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Director’s Mom Kvells Over Casting Coup
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More in The ShmoozeHelena Bonham-Carter saved the day for Paul Weiland, who is the director of “Sixty Six,” a film inspired by Weiland’s own 1966 bar mitzvah in England.
At a recent preview screening at the JCC in Manhattan, the 55-year-old Brit revealed his mother’s reservations about the comedy: “I only really got away with making this movie because it’s [only] slightly negative towards her…. But the minute I said that Helena Bonham-Carter was playing her, she said: ‘Oh, marvelous, fine! Make the movie!’”
The audience roared as Weiland continued: “When [my family] saw the film, they were highly delighted with it, and suddenly my mom became kind of a starlet overnight, and all her friends were…. Well, not all her friends — she’s still not talking to some of the friends that didn’t tell her how marvelous the film was, of course, which I think is the next movie. ‘Yeah, what, you didn’t like my son’s movie?’”
Weiland, who also directed the 2008 comedy “Made of Honor,” considers himself a cultural Jew. His Orthodox bar mitzvah coincided with the one and only time that England won the World Cup in soccer.
“Sixty Six” was released in 2006 in England, where, Weiland said, “it started to get a cult status with Jewish audiences.” The film is currently being shown in New York, Los Angeles and Florida. It opens on August 15 in Portland, Ore., and August 22 in Chicago and Boston.
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"sixty-six" is one of the best films on the strains and conflicts between contemporary orthodox/traditional vs. 'regular'(read assimilated) jewish life i've seen; second to it is "go for zucker" from germany.
every time it is on cable here in sydney, i watch it and force my husband (who also had kind of that minhag anglia upbringing)to watch it again; it almost functions like therapy for him.
it is a sweet movie and a bitter one at the same time -- the dichotomy of the two brothers, one perfect, the other a nebbish, one who pays his taxes while the other hides all his takings in cash in a box, parents who invest all their pride in a noisy older brother, leaving nothing for their quiet youngest -- is every jewish family dysfunctional seemingly beyond repair?
helena bonham-carter so breaks the stereotype of the frumpy jewish mother:one could only wish that all the jewish mothers of that era looked that good.
i hope mr. weiland continues to make such wonderful, sweetly honest, funny and hopeful movies. we all need them. and keep ms. bonham-carter cast as every jewish mother...she's a superb antidote to the legacy of portnoy.
Let's see if I've got this right: Jews are so diabolically clever that we control the movie industry —among other things— and use it for our Zionist propaganda. Yet somehow we missed that the 2001 remake of The Planet of the Apes was a thin "allegory of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict"!? Even when the favorite slur of a certain type of anti-Semite is that Jews are "descendants of apes and pigs"!? I suppose the name "Ari" should've tipped us off.
I guess Joachim Martillo's next revelation for FORWARD readers is that there is an organized group of "Ethnic Ashkenazim Against Zionist Israel" [other than Satmar and Neturei Karta] and that he is a legitimate representative of it!
The URL is eaazi.blogspot.com/2008/08/planet-of-zionist-apes.html
Helena Bonham-Carter is noteworthy for her leading role as Ari in the remake of The Planet of the Apes, which as an allegory of the conflict over Palestine is the only Palestinian sympathetic big-budget Hollywood film.
See Planet of the Zionist Apes.
The hyperlinked article neglects to mention the dialogue about curfews, which the Apes imposed on humans and which could almost have been taken from news reports about IDF-imposed curfews on Palestinians.