Shooting Midnight Cowboy Movie Cover and pictures of Moment Zoominar speakers.
20 Apr
Arts & Culture, Latest, Zoominars

The Making of Midnight Cowboy with Journalist Glenn Frankel and Film Historian Rebecca Prime

In an era when a new wave of movies pushed the boundaries of mainstream filmmaking, Midnight Cowboy stands out as the riskiest, most unconventional, and most successful of them all. Glenn Frankel’s new book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic, explores the making of the only X-rated film to win a Best Picture Oscar and offers a window onto the creative ferment and social unrest that gripped New York and America in the 1960s: the rise of gay liberation, the treatment of sexual themes in popular culture, and the role of Jewish artists such as director John Schlesinger and star Dustin Hoffman. Glenn, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, in conversation with film historian and scholar Rebecca Prime, managing editor of Film Quarterly.

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23 Jul
Arts & Culture, Film, Latest

Palm Springs: Build Your Own Palace in Time

Repetition mixed with monotony is not usually high up on Hollywood’s list of project themes, which is why Hulu’s Palm Springs was such a delightful surprise. The film stars Andy Samberg (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Cristin Milioti (How I Met Your Mother) as two apathetic California wedding guests who get stuck in a Groundhog Day-like time loop, forcing them to relive the couple’s special day over and over again. For a film that was shot in pre-coronavirus times, Palm Springs is surprisingly relevant.

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07 Mar
Culture

People of the Jungle Book

Robert Sherman, half of the brotherly duo that wrote songs for Disney movies like "Mary Poppins," "The Jungle Book," "The Sword in the Stone" among many others, died Tuesday at age 86. Sherman's father was a Russian Jew who came to the United States with his family to escape the pogroms; below are three of our favorite "Jewish" Sherman songs. The feminist movement has, of course, long been populated by Jewish women. While the Banks family gives no indication of being Jewish, the matriarch's politics certainly fit right in. You know, Jews, comedy, the whole "have to laugh at millennia of oppression and persecution because otherwise it's just too sad" thing. The age-old assimilation question, this time with monkeys.      

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25 Jan
Culture

A Jew Named Oscar?

Oscar nominations were announced yesterday, and Jews and Jewish-themed movies, as you might expect, were among the honorees. Woody Allen (yes, he's Jewish!) racked up four nominations for "Midnight in Paris" (though nothing for Adrien Brody, whose version of Salvador Dali is the only way we want to imagine the artist); "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, is up for Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor; Steven Spielberg's "War Horse" got a nod for Best Picture, among other nominations (We sneaked into this movie for five minutes before "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" and, you know, it's "War Horse."); Jonah Hill is up for Best Supporting Actor (making up for the "Superbad" snub, natch); and in the Foreign Language category, office favorite "Footnote" from Israel (a Talmudic thriller? Yes,...

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