Kadosh
|
List Price: Our Price: $16.14 You Save: $13.81 (46%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $3.30 (click here) Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Kadosh
Movie Review: It rings a false and unhappy note.
Summary: 2 Stars
I do not know any ultra-orthodox Jews (I'm not even Jewish, but Hindu) but this portrayal rings false to a neutral observer. It is easy for secular minded types, who are unacquainted with deeply pious or religious societies to end up believing that life within them is repressed, unhappy in tone, and generally unfulfilling in any authentic way.
Do Haredi not smile in their weddings? Are no families, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins who populate everyday life and bring laughter, anger, gossip and chatter and noise? Is life so solitary and non-communal in such a closed society? What's the big deal with religious rituals, anyway? We all have our own rituals, secular or otherwise, from saying "good morning" to strangers to hitting the gym during the lunch hour, or wearing a suit to work.
It seems the movie maker has an axe to grind. Starting from a liberal viewpoint, he ends up with the most slanted, intolerant portrait possible of a pious, ritualistic community, dehumanizing them and thus forgetting liberal humanism's most basic attitudes which are a) a tolerance for other people and their customs, and b) an understanding that people are simply people, no matter what rituals they may observe or whatever forms their societies may take.
Movie Review: Actors try, but director's simpleminded attack on Orthodox
Summary: 2 Stars
The DVD interviews are extremely revealing. The actors (themselves secular Israelis) love the challenge of playing fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox Jews and manage to convey a true pathos for the characters and their lives. Their attempt to find beauty and integrity in the characters, and their sympathetic portrayals, are admirable but paradoxical, because the script is stacked against this attempt. The writer/director makes clear in his dvd interview: Orthodox Judaism and the Talmud are, according to him, clearly out to debase women. He chooses the most anti-woman quotations from the Talmud (certainly using a search engine) and composes a plot and shallow fundamentalists to mouthe the lines. In the interview, he claims all monotheistic religions are by nature anti-woman [unlike the Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Egyptians,... ???] and that fundamentalists are people too shallow "to experience spirituality in the world without ritual" as he does. He admits making the film as an attack on the religious right in Israel.In sum, the actors' sensitive portrayals make the first half of the film truly interesting, but the second half is all contrived preachiness, ruining what could have been a balanced critique and portrayal of women in this culture.
Movie Review: A liberal attack against religious Israel
Summary: 2 Stars
Kadosh shows a deceitful view of religious Israel and serves its director's liberal agenda. Free market's ideology is trying to spread an individualist lifestyle through the world, and when it finds a group of individuals socially oriented who don't say amen to liberal gibberish, free market's forces try to destroy them. This film is part of that war.
Malka says to Rivka, "Come with me! There is another world out there. It's enormous. Our world is not the only one." This is very interesting, what Malka is really saying to Rivka is, "Come with me and let's join the corporate globalized individualist world." Does someone has told Malka about divorce rates, low incomings, 12 hours working days, infidelity, loneliness, Prozac...?
Please, don't think that Kadosh is a faithful presentation of Jewish religious life, it's not. If you want to watch something better, you could try _A Stranger Among Us_ by Sidney Lumet (featuring Melanie Griffith). You can also read some good books as _The Committed Life_ or _The Committed Marriage_ by Esther Jungreis.
Movie Review: Inaccurate but...
Summary: 2 Stars
I grew up in modern orthodox judaism in England and studied at an ultraorthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem close to where the movie was set, have ultraorthodox relatives etc. but am now secular myself. A lot of the ritual aspects of the movie especially the scenes in the synagogue/yeshiva were inaccurate. I couldn't determine if they were Sephardi (Middle Eastern Jews) or Ashkenazi (European Jews) - some bizarre mix in the middle - Meah She'arim is a primarily Ashkenazi neighborhood. The wedding was the most bizarre... . Perhaps the producers were short of money to hire extras. The whole feel was very unrealistic as a result.
To an outsider a lot of the context wouldn't be clear as can be seen from some of the other commentaries here. The overall themes though if more contextualized aren't totally out of place at all, though I know it is an anti-Orthodox movie, but these are important issues. However, the end result is really messed up and detracts from getting the message across.
Movie Review: A Little Bit Of Truth and A Whole Lotta Lies
Summary: 2 Stars
This movie shows the beauty of some things Jewish and at the same time shows those beautiful things as sad repulsive. In the scene of the wedding the women seems to be taken away from her festivities. In reality the woman and the man each celebrate with their friends (so the men and women do not mix.) In the film, she looks as if she is done and on her way home. I have yet to be at an orthodox wedding that was like that.
Also, there are some truths in this movie. But the vast majority of the truth has been clouded by misuse of context. I add this movie to others like Price Above Rubies for showing the most blatent damaging look at orthodox people with the worst amount of personal prejudice thrown in for effect.