Ralph's Movie Reviews: A BOTTLE IN THE GAZA SEA

Thursday, March 29, 2012

A BOTTLE IN THE GAZA SEA

Drama
In French and Arabic with English subtitles

PRINCIPAL CAST MEMBERS
Agathe Bonitzer: 17-year-old Tai Levine, resident of Jerusalem
Riff Cohen: her older brother Eytan
Mahmoud Shalaby: 20-year-old Naim Al-Farjouk, a resident of Gaza
Hiam Abbass: Naïm’s widowed mother

REVIEW
There’s always hope: that’s the message we take away after seeing this small scale film about the on-going situation in the Gaza strip, an area surrounded by Israel.

The acting is uniformly good and the story is a credible one taking time to portray the contrasts such as rich/poor, freedom/confinement, Jew/Arab. I know which side I’d pick.

CLASSIFICATION

for brief scenes of the aftermath of a bombing.

FOR NITPICKERS ONLY
• Tai uses a search engine to find out the distance between Jerusalem and the Gaza and it shows it to be 72 km; in fact it’s 78 km.
• Naim’s mother takes one dish from the pile and places it on a cupboard shelf but it crashes down on to the empty counter where the other dishes used to be but have somehow disappeared.

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my ratings system

I've always thought that telling too much about a movie or warning someone about a "twist" at the end deprives the person the pleasure of seeing it as it unfolds, so I don’t do it. You may not always agree with my rating of course, but at least it is an unbiased opinion unlike some of the full time professional reviewers who are on the studio’s payroll.

A few movies you won’t see any review from me:

Scary movies: I’m the world’s biggest chicken and just hate getting the crap scared out of me. I can handle an unexpected door slam, that kind of thing, but a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat…not for me. Sorry.
Movies geared to the young teen and pre-teen crowd with dialog comprising mostly of crude remarks, awful jokes and lots of rude, socially unacceptable body noises. "The Spy that Shagged Me" comes to mind. (I wonder if the kids know what the British verb to shag someone really means? They probably do; I bet you it’s the parents who haven’t a clue).
Sometimes Hollywood gets on a roll and they produce a series of movies that are all very much alike. For example movies about the CIA were very popular and so we had The Bourne Identity and Bad Company and The Sum of All Fears. They all had the same basic theme and it becomes repetitive. I will see some, but not all of them.

FYI this is my rating system:

0 stars = Terrible: so bad it’s not worth talking about; in fact, I’d pay you not to go
= Lousy: I actually got up and walked out before the end it was just that bad (no kidding)
= Not so good: thought about walking out but hung in just in case it got better (but it didn’t)
= A so-so good movie: I enjoyed it somewhat but wasn’t all that crazy about it
= A really good movie: I recommend seeing it
= An excellent movie you just got to see! I suggest you put it on your "To Do List" it’s that good.

some favourite websites

For those into it, Nitpickers at

has more movie mistakes than you could ever imagine. My contributions can be seen if you check out the Nitpickers Registry and click on the link Nitpickers Listed by Nitpicker Number, select the group 45,401 - 45,500 and drill down to number 45411. Although I have 56 nitpicks to my credit, some have almost 2,000. You wonder sometimes where they find the time to do it.