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Everything is Illuminated

19 years ago
12 Comments
by ck
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everything is illuminatedComing soon to a theatre near you!
By soon I mean it’s going to open on September 16th. Starring Elijah Wood, Everything is Illuminated is based on the critically-acclaimed and best selling novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. The movie (according to the Warner Bros. press kit)

…tells the story of a young man’s quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather in a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map by the Nazi invasion. What starts out as a journey to piece together one family’s story under the most absurd circumstances turns into a surprisingly meaningful journey with a powerful series of revelations — the importance of remembrance, the perilous nature of secrets, the legacy of the Holocaust, the meaning of friendship and, most importantly, love.

Hopefully the screen adaptation won’t suck. But now, those less literate amongst you can see the film and pretend to have read the book when engaged in witty conversation with people that read. Make it a point to kvetch about how the movie completely failed to capture Foer’s charming word play sprinkled throughout the novel. Praise the metafictional angle, order a double espresso and pat yourself on the back for being such a smarty pants.

You can visit the official site here and check out the trailer here.

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ck

Founder and Publisher of Jewlicious, David Abitbol lives in Jerusalem with his wife, newborn daughter and toddler son. Blogging as "ck" he's been blocked on twitter by the right and the left, so he's doing something right.

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12 Comments

  • i read the book ,it did not make any sense,it jumps to one thing to another, i could not follow the storyline!
    it seems that the trailer is appealing.

  • From the book:

    Touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing…memory. While Gentiles experience and process the world through the traditional senses, and use memory only as a second-order means of interpreting events, for Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to the other prinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from strokiung his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abhaham tested the knife point to be sure Issac would feel no pain – that the Jew was able to know why it hurts.

    When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?

    How do you film that?

  • Writer too? I probably would have known that if I had received a press kit.

    He’s a classic surly overachiever, who’s so in his own head that he can’t even be bothered to clap for singers at karaoke. Jus’ sayin’.

  • Liev Schreiber didn’t just direct. He ALSO wrote the screenplay (!!) Sheesh, friggin showoff.

  • this better be good. that’s all i have to say. the book is incomparable to anything i’ve read lately. it better be damn good.

  • Reminds me of an evocative passage in The Lovely Bones. I’ll transcribe it:

    I loved the way the burned-out flashcubes of the Kodak Instamatic marked a moment that had passed, one that now be gone forever except for a picture. When they were spent, I took the cubed four-corner flashbulbs and passed them from hand to hand until they cooled. The broken filaments of the flash would turn a molten marble blue or sometimes smoke the thin glass black. I had rescued the moment by using my camera and in that way had found a way to stop time and hold it. No one could take that image away from me because I owned it.

  • Wow. I can’t wait to see this. Because I actually HAVE read the book.

    I love that in the trailer, Jonathan says he collects stuff . . . family stuff . . . because he’s afraid otherwise he’ll forget. Isn’t that what Jews DO?

  • dang — shcreiber directed this while simultaneously leading glengarry glen ross on broadway for the last 4 months? double dang! jewboy gets mad props! (even if his movie winds up sucking!)

  • I so loved this book. I rarely read fiction but this one somehow made it next to A Passion for Truth by Heschel as books that have helped shaped my life. I think I just read it at the right (or wrong) time, cause it gave me a whole complex about whether you can be happy and honest at the same time, and made me see the hilariousness behind the absurdity of shtetl judaism in a whole new way.
    Love Liev Schreiber, but i’m a little terrified to see the film.

  • Plus, after you manufacture yourself smart Alex many girls will want to be carnal with you when they see you are a very premium person.

  • You got a press kit? Jeez, what does a girl have to do to get noticed by the Hollywood press corps/media machine?

    Seriously, though–the movie will inevitably fail to capture the unique flavor of the book. But Liev Schreiber’s at the directorial helm, and we NY Jewesses often have Liev on the lev, so the film should do okay here…