Esther Kustanowitz: November 2009 Archives

Attention, hotels...if you've got a "Sir Ian McKellen" on your list of incoming guests, you should probably remove the Bible from the bedside table drawer in his room and read this recent Q&A with Details magazine (quoted on PopEater):

"The openly gay 'Lord of the Rings' star admits to a habit of tearing out the Bible passage that condemns homosexuality -- ("Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." - Leviticus 18:22) -- every time he finds one in his hotel room.[...] "I'm not proudly defacing the book," he asserts, "but it's a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible.

McKellen says his actions have inspired others to do the same. "I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom."
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McKellen, who remained closeted for much of his career, also speaks candidly of the scars he suffered of having to hide who he was in order to succeed in his chosen field. "Acting was a means to publicly display my emotions in a way that was illegal for me to do as a private person. [...] It was horrible living this secret life. You could feel a little bit what it was like to be a Jew in central Europe during a certain period. It was horrible."

In the X-Men movies, McKellen played Magneto, whose backstory including discovering his mutation as a Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp and surviving the Holocaust; although his role is primarily that of villain, Magneto's actions "are driven by the purpose of protecting the mutant race from suffering a similar fate."

(Hat tip to Smoking Lizard Soapbox, who penned this "Open Letter to Sir Ian McKellen," wherein he disagreed with McKellen's choice, noting, among other points that hotels "provide both Bibles and porn because they don't get to judge their guests.")

[Image from WorldNetDaily, but jeers to them for using the word "hijack" when they meant copyright infringement.]

You know what the Middle East needs? More comedy! (Or first, some comedy. And then, more comedy!)

Daily Variety broke the news that MTV Networks and Abu Dhabi's Twofour54 signed a deal to create Comedy Central Studios Arabia:

The new company, which will be based in Abu Dhabi, will develop and produce comedy content in Arabic for broadcast and distribution across the Middle East and North Africa. While existing Comedy Central formats are likely to be adapted for the Arab market, the focus will also be on developing new Arabic comedy talent across multi-platforms, including standup, as well as short- and long-form programming. [...]

"I found early on that Arabs are funny and inherently amusing," said Twofour54 chief exec Tony Orsten. "There is a large appetite for comedy content in this region. We want to create a production industry based on it and find opportunities to find new talent."

Here on Beliefnet, I've written before about Jewish themes in popular culture, including "Family Guy," about Sarah Silverman's bid to sell the Vatican to cure hunger, and reviewed books and films about the Holocaust (and that was all last month). But I had no idea that those themes would come together, thanks to "Family Guy Presents: Alex and Seth's Almost-Live Comedy Show."

After an animated sketch about self-gratification, "Family Guy" creator Seth MacFarlane decides that it's a good idea to "inject a certain amount of heart" into the program, and sings a song from "one of his favorite movies." The song happens to be "Edelweiss," from "The Sound of Music" - this leads co-star Alex Borstein to object, noting that the Austrian people were not very kind to her family during World War Two. After some push-pull between the two - including MacFarlane's dismissal that "this is not the place to bring out your Hebrew baggage" - Borstein makes a last stand, declaring that her family barely escaped the Nazis, she wasn't going to stand back and say nothing. Finally, MacFarlane caps his argument with: "If none of that ever happened, how many female Jewish comedians would you be competing with in Hollywood? Right now, it's just you and Sarah Silverman." Borstein waits a beat, and then joins him in song.

View it for yourself here, and continue after the jump for some discussion.

I read lots of books as a child, and the protagonists - Laura Ingalls Wilder, Dorothy Gale, Scarlett O'Hara and countless others - still live in my mind, heart and imagination. But one heroine's story continues to echo through my work as a writer, and my heritage as a Jewish woman. I've written about her and been inspired by her countless times (including, most recently, here at Beliefnet). Anne Frank lives, not just in my heart, but in the collective of humanity. The irony of course is that she lives, because she died. And because she died - and because a fissure in humanity was to blame for her death - we are compelled to revisit Anne's attic, in print, and on film.

The latest trip back to the secret annex is the critically acclaimed BBC miniseries, now being released in two different editions: the movie edition and the miniseries edition. While the elements of the story and the characters are the same, there are small touches that show you a different side to living in the annex.

Gone is whatever gloss there might have been on the experience of living as a self-contained society above Otto Frank's business in Amsterdam; in this version, you see the moments that the original film and Broadway show deemed unfit for the world to see, because they depicted Anne as an awkward teen going through puberty. Anne's narrative in this version - the only film version approved by the Anne Frank Fonds - is more authentic, more unexpurgated, and better depicts the awkward struggles of a girl becoming a woman under extreme circumstances. Particularly striking is the tense relationship between Anne and her mother, and the long moments that the camera spends capturing the awkwardness of new arrival Mr. Dussel as Anne's new roommate. Those two relationships in particular illustrate Anne's alienation - even within the close quarters, she really feels alone..

This version is different than others you've seen, and is extremely well-done - Ellie Kendrick is, in particular, an eerie doppelganger of the girl we've come to know through her diary. But the film battles the perennial challenge of films about the Holocaust in general, and Anne Frank, specifically: it's hard to watch, because no matter how the script's words change, the ending is always, painfully, the same.

"The Diary of Anne Frank - Movie Edition" and "The Diary of Anne Frank - BBC Mini Series Edition" are now both available on DVD from Well Go USA Inc.