Review: Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Reviews

Close to Home

Absorbing, informative

By NINA MACLAUGHLIN | February 28, 2007

2.5 Stars

The front lines are not on battlefields but on buses, street corners, and crowded Jerusalem marketplaces in this drama from Dalia Hagar and Vardit Bilu. And the soldiers here are not men but two young Israeli women serving their required two-year term. Close to Home examines the tedium, the mindlessness, and the repetition of military service as snitchy, angel-faced do-gooder Mirit (Neama Shendar) and defiant, cocky rebel Smadar (Smadar Sayar, a dark-haired, dark-eyed Chloë Sevigny look-alike) patrol a sector of Jerusalem, checking Palestinian IDs. The film gets off to a slow start, and the relationship between the two young women runs a predictable course: they hate each other; they tolerate each other; they’re united by trauma and danger. But the on-street-level feel and the impact these two girls — who talk about haircuts and hats and cute boys — have on the safety of the city inform and absorb.

Related: Redacted, Four years later, Firewall, More

Redacted
The Iraq War movies are starting to resemble the war itself: miscalculated, mishandled, unpopular, and with no end in sight. Scialfa
Four years later
In the aftermath of a surprise attack by Egypt and Syria that overwhelmed Israeli forces in 1973, a special commission was convened to determine what went wrong.
Firewall
You could trace a history of American anxiety through the bad guys Harrison Ford has had to fight to protect his on-screen family: industrialization in The Mosquito Coast (1987), the IRA in Patriot Games (1992), Russian terrorists in Air Force One (1997), himself in What Lies Beneath (2000).
What's going on?
Five years into the Iraq War, we can catalogue a person’s every move with Twitter, Facebook, and the like.
Soldiering on
Kenny Carnes has bitten off a lot to chew with Pieces of War , the solo play that he wrote and performs at Perishable Theatre.
A night in Guantánamo
I’d volunteered to spend the night in the replica cell (which is modeled on the ones at Gitmo) because we’ve all heard stories about unlivable conditions at Gitmo but can’t come close to imagining what it must be like.
The war grinds amid a disengaged public
As another Memorial Day recedes in the rearview mirror, the carnage continues in Iraq.
Where are the movies on the war in Iraq?
Oscar Wilde might have called 9/11 “the day we dare not speak its name.” He would have been correct, at least, that we dared not speak its name to make a buck — until now.
Why are some lives more important than others?
Friendly-fire deaths represent just one percent of US military casualties in Iraq, according to figures provided by our government.
Running toward truth
The first wave of current-war fiction is washing up on American shores, and Alex Carr’s The Prince of Bagram Prison is a prime example.
Pardons are forever
Prediction: Before leaving office, President Bush will issue a shockingly large number of presidential pardons to operatives who, with the administration’s blessing, ventured far outside the law to wage Bush’s “war on terror.” Who might need - and get - a pardon?: Legal advisers, high-level officials, covert operatives. By Harvey Silverglate
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Topics: Reviews , Armed Forces, War and Conflict, Chloe Sevigny

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We're all idiots when we're 18. We're all idiots for the first half of our 20s, and longer, for some. By saying so, we're not trying to insult anyone.