April 30, 2010, - 7:34 pm
Weekend Box Office: Skip This “Nightmare” (On Elm Street); “Littlest Traitor” on Israel
Nothing that spectacular at the movies, but at least there’s finally something that’s relatively, slightly pro-Israel.
* “A Nightmare on Elm Street“: Some movies should never get remade, and this horror movie is one of them. The 1984 Wes Craven original was fine, it was campy, and it even had Johnny Depp swallowed up by a bed. The new one is not only not an improvement on the old one, but it’s a bloody, four-letter-word filled, sadistic waste of time. It isn’t funny or humorous, not campy, and not scary at all. You know exactly what’s going to happen pretty much the whole time. It’s that predictable. Not to mention stupid.
Plus, it stars David Cassidy’s daughter, Katie, the pretty girl who creepy daddy dearest said he would enjoy watching in a lesbian scene. Fortunately, he doesn’t have that luck here. It’s the same story as the original, but it stars the far substandard Jackie Earle Haley as “Freddy Krueger,” in place of actor Robert Englund. High school friends begin being haunted in their dreams with nightmares starring a creepy burn victim. Soon, some of them die, and others who learn of this desperately try to stay awake so that the burn victim, Freddy Krueger, doesn’t kill them. If you die in your nightmares at the hands of Freddy, you’re dead in real life. Why is Freddy haunting them? Too gratuitously violent and pointlessly graphic, not to mention stupid, for me to care.
Absolutely awful. Rent the original, instead.
TWO-AND-A-HALF MARXES
* “The Little Traitor“: This Israeli-produced film is unique in one aspect among several others. It’s actually relatively pro-Israel, compared to the dreck that’s usually produced by far-left Israeli filmmakers and funded by the Israeli government so HAMAS and Bin Laden don’t have to. The movie is mostly in English with a few Hebrew parts containing subtitles. It features classic actor, Theodore Bikel, in a small role.
“Relative” is the operant word here. The movie is based on a novel by Israeli leftist, Amos Oz. It follows a young boy (well acted by cute, young Israeli, Ido Port) and his Holocaust-survivor Polish immigrant family in pre-Israel Palestine, just before the Jewish State becomes a reality and officially recognized by the international community.
The boy, “Proffy,” and his friends plot to ambush and inconvenience British soldiers who are occupying Palestine and harassing Jewish residents, including turning Holocaust survivors away. Proffy befriends a British soldier (Alfred Molina), who catches him when a nightly curfew begins. The movie also shows Proffy’s parents’ involvement with the Jewish underground, who worked to save Jews and help establish statehood for Israel. Because of his family’s involvement with this, Proffy comes under suspicion for being a traitor when his friendship with a Bible-loving British soldier is discovered.
The movie is very light on this and doesn’t show the British violence against the Jews, which was severe. Nor does it show the British siding with the Muslim Arabs in the area, which was also extreme. Instead, it shows Proffy and the Jews at peace with the Muslim Arabs. That wasn’t the case, as Muslim Arabs hated the Jews then as they do now, fomenting murderous pogroms against them.
And the movie is light on story development. It really isn’t very touching, not even the scenes showing Israel becoming a State or even a scene of a Jew killed by the British for little reason. The only touching part is at the end. Still, because there are so few movies that are relatively pro-Israel or even centrist on the issue, I give this a better rating than I normally might.
TWO REAGANS
Tags: 1948, 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Alfred Malina, Amos Oz, Arabs, British, Freddy Krueger, Haganah, Ido Port, Irgun, Israel, Israeli, Israeli film, Jackie Earle Haley, Katie Cassidy, Movie Reviews, Muslims, Nightmare on Elm Street, Palestine, Palestinians, pro-Israel, relatively pro-Israel, remake, Robert Englund, Statehood, The Little Traitor, Theodore Bikel, Wes Craven
Deb – ….nice to see Doctor Octopus back in the good movie game….
Nick Fury on April 30, 2010 at 11:29 pm