gaza, which was raging as he accepted the prestigious award. The images coming out of Gaza that day looked remarkably like those in Folman’s film. But he was silent. So before we sing Folman’s praises, which will of course be praise for us all, we would do well to remember that this is not an antiwar film, nor even a critical work about Israel as militarist and occupier. It is an act of fraud and deceit, intended to allow us to pat ourselves on the back, to tell us and the world how lovely we are.

Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country’s good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful - but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened - so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey “information”? We have this waltz.
Advertisement
The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the “we shot and we cried” syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization - another absolutely essential ingredient in public discourse here - and voila! You have the deceptive portrait of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.

Folman took part in the Lebanon war of 1982, and two dozen years later remembered to make a movie about it. He is tormented. He goes back to his comrades-in-arms, gulps down shots of whiskey at a bar with one, smokes joints in Holland with another, wakes his therapist pal at first light and goes for another session to his shrink - all to free himself at long last from the nightmare that haunts him. And the nightmare is always ours, ours alone.

It is very convenient to make a film about the first, and now remote, Lebanon war: We already sent one of those, “Beaufort,” to the Oscar competition. And it’s even more convenient to focus specifically on Sabra and Chatila, the Beirut refugee camps.

Even way back, after the huge protest against the massacre perpetrated in those camps, there was always the declaration that, despite everything - including the green light given to our lackey, the Phalange, to execute the slaughter, and the fact that it all took place in Israeli-occupied territory - the cruel and brutal hands that shed blood are not our hands. Let us lift our voices in protest against all the savage Bashir-types we have known. And yes, a little against ourselves, too, for shutting our eyes, perhaps even showing encouragement. But no: That blood, that’s not us. It’s them, not us.

We have not yet made a movie about the other blood, which we have spilled and continue to allow to flow, from Jenin to Rafah - certainly not a movie that will get to the Oscars. And not by chance.

In “Waltz with Bashir” the soldiers of the world’s most moral army sing out something like: “Lebanon, good morning. May you know no more grief. Let your dreams come true, your nightmares evaporate, your whole life be a blessing.”

Nice, right? What other army has a song like this, and in the middle of a war, yet? Afterward they go on to sing that Lebanon is the “love of my life, the short life.” And then the tank, from inside of which this lofty and enlightened singing emanates, crushes a car for starters, turning it into a smashed tin can, then pounds a residential building, threatening to topple it. That’s how we are. Singing and wrecking. Where else will you find sensitive soldiers like these? It would really be preferable for them to shout with hoarse voices: Death to the Arabs!

I saw the “Waltz” twice. The first time was in a movie theater, and I was bowled over by the artistry. What style, what talent. The illustrations are perfect, the voices are authentic, the music adds so much. Even Ron Ben Yishai’s half-missing finger is accurate. No detail is missed, no nuance blurred. All the heroes are heroes, superbly stylish, like Folman himself: articulate, trendy, up-to-date, left-wingers - so sensitive and intelligent.

Then I watched it again, at home, a few weeks later. This time I listened to the dialogue and grasped the message that emerges from behind the talent. I became more outraged from one minute to the next. This is an extraordinarily infuriating film precisely because it is done with so much talent. Art has been recruited here for an operation of deceit. The war has been painted with soft, caressing colors - as in comic books, you know. Even the blood is amazingly aesthetic, and suffering is not really suffering when it is drawn in lines. The soundtrack plays in the background, behind the drinks and the joints and the bars. The war’s fomenters were mobilized for active service of self-astonishment and self-torment.

Boaz is devastated at having shot 26 stray dogs, and he remembers each of them. Now he is looking for “a therapist, a shrink, shiatsu, something.” Poor Boaz. And poor Folman, too: He is devilishly unable to remember what happened during the massacre. “Movies are also psychotherapy” - that’s the bit of free advice he gets. Sabra and Chatila? “To tell you the truth? It’s not in my system.” All in such up-to-the-minute Hebrew you could cry. After the actual encounter with Boaz in 2006, 24 years later, the “flash” arrives, the great flash that engendered the great movie.

One fellow comes to the war on the Love Boat, another flees it by swimming away. One sprinkles patchouli on himself, another eats a Spam omelet. The filmmaker-hero of “Waltz” remembers that summer with great sadness: It was exactly then that Yaeli dumped him. Between one thing and the other, they killed and destroyed indiscriminately. The commander watches porn videos in a Beirut villa, and even Ben Yishai has a place in Ba’abda, where one evening he downs half a glass of whiskey and phones Arik Sharon at the ranch and tells him about the massacre. And no one asks who these looted and plundered apartments belong to, damn it, or where their owners are and what our forces are doing in them in the first place. That is not part of the nightmare.

What’s left is hallucination, a sea of fears, the hero confesses on the way to his therapist, who is quick to calm him and explains that the hero’s interest in the massacre at the camps derives from a different massacre: from the camps from which his parents came. Bingo! How could we have missed it? It’s not us at all, it’s the Nazis, may their name and memory be obliterated. It’s because of them that we are the way we are. “You have been cast in the role of the Nazi against your will,” a different therapist says reassuringly, as though evoking Golda Meir’s remark that we will never forgive the Arabs for making us what we are. What we are? The therapist says that we shone the lights, but “did not perpetrate the massacre.” What a relief. Our clean hands are not part of the dirty work, no way.

And besides that, it wasn’t us at all: How pleasant to see the cruelty of the other. The amputated limbs that the Phalange, may their name be obliterated, stuff into the formaldehyde bottles; the executions they perpetrate; the symbols they slash into the bodies of their victims. Look at them and look at us: We never do things like that.

When Ben Yishai enters the Beirut camps, he recalls scenes of the Warsaw ghetto. Suddenly he sees through the rubble a small hand and a curly-haired head, just like that of his daughter. “Stop the shooting, everybody go home,” the commander, Amos, calls out through a megaphone in English. The massacre comes to an abrupt end. Cut.

Then, suddenly, the illustrations give way to the real shots of the horror of the women keening amid the ruins and the bodies. For the first time in the movie, we not only see real footage, but also the real victims. Not the ones who need a shrink and a drink to get over their experience, but those who remain bereaved for all time, homeless, limbless and crippled. No drink and no shrink can help them. And that is the first (and last) moment of truth and pain in “Waltz with Bashir.”

Sure-fire Oscar winner up-ended by the industry’s “long-standing joke”,

By Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX) -
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Waltz With Bashir [Theatrical Release] (Theatrical Release)

I’m compelled to write this review after watching the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Foreign Film selectors botch yet another award. David Ansen wrote in Newsweek last year about how the selection committee’s decision-making, umm, ‘process’ is the industry’s “long-standing joke.” The right films don’t even get nominated (Ansen’s article centered on the egregious omissions last year of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Band’s Visit). And the ultimate winner is often the ultimate head-scratcher: faced this year with two sure-fire classics - this film and the equally worthy French offering The Class (Entre les murs) [Theatrical Release] - the committee chose instead the little-known (and almost completely unseen) Japanese nominee Departures [Theatrical Release]. With all due respect to those filmmakers, you could hear the sense of bewilderment in the hall as the dazed winners (I suspect even they were dumbfounded) made their way to the stage. I’m sure that bewilderment was mixed with murmurs from an audience of insiders - something along the lines of “unbelievable, they’ve blown it again.”

A shame because this film is among the best you’ll ever see - it’s writer/director Ari Folman’s attempts to deal with his repressed memories of his role in the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres during the 1982 Lebanon War. Folman’s innovative use of animation allows him to re-stage the memories of his fellow soldiers. At the film’s end, Folman’s role (or at least his proximity to the events) is revealed and animation segues into real-life footage of what transpired in the camps.

The Golden Globe committee - with a far more firmer grasp on common sense than the Academy - handed ‘Waltz’ its award for the best foreign language film of 2008.

Ansen’s article from last year reveals the Academy’s “attempt to reform a misbegotten system,” and concludes that “Mark Johnson, chairman of the committee, has vowed further reforms. History suggests it’s going to be an uphill battle.”

Keep working at it, Mr. Johnson. This thing is still broken.
Search Waltz with Bashir [Blu-ray]: Ari Folman, Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon, Nili Feller, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli: Movies & TV from AmAzon

[asa]B001KVZ6A2[/asa]

DVD Review: Waltz with Bashir [Blu ray]: Ari Folman, Ron Ben Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon, Nili Feller, Gerhard Meixner, Roman Paul, Serge Lalou, Yael Nahlieli: Movies & TV sharebookmarx

Just Dance (Video Game) newly tagged "video"

Just Dance (Video Game)By UBI Soft

Buy new: $36.9918 used and new from $32.89 Customer Rating:

First tagged "video" by norma Segui Customer tags: wii(133), dance games(131)

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX5 10.2MP CMOS Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Zoom with SteadyShot Image Stabilization and 3.0 Inch Touch Screen LCD (Green) (Electronics) newly tagged "video"

Sony Cyber-shot DSC-TX5 10.2MP CMOS Digital Camera with 4x Wide Angle Zoom with SteadyShot Image Stabilization and 3.0 Inch Touch Screen LCD (Green) (Electronics)By Sony

Buy new: $329.00 Customer Rating

2010 Tachyon XC Micro Helmet Camera (Electronics) newly tagged "video"