San Diego Jewish Film Festival offers 51 movies from 14 countries
February 6th, 2010 by Scott Marks
“A Matter of Size” is one of the hefty offerings at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of Menemsha Films)
San Diego’s longest-running film festival turns 20 this year. And what better way to celebrate than by showing more movies than ever before?
Slated for February 10-21, the San Diego Jewish Film Festival (SDJFF) promises films from 14 different countries. The combined number of shorts, documentaries and features totals an impressive 51.
“We started with four films,” Joyce Axelrod, the fest’s founder and former chairperson, laughingly recalls. “Even after the festival was well underway (co-founder) Lynette Allen and I never showed more than twenty or thirty films.”
It began as a modest series of film screenings held in a gymnasium and curated by Axelrod and Allen. At the time, there were only a handful of Jewish film festivals sprinkled across the country. If Axelrod’s tabulations are correct, there are currently 81 Jewish festivals in the U.S. and 130 worldwide.
San Diego’s fest found an early home at La Jolla’s Sherwood Auditorium in the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. For the past several years, SDJFF’s flagship theater has been the AMC La Jolla 12.
This year’s venues also include the UltraStar Mission Valley Cinemas at Hazard Center and UltraStar Poway Creekside Plaza 10, the David & Dorothea Garfield Theatre at the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center, and on the campus of San Diego State University at the “Not Quite Kosher Film Festival.”
For 13 years, running the festival was Axelrod’s all-consuming passion. Seven years ago, she handed the reigns over to Judy Friedel, who now acts as festival chairperson. Joyce still maintains a spot on the festival lineup. The Joyce Forum has become one of SDJFF’s most popular components.
It began as a birthday gift from her husband, Joe Fish.
Joyce Axelrod
“Joe made a gift to the Center for Jewish Culture, “Axelrod remembers. “He and (former festival director) Jacqueline Siegel knew of my interest in emerging filmmakers. They decided to establish the Joyce Forum, a festival-within-the-festival to show films created by budding talent. It was also a way for the industry to recognize them as up-and-coming filmmakers.”
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Tags: A Matter of Size, Joe Fish, Joyce Axelrod, Joyce Forum, Judy Friedel, Lawrence Family JCC, Lynette Allen, Nicole Opper, Not Quite Kosher Film Festival, Off and Running, San Diego film festivals, San Diego Jewish Film Festival, San Diego State University, Sandra Kraus, SDJFF, SDNN, Sherwood Auditorium, Sherwood Auditorium Museum of Contemporary Art San Dieg, Song of Hannah, sumo wrestling, UltraStar Mission Valley CinemasShare: 
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Review: FROM PARIS WITH LOVE / Pierre Morel (2010)
February 5th, 2010 by Scott Marks
John Travolta, Melissa Mars and Jonathan Rhys Meyers
From Paris With Love (2010)
Directed by Pierre Morel
Written by Adi Hasak from a story by Luc Besson
Starring: Jonathan Rhys Meyers, John Travolta, Kasia Smutniak and Melissa Mars
Photographed by Michel Abramowicz in 
Running Time: 92 minutes
Rating: 
The 2009 movie season started with a bang. Pierre Morel’s “Taken” was last year’s most electrifying action thrill ride. With only two films to his credit (“District B13” and “Taken”), Morel has already established himself as a major action director. I had every reason to enter “From Paris with Love” with high expectations.
Lightning did not strike thrice.
It’s one thing for a film not to live up to one’s expectations and another to be bored silly by it. It takes what seems forever for what little quality action there is to ignite. Will Travolta ever show his face and when he does will the movie start to finally start to hum?
He does, but it doesn’t. Both of Morel’s previous hits open on action. “From Russia With Love” crawls to a start with a solid reel of exposition and backstory involving James Reece (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) and his fiancé Caroline (Kasia Smutniak).
James leads a double life. By day he serves his country as a personal aide to the U.S. Ambassador in France. At night he moonlights as a low level CIA operative nursing a burning desire to make it to the big leagues. Caroline is hip to both jobs and appears to be cool with it. Too cool. For an action thriller they sure do expend a lot of time hammering home the lovey-dovey angle.
If you can’t see the ending to this one coming than you’re blindfolded and seated in another theater.
James is assigned a partner and when Charlie Wax (Travolta) does finally arrive about one reel into the proceedings, it’s only under the silliest of circumstances. He’s being detained at the airport unable to get to his favorite brand of energy drink past customs. Never mind a suspicious suitcase containing new age beverages. Any airport X-ray technician would have spotted the individual parts of a makeshift gun concealed in every can. Travolta needed a big, scenery chewing introduction and this is the best the screenwriter could come up with.
Travolta, looking dangerously close to Ming the Merciless, decides his first night in Paris will be spent shooting up a Chinese restaurant. Cocaine raining down from the ceiling through bullet holes from the upstairs supply house indicates a stylistic sensibility at work. When Wax instructs James to cart around a vase filled with the powder, the terribly unfunny running gag that ensues isn’t worth the momentary visual flair.
Wax’s flamboyant style of maiming and murdering does yield at least one good scene. Before ascending a spiral staircase, Wax instructs James to follow several paces behind. Gunshots echo from above as James watches body after body plummet past.
“District B13’s” Cyril Raffaelli and David Belle perform parkour stunts that find them careening off walls like golf balls in a clothes dryer. Then 56-year old Liam Neeson did some of his own action work in “Taken,” but Travolta is strictly from the Steven Seagal school. Watch the ultra-slow motion camera moves and unnecessary edits when JT talkes on an Asian street gang. The guy can barely lift his leg let alone kickbox.
Without giving too much more away, the simple plot and even simpler treatment of terrorism should help to make this #1 at the box office.
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This review originally appeared in the San Diego Uptown News.
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