the believer review

As we read of the rapid rise of anti-Semitic incidents throughout the world, it may be helpful to ponder the psychic toll this news takes on Jews and intermarried families.

Do we internalize the hatred, discovering within ourselves the stereotypes others see in us? Do we become fearful, or do we respond with courage and strength?

A profoundly disturbing film, The Believer, written and directed by Henry Bean, an observant Jew, explores the emotional damage anti-Semitism has done to one brilliant, independent-minded Jew, Danny Balint.

Although the film was made before Sept. 11, well before the dramatic international upsurge in anti-Semitic incidents, its release--on May 17 in New York and Los Angeles--is timely.

The film begins with a quote from Catallus, "I love and I hate. Who can tell me why?"

We then observe a yeshiva (Jewish school), with young boys and a teacher discussing the meaning of the biblical story in which Abraham is asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. The young Danny interprets the story not as a test of faith, but as a demonstration of power: that God is unsecured loans proving his power in contrast to the powerlessness of Abraham.

Obviously obsessed with the issue of power, and repulsed by those who are powerless, 22-year-old Danny (Ryan Gosling) chooses to identify with Nazis as opposed to Jews.

On a New York subway one day, Danny, looking like a skinhead not a Jew, harasses a yeshiva student, and then, when the boy suddenly darts off the subway, follows and attacks him.

Given that the film is being released during a time of greatly increased anti-Semitism, I watched this scene with great discomfort, afraid that it would encourage copycat attacks.

After attacking the yeshiva student, Danny joins a neo-Nazi group, where he proposes killing Jews. When the others ask why, he spews out a ream of negative stereotypes of Jews, including "The modern world is a Jewish disease." Finally, he says, "Not for any rational reason, but because we know we hate them, because we want them gone."

Again, although the other Jews in the film are portrayed positively and its ultimate point is to disagree with the anti-Semitism exhibited, I feared that the suggestion--to kill Jews--might be taken up by some film viewers. The film even names specific, well-known Jews bad credit loans as possible targets.

After getting involved with the neo-Nazi group, Danny's obsession with Jews propels him to organize an attack on a synagogue. In one distressing scene, in which one of his fellow neo-Nazis urinates from the bimah (podium), another one discovers the ark and pulls out a Torah.

Suddenly, Danny's years of yeshiva education restrain him: He may despise Jews, but he still reveres the Torah. Although he does his best to prevent any desecration of the Torah, it is nonetheless ripped. Danny lovingly scoops the Torah up and brings it home, wrapped in a tallit (prayer shawl), where he begins to carefully repair it. He also starts wearing the tallit underneath his shirt.

Danny has meanwhile become involved with Carla (Summer Phoenix), who is the daughter of Lina (Theresa Russell), the leader of the neo-Nazi group. A rebel herself, Carla finds Judaism fascinating. At her request, Danny teaches her Hebrew and they start lighting Shabbat (Sabbath), candles together.

As the film progresses, Danny reconnects with Judaism and with former classmates, but is unable to relinquish his neo-Nazism. He now identifies as both a Nazi and a Jew, as seen by his images of a horrifying story told to him by a survivor. Earlier in the film, when he recalled the story, he had identified with the Nazi in it, but at this point in his life he identifies with both the Nazi and the Jew.

In one startling scene, Danny uses Nazi-like gestures while chanting a Jewish prayer. His double life ultimately becomes impossible to maintain, and the film concludes with the inevitable final scene.

Ryan Gosling, a relatively unknown actor, is superb as Danny, showing both his initial heartlessness, his vulnerability around Carla, and his ultimate torment. Summer Phoenix's Carla is a complex, equally brilliant and self-hating young adult. On the whole, I find The Believer a worthwhile film for interfaith couples to see in order to become more aware of the ways anti-Semitism can be internalized, but I fear the consequences if it is seen by anti-Semites.

The disturbing yet riveting film leaves viewers full of questions, eager to discuss it. Just in time to answer many of these questions, the Sundance Channel will air, on May 19 at 7:30 p.m., and on May 26 at 11 p.m., a fascinating documentary, Anatomy of a Scene: The Believer, in which writer/director Henry Bean discusses many of the thought processes that went into making the film, specific choices he made in the pivotal scene in which Danny repairs the Torah, why he chose Ryan Gosling to portray Danny, and aesthetic issues such as the use of a hand-held camera and the choice of a grainy-looking type of film.

Anatomy of a Scene: The Believer was edited by Jenny Raskin, Lisa M. Jones and Bill Shaw.

The Believer, which was inspired by a real story Bean read in the New York Times, won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize in 2001.

computers and the Olympics.

The London Olympics organisation committee kicked off 200,000 hours of testing today in its 2,000m² testing lab in Canary Wharf.

Led by London Olympics CIO Gerry Pennell, a team of up to 70 people will test all the software in the laboratory. The lab is split into over 50 individual cells that each focus on the software underpinning a different testing job. For instance, there are 35 cells testing the software for different Olympic sports.

When the lab has finished testing, the team will transfer all the software and the hardware to the Olympic venues for onsite testing.

The technology runs everything, from the timing of track events to the logistics of getting athletes around.

Gerry Pennell has experience of major sporting events and was previously director of technology for the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

It is not possible to prepare for every eventuality in an event of the size of the Olympics. Former Olympic champion Sebastian Coe, who chairs the London Olympics planning committee, said the test team had to attempt to prepare for the worst. "We know things will happen that we cannot plan for, so we have to get our teams ready."

The security of data is a top priority. According to supplier Atos Origin, when it ran the IT at the last Olympic Games in Beijing, there were between 12 and 14 million data security events that needed to be checked-out every day.

The testing phase comes after two years' work has been completed. The Olympic IT team completed the software designs in 2009 and produced the software in 2010. This year will see the testing phase with the operation phase next year.

Some of the software, such as the volunteer portal, are already up and running.

By the time of the Olympic Games in summer 2012, over 5,000 people would have been involved in the creation and implementation of the technology that underpins the sporting event.

The Olympics IT is being delivered by multiple suppliers. As a result, Pennell's task is managing and integrating the contribution of multiple suppliers, with support from the Olympics main IT partner Atos Origin. He said he is used to managing multiple outsourced service providers, because that is the model that his previous employer, CFS, uses.

Atos Origin first became involved in Olympic IT in 1992 and by bad credit loans the 2004 Olympic Games it was the main partner. It is already planning for the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 2016.

Because Atos has been working on the Olympics for nearly 20 years it has been able to innovate. For example next year's games will see the Olympic data feed data in a standard format for the first time. Athletes, the media and officials will have a mobile application with bespoke content and a system that feeds information to commentators in real-time will be introduced.

Planning and implementing IT in any major unsecured loans project is challenging to say the least. Problems and delays can cost millions of pounds. The Olympic IT team cannot afford any delays and the reputation of an entire nation rests on its success in 2012. But Pennell, who was at the IT helm of Cooperative Financial Services (CFS) during the recent banking crisis, says: "Being a CIO at a bank during the credit crunch was good preparation for a project like this."

Team America World popo

After serving as director of photography on a series of large-scale, effects-laden action films (The Matrix trilogy and Spider-Man 2), Bill Pope, ASC instructed his agents to look for something “completely different.” Little did the cinematographer know that he’d get what he asked for — in spades. “I certainly never saw a puppet movie coming up on my horizon,” Pope says with a chuckle. “However, when [directors] Matt Stone and Trey Parker sent me the script, I literally laughed out loud as I read it. At the time, I didn’t unsecured loans know they wanted to make the film entirely with puppets. When I finally met with Matt and Trey and they told me they wanted to do the whole film with marionettes — all in camera, with no CGI — I told them I was their man. CG allows you to do things onscreen that you shouldn’t be able to, but many times those kinds of effects can take you out of the story. For me, the organic quality of doing things in camera is usually much more charming.”

Stone and Parker have earned considerable notoriety for their raw and controversial animated television series South Park. In 1999, the eccentric duo released an even racier feature-film installment: South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Their other collaborations include the features BASEketball and Orgazmo, as well as the TV series That’s My Bush! “Bill was suggested to us by our producer, Scott Rudin, who had worked with him on Clueless,” says Stone. “From the outset, we felt we should find a cinematographer who had shot these kinds of action movies. In fact, the entire precept of Team America is based on the idea of doing a huge, overwrought, Bruckheimer-esque action/event movie, only with puppets. When we wrote the script, however, we didn’t write it with puppets in mind. We just wrote it like any big action film — a guy jumps his motorcycle over 16 cars and there’s a big explosion — and handled the script without any thoughts about how we would actually do it!”

In true South Park fashion, no individual, religion or political bad credit loans affiliation is safe from being roasted in this election-season satire. To focus their gibes, the filmmakers dreamed up “Team America,” an elite group of world freedom fighters who battle to save democracy against tyrannical oppression and terrorist intimidation. “They’re sort of like the A-Team and James Bond fused together,” notes Pope. “We don’t know if they’re government-sponsored or whatever, but they basically go around solving various problems and fighting terrorism. Of course, they manage to screw things up in as many ways as possible. Along the way, Matt and Trey send up everything and everyone; as in the South Park movie, nobody is safe, and anybody can be made fun of. If you’re going to have satire, you might as well make it all-encompassing.

“The conflict of the film,” he continues, “is that [North Korean dictator] Kim Jong Il is trying to take over the world with weapons of mass destruction, and he’s using the Chechens and Al-Qaeda as his pawns. His other ‘lackeys’ are liberal film actors who don’t believe in ever fighting battles and in keeping peace at any cost. So on one hand, Matt and Trey are mocking all of the high-profile, left-wing liberals; on the other hand, they simultaneously make fun of the right-wing American convention of going in and saving the day. In the end, we hope to come down someplace in the middle.”

Stone and Parker took inspiration for the film from the 1960s British marionette series Thunderbirds, created by Gerry Anderson and photographed by John Read. “Team America was certainly inspired by the work that Gerry Anderson did,” Stone explains. “He created an entire niche with all of his different marionette shows, the most popular of which was Thunderbirds. But while those shows gave us some ideas, we were not fans of them at all. In fact, we thought they were pretty boring, which inspired us to parody the shows as well.”

Pope admits he wasn’t a follower of the original puppet series either. “In fact, I had never even seen Thunderbirds,” he confesses. “My generation sort of missed it, and when I did come across it, I was at an age where camp didn’t appeal to me. However, what we learned from those shows was to treat the genre seriously and not make fun of the puppets. We’d just design a scene as you would with any action ‘actor’ and then let the puppets do it. The problem is that marionettes can never quite stand up straight or move gracefully — they’re inherently stupid things, so we didn’t need to enhance that factor. In fact, we tried to downplay it as much as possible.”

Devising a plan of attack for the low-budgeted shoot demanded considerable R&D. Since the puppets were being created at 1⁄3 scale, all sorts of issues had to be addressed, including set design, dressing and construction, miniature props, the scaling-down of lighting instruments and the use of camera-moving platforms. “Matt and Trey had been working on this in their heads for quite a while before I was hired; they even took some Barbie dolls and a crew out last October to shoot a day of tests, just to find out how hard it was going to be. Of course, they quickly discovered it was quite difficult. Then, after I was hired, the original plan was to shoot for three weeks in the spring and then shut down while they went back to work on South Park; after that, we would start up again for another four weeks in the summer to finish the movie. They figured it would take about seven weeks to shoot the entire film.

“In preparing the film, we started with a small three-day test shoot in February of this year. As we got ready for the tests, we started to realize just how long things were going to take. The variables became more and more solid, and we realized that to control the marionettes, we were going to have to fly eight to 10 puppeteers around the set all the time. To do that, we would have to build bridges above the sets and fly Condors overhead. We also realized we would have to use some rod puppets from underneath; in those instances, holes would have to be drilled and grooves made in the floors on a per-shot basis. Still, even with storyboards, it was difficult to anticipate everything that was needed to execute a particular shot. After just three days of prep, we realized it was going to be even harder and more time-consuming than we thought. Seven weeks was a ridiculously short amount of time in which to do this type of film.”

Kim jon il. Keep saying king...

Kim Jong-il, the North Korean leader who died on Saturday, will enter the history books as one of the world’s cruellest tyrants, following a reign of terror during which he developed nuclear weapons while his compatriots unsecured loans starved.

The reclusive Kim, who was either 69 or 70 years of age, was often portrayed in the west as a caricature of a mad dictator: a gluttonous playboy who compensated for his short stature with a bouffant hairdo and platform shoes; an internet addict who had more than 20,000 DVDs, and at one point was Hennessy cognac’s best customer.

But contrary to the popular impression of bad credit loans Kim as a madman, he “was not delusional”, according to Madeleine Albright, who met him in Pyongyang in 2000 while she was US secretary of state. In her memoir, Madam Secretary, she said: “I found him very much on top of his brief.”

Others who met him describe being surprised by his bearing. Isao Iijima, a top aide to former Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi who met him twice, described Kim as having “gentle eyes, like those of an elephant. He did not have vicious eyes”.

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Kim used calculated brinkmanship to keep the world at bay while at home he wreaked havoc. He promoted a pervasive personality cult that saw him and his father, the state’s founder Kim Il-sung, revered as gods, and used an unimaginable level of fear to keep the populace under control.

Any misstep, such as watching a South Korean film, could land not just the perpetrator but his or her entire family in a political prison.

Kang Cholhwan, who defected to South Korea in the 1990s, described being kept in Yodok, one of the most notorious camps, for a decade from the age of nine after his grandfather esp­oused capitalist ideals. He witnessed 15 executions and was so hungry he trapped and ate snakes and mice.

In one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 20th century, Kim allowed as many as 3m people to starve to death during the mid-1990s in a famine resulting from decades of economic and agricultural mismanagement.

All the while he was leading a lavish life. Konstantin Pulikovsky, a Russian official who accompanied Kim on a train journey to Moscow (Kim was terrified of flying), described how live lobsters and roasted donkey were flown in to supply the train each day. “I am the object of criticism around the world,” Mr Pulikovsky quoted Kim as saying. “But I think that since I am being discussed, then I am on the right track.”

According to state propaganda, Kim was born on Mount Paekdu, the spiritual home of the Korean people, underneath a bright star. In reality, he was believed to have been born in 1941 in a Soviet Army camp near Khabarovsk, in the Russian far east, where his father was exiled.

In his childhood, he was nicknamed Yura and, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the countries’ close ideological ties, still gravitated to Russians, spending hours in the sauna with Russian diplomats in Pyongyang.

The Kim family returned to Pyongyang when Japan lost control of Korea at the end of the second world war, with Stalin anointing Kim Il-sung as the leader of the communist half of the peninsula, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

He spent parts of his childhood in China after his father invaded US-backed South Korea, sparking in 1950 the three-year Korean war, but later attended Kim Il-sung University, majoring in political science. He rose quickly through the Workers’ party ranks, taking charge of organisation and propaganda in 1973, before his father officially designated him as his successor in 1980.

It was from this time that his portrait was compulsorily hung beside his father’s in buildings – public and private – around the country, and that he begun being called the Dear Leader, styled after his father’s Great Leader.

Kim was believed to be behind the 1983 bomb attack in Rangoon, Burma, that killed 17 members of the South Korean cabinet, as well as the bombing of a South Korean airliner in 1987.

In 1991, Kim was put in charge of the military, despite never having served, until his father died in 1994. Three years of official mourning followed, before Kim took over the leadership of the Workers’ party.

However, he named his father Eternal President and never took on the top title himself, instead calling himself the chairman of the National Defence Commission and general secretary of the Workers’ party.

In the decade since he took formal control, North Korea has suffered repeated humanitarian crises, including the 1994-97 famine, during which the leadership kept the international community at arm’s length.

With the collapse of the Soviet bartering system, North Korea’s economy fell into ruin and it became reliant on China, now its closest ideological ally, for economic and political support.

In 2002 Kim allowed some price and wage liberalisation, but the reforms were halfhearted and led to even greater economic problems as necessities such as rice spiralled beyond the reach of the common people.

Kim captured the world’s attention when he responded to accusations he was running a secret uranium-based nuclear programme – in addition to the known plutonium plants – by withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. This sparked a nuclear crisis, which came to a head with his test of a nuclear device in October 2006. Although a technical failure, the test catapulted the rust-bucket country into the league of nuclear states. It prompted a diplomatic process with the US, marked by Kim’s habit of making deals, breaking them, extracting greater concessions, before eventually carrying out his end of the original deal.

It is this pattern that has led some analysts to comment on Kim’s ability to play a weak hand of cards exceptionally skilfully. Still, he pushed the peninsula perilously close to war last year with the of killing 50 South Koreans in a submarine attack against a warship and the bombardment of a South Korean island.

Kim married four times – first to a woman chosen by his father, with whom he had a daughter. With his second wife he had a son, Kim Jong-nam, now about 40, who was considered the obvious heir until he was caught sneaking into Japan using a false Dominican passport.

He had two more sons, Kim Jong-chul and Kim Jong-eun, with Ko Young-hee, a dancer who was called his favourite wife but is believed to have died from cancer in 2006. The same year, Kim married his secretary, more than 20 years his junior. Kim suffered a suspected stroke in 2008, forcing him to accelerate the promotion of Kim Jong-eun, now styled “the Great Successor”.