Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice
Sorted by date Results 26 - 43 of 43
(JTA)-The first thing Carl Reiner does every morning is pick up the paper and read the obituary section to check if he's named there. "If I'm not, I'll have my breakfast"-or so he says in the charming and appropriately titled HBO documentary "If You're Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast." Then the 95-year-old actor, writer and director, the creator of the "Dick Van Dyke Show"-"my greatest achievement," he tells JTA-goes to his computer to work on his latest project, a book. In fact, that's what he w...
(JTA)-Strong women are right in actor Jessica Chastain's wheelhouse. There's Maya, the fictional CIA agent in "Zero Dark Thirty," whose work led Seal Team Six to Osama bin Laden; Melissa Lewis, the heroic mission commander who refuses to abandon a teammate in "The Martian," and Elizabeth Sloan, the accept-no-prisoners Washington lobbyist who takes on the gun industry in "Miss Sloan." "I look for characters that challenge the status quo," Chastain, who snagged a Golden Globe for her work in "Zero...
(JTA)-Actor Hank Azaria is known for his portrayal of an array of characters-most notably voicing Moe, Chief Wiggum and Apu on "The Simpsons." While he may be best known for his work on the long-running animated classic, Azaria, of course, has had a successful career in TV and film, with roles as varied as journalist Michael Kelly in "Shattered Glass" to the title role in Showtime's "Huff" to voicing the villain Gargamel in "The Smurfs" movie. His friends call him "the freakish mimic." And...
(JTA)-Filmmaker Kahane Cooperman hasn't written an Oscars acceptance speech yet, but she likely will before the Academy Awards ceremony on Feb. 28. Not to jinx things or appear overconfident, Cooperman told JTA in a telephone interview, but "on the chance it happens, for fear of leaving someone out." Her film, "Joe's Violin," is up for an award for short documentary-a category typically ignored by viewers more interested in what Emma Stone is wearing. It's a 24-minute, five-handkerchief weeper;...
(JTA)-Josh Radnor is starring these days in Richard Greenberg's off-Broadway play "The Babylon Line." For the 42-year-old actor, it is the latest in a long and impressive list of credits. However, the odds are that no matter what else he accomplishes in life, for most people he will always be Ted Mosby, the man who spent nearly a decade telling his TV children-along with millions of viewers across the country-how he met their mother. The beloved sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" aired for nine seas...
NEW YORK (JTA)-Nick Kroll is serious, which is a tad unusual for a man who has largely made his living by being funny. But being funny for reporters isn't his job, he tells JTA in a telephone interview. "My job is just to answer your questions," Kroll said. "Trying to be funny is tricky. You end up saying things that look different in print. My goal is to produce content that's funny, not be funny in interviews." Kroll, of course, has been creating funny content for a dozen years, most famously...
(JTA)-Which is braver: Riding a motorcycle across the length of Africa, or taking on an adaptation of a Philip Roth novel for your first directing gig? For a second, actor Ewan McGregor is stumped by the question-but he quickly recovers. "I think this ['American Pastoral'] was more dangerous," he told JTA, chuckling. As part of his role as a UNICEF ambassador, in 2007 the leading man traveled 15,000 miles by motorcycle from Scotland through Europe and across Africa, all the way to Cape Town,...
(JTA)-In his new film, "Imperium," Daniel Radcliffe plays FBI agent Nate Foster, who goes undercover to take down skinheads planning to set off a dirty bomb. The film, which opens Friday, is taut and exciting. It is also a movie the former "Harry Potter" star doesn't want his 93-year-old Jewish grandmother to see. (More on that later.) "Imperium" is loosely based on the experiences of FBI agent Mike German, who spent 16 years with the bureau, a dozen undercover. German co-wrote the screenplay wi...
(JTA)-"Septembers of Shiraz" is a film about a prosperous Jewish family in Iran caught up in the aftermath of the 1979 revolution that overthrew the shah. It's based on Dalia Sofer's well-received 2007 novel of the same name, which used her own family's experiences as source material. When the film debuted last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, the reviews were uniformly negative. One critic called it "a disappointing misfire." (The movie officially opens a commercial run in New...
(JTA)-It's just before Rosh Hashanah in 2013, and New York City's mayoral campaign is heating up. Disgraced former congressman Anthony Weiner, who in a surprise move had thrown his hat in the ring a few months earlier, is doing one of those obligatory photo ops at a Jewish bakery in Brooklyn. All is going well. Weiner has picked up an order of cookies laced with honey-sweets for the New Year-and even insisted on paying full retail. As he is leaving the store, though, a man wearing a kippah...
(JTA)-"Rabin in his Own Words," which opened last Friday in New York, Los Angeles and South Florida, is more than a tribute to the two-time Israeli prime minister tragically gunned down in 1995. The aptly named cinematic autobiography, which uses archival footage going back to the statesman's childhood, is entirely narrated by Yitzhak Rabin himself. Filmmaker Erez Laufer, 53, designed it that way because, he tells JTA, "I got tired of hearing people analyzing him, people talking about him, both...
(JTA)-When the highly anticipated movie "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" opened nationally last Friday, several burning questions might finally be answered. Among them: Which superhero is tougher? Does Wonder Woman hold her own? And does actor Jesse Eisenberg, who often plays characters of a more sensitive sort, pull off a convincing Lex Luthor? Here are some hints from someone who caught an advance screening of the film-and signed an extraordinarily detailed non-disclosure agreement....
(JTA)-Avigail Alfatov eats her pizza upside down and has funny hiccups. Her favorite food is falafel and she makes her face shine by wiping it with green tea bags. How do we know this and, perhaps more important, why do we care? Well, Alfatov is the reigning Miss Israel and is the country's entry in the Miss Universe Pageant, which airs Dec. 20 on Fox. These are just a few of the fun facts listed on her contestant profile. She is also a national fencing champion, would love to meet Michael...
(JTA)-Writer and director Jill Soloway grew up in what she calls a "somewhat normalish, upper middle class Jewish household" in Chicago. Her mom was a public relations consultant (she worked for Mayor Jane Byrne) and her dad a psychiatrist. But she always sensed that "something was a little off," she tells JTA in a telephone interview. "Not much more than that. Just a little bit different. Nothing I could easily identify." What that "little bit" was became clear about five years ago, when her...
(JTA)-Danny Strong is probably most recognizable as being "that Jewish guy" on TV-he played eager adman wannabe Danny Siegel on "Mad Men" and the nerdy, perennial victim Jonathan Levinson on "Buffy: The Vampire Slayer." But, among those in the know, Strong may be best known as the "voice of black America," as one showrunner sarcastically quipped. He's the co-creator of the hip-hop-themed TV hit "Empire" and he also wrote the screenplay for Lee Daniels' "The Butler." "Empire" is centered on the...
(JTA)-Will lightning strike thrice? Who better to ask than Thunder? That would be Thunder Levin, the writer of the campy, over-the-top "Sharknado" movies-the latest of which, "Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No!," premieres on July 22. For those unfamiliar with the "Sharknado"oeuvre, the films center on a strange weather phenomenon: A hurricane that precipitates a tornado. Together they suck up live, hungry sharks that subsequently rain down on humanity. In a kind of Darwinian miracle, during those few...
(JTA)—To anyone who has read a rock-and-roll biography or caught an episode of VH1’s “Behind the Music,” it is a sadly familiar tale: An artist achieves great success only to self destruct. There’s something called the “27 Club,” made up of a surprisingly number of influential musicians who died at that young age. Among them are Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain and, as of July 2011: The English songstress Amy Winehouse. Winehouse is the subject of a powerful new documentary, “Amy,” which is both fascinating and painful to watch. She rel...
(JTA)-It wasn't so long ago that gay men were vilified by American society at large. Back in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic surfaced, priests railed against them, claiming the disease was God's revenge for sinful lifestyle choices. That, of course, has changed-mostly. While there are still regular examples of anti-gay sentiments (and violence), HIV/AIDS is no longer the scourge it once was. Most Americans now support same-sex marriage and the practice is now legal in most states. If there is...
