BART Cop Smashes Drunk Dude's Head Through Glass
Asm. Tom Ammiano On Glass Breaking BART Cop
Parents Petition Caltrain to Reduce Train Speed In Palo Alto
Don't Dump Unwanted Stuff On City Sidewalks
Gavin Newsom's Mariah Carey-like Interview Demand
No, not these Chosen Ones (white Christian gospel choir) or these (psychic powers): this Chosen Ones is a documentary about the Jewish music scene in New York by a German filmmaker/tourist, which had its world premiere at the Castro for the SFJFF on Monday night.
Sigh -- what can we say here? Well, because we like to keep it positive, here's the good things about the movie: it was interesting seeing a diverse group of Jewish musicians in Manhattan, like the Hasidic African-American rapper Y-Love (YouTube clip above) to Orthodox rabbi and anti-folker Rav Shmuel. Um, and director Wendla Nolle seemed like a nice person who had a nice time in New York.
We feel sufficiently bad about going negative about the rest of the movie that we've moved it to after the jump.
The rest of the movie, though? Tooth-grindingly frustrating! Nolle's complete lack of any background in the subject drove us CRAZY. Why doesn't Nolle seem to know anything about Judaism or Jewish history if she's so interested in learning how faith informs popular music (as she repeated on the voiceover fifty bazillion times)? For instance, she seems startled to hear that a member of a Jewish acoustic-folk band she interviews doesn't buy German products. What could they possibly have against Germans?
And who were these guys? What did any of these musicians have in common besides being Jewish? Why didn't she translate any of the Hebrew lyrics? Why even make this movie if no one had anything interesting to say about their faith and music (beyond "I live in two worlds")? And why didn't she tell anyone any of the names of any of the bands?
We really hate to be negative without adding anything positive to the dialogue, but -- yeah, The Chosen Ones was kind of a frustrating moviegoing experience for us. Y-Love and Rav Shmuel seemed like nice guys, though, as did the secular Israeli musician whose name we never caught. And we're optimistic that Nolle's going to grow and mature as a filmmaker for her next projects too!
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
ugh. maybe if the jewish film festival didn't show films on TISHA B'AV, a mourning day, i could have seen this.
y-love, by the way, is amazing indeed and has a bright future. he has come a long way since these clips and is definitely, definitely worth catching live.