Posted By richards on April 18, 2014
Join Us for Earth Day 2014: Learning to "Green" Your Synagogue
Register here: http://rac.org/confprog/calls/ Earth Day might fall during Passover this year, but you can still get in the environmentally friendly spirit! Rabbis, social action chairs, and...
By: Religious Action Center
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Join Us for Earth Day 2014: Learning to "Green" Your Synagogue - Video
Posted By richards on April 18, 2014
'Fading Gigolo' Demonstrates a Rare Feel for the Frum World
Courtesy of Millennium Entertainment
For His Eyes Only: John Turturro directs and plays the eponymous part in Fading Gigolo.
A romantic comedy is a fantasy about love. Its a fantasy of finding love, of love overcoming the odds, of love doing away with any other difficulty that life might present. At the end of the movie, when the guy and the girl decide they cant exist without each other, we know theyre going to live happily ever after.
Fading Gigolo, directed by and starring John Turturro, is a romantic comedy, but its only partly about love. Its also about New York in the fall; about used bookstores and old-fashioned diners; about walks in the park and trips to the grocer for wine and baguettes. Its a fantasy about male friendship, which endures even when love doesnt. And when it comes to love, its a fantasy not of romantic bliss, but of a kind of delicious sadness.
The movie centers on the gallantly named Fioravante, a single, middle-aged New Yorker whose life has become prematurely becalmed. He lives in a small apartment, works part-time at a flower shop, and part-time at M. Schwartz and Sons, a used bookstore owned by his friend Murray. When Murray (played by Woody Allen, a fact that was a bigger selling point before renewed allegations of child abuse hit the press) decides to close the store, Fioravante suddenly needs another job.
Murrays solution is to pimp Fioravante out to his dermatologist, Dr. Parker (Sharon Stone), a glamorous bisexual woman unhappy in her marriage and intent on pursuing a mnage a trois. After much cajoling Youre an experienced lover, why shouldnt you get paid for it? Murray asks Fioravante agrees.
The premise of a middle-aged man taking up sex work to earn extra money isnt exactly new; it was used, unspectacularly, in movies like Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo and TV shows like HBOs Hung. But here the prostitution plot is little more than a comic foil to the love story between Fioravante and Avigail (Vanessa Paradis), a hasidic widow from Williamsburg who has her own sideline checking Murrays stepchildren for lice. (Once again, Allen posing as the stepfather to another womans children is an unfortunate choice, even if here theyre African-American boys.) Its an unusual setup, certainly, but like an ink-wash painting, rendered with a consummately delicate touch.
Turturro is best known as an actor, especially for his roles in Coen Brothers movies like Barton Fink, Millers Crossing and The Big Lebowski. But he is also an accomplished director whose movies include Romance and Cigarettes (2005) an outrageous musical drama about the trials of an unfaithful husband and his family and Illuminata (1998), a romantic farce about a theater troupe in early 20th-century New York.
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Posted By richards on April 18, 2014
It's a tantalizing combination of words Woody Allen is a pimp that seems custom-made for tabloid fodder. And while cheeky headline writers may still be inclined to exploit the phrase, actor and filmmaker John Turturro had more artistic intentions when he decided to cast the controversial comedian as an aging procurer in his "Fading Gigolo."
Opening Friday in limited release, Turturro's film he wrote, directed and stars opposite Allen is one of the season's more unusual amalgams. A religious sex comedy? A sociable meditation on loneliness? An exploration of a Hasidic Jewish enclave? "Fading Gigolo" is all of those things. Plus Allen acting in a non-Woody Allen movie for the first time in more than a decade.
Turturro, who previously directed "Mac" and "Romance & Cigarettes" among other films, said some of his earliest ideas about the independently financed film were rooted in his memories of 1975's "Shampoo," starring Warren Beatty as George, a Beverly Hills hairdresser as adept at tressing locks as he is undressing women. For all of George's sexual couplings, Turturro said, he's ultimately emotionally untethered. What if the story were updated and set in the world of sex workers, with Turturro playing a gigolo?
PHOTOS: Woody Allen's highest grossing films
That's when the idea of collaborating with Allen took root. The 57-year-old actor said he had always wanted to work with the 78-year-old director. (All this of course before the recent flare-up about old, unproven charges of sexual molestation brought up by estranged daughter Dylan Farrow that turned into an ugly public spectacle.)
"I thought that maybe we would be interesting together," said Turturro, who acts opposite the late Philip Seymour Hoffman in May 9's "God's Pocket." "Maybe we would have some good chemistry. I've always kind of liked him."
So he took a page out of "Shampoo" and used their mutual hairdresser as an intermediary. Could the barber ask Allen, Turturro wondered, if he would be interested in playing a pimp in a movie? The barber passed along the suggestion to Allen, and by the time Turturro was ready for another haircut the answer was yes.
"I was kind of fooling around," Turturro said. "But he took it seriously."
Allen last had a lead role in a film he didn't direct 14 years ago, in 2000's Alfonso Arau comedy "Picking Up the Pieces." But he wasn't joining "Fading Gigolo" just as a performer. He wanted to help shape the story, and Turturro was happy to welcome Allen as a collaborator.
PHOTOS: Behind the scenes of movies and TV
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Posted By richards on April 18, 2014
Nera Kraljevic Gil Ashkenazi social @ 3rd Istanbul Salsa Festival
April 2014.
By: gil32m
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Nera Kraljevic & Gil Ashkenazi social @ 3rd Istanbul Salsa Festival - Video
Posted By richards on April 18, 2014
Danay Bustamante Gil Ashkenazi Social Dancing @ 3rd Istanbul Dance Festival 2014
April 2014.
By: gil32m
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Danay Bustamante & Gil Ashkenazi Social Dancing @ 3rd Istanbul Dance Festival 2014 - Video
Posted By simmons on April 17, 2014
G.A.D.L. (Guru Anti-Defamation League) I #39;m trying to teach about Love and Bliss and this guy totally pisses me off!!!!! By: ikkyu15
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Posted By simmons on April 17, 2014
Islam END TIMES ALERT Israel Greece Turkey America Open up your Eyes, your Heart and your Mind and Watch this Video. Don #39;t ask your imam or mullah, he #39;ll tell you that this is the work of kuffar or the devil,..
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Islam END TIMES ALERT Israel Greece Turkey America - Video
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