Breaking news: Guy Fieri isn’t just a giant tool, but allegedly also an anti-Semitic, homophobic, lecherous giant tool.
I’ll skip to the anti-Semitic stuff. Here’s Gregory Pratt of the OC Weekly’s sister-publication in Minnesota talking with David Page, who created “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives”:
“They were demanding tremendous research from my people, and pictures, but they didn’t want to pay for them,” Page says. “Guy said to me: ‘You know, it’s true: Jews are cheap.’”
In fairness, lots of business people are cheap. No need to pick on The Jews.
Does this warrant labeling Fieri an anti-Semite? I don’t know. He’s clearly a tool. I didn’t even need to read this article to know that. But a drinking buddy of, oh, Mel Gibson. Not sure this really rises to that level.
*UPDATED: Jesse Derris, a spokesman for Fieri, called me tonight to say that the statements attributed to Fieri in the City Pages article were patently false. “That’s not the way he thinks, not the way he talks,” Derris said, reiterating something he told Guy Fieri an anti-Semite?* Read More »
An Oct. 13 article on the Web site of Commentary, a politically conservative magazine founded by the American Jewish Committee, though no longer affiliated with it, argued that “it isn’t just a few crackpots engaging in anti-Semitism.” The article said that the “main organizer behind the movement—Adbusters editor Kalle Lasn—has a history of anti-Jewish writing.”
Mr. Lasn did not return a message left on his Adbusters office voice mail in Vancouver, British Columbia. But Patrick Bruner, another member of the Occupy Wall Street press team, said the magazine Adbusters had helped prompt the protest movement with a call for action but otherwise had “not been active at all.” He said the Occupy Wall Street movement rejected any kind of racism or hatred, but also was “open source,” meaning that anyone could take part.
In Egypt, insulting Islam on Facebook now can earn you three years in jail with hard labor. And the ” title=”AFP”>AFP:
The Cairo court found that Ayman Yusef Mansur “intentionally insulted the dignity of the Islamic religion and attacked it with insults and ridicule on Facebook,” the agency reported.
The court said his insults were “aimed at the Noble Koran, the true Islamic religion, the Prophet of Islam and his family and Muslims, in a scurrilous manner,” the agency reported.
It did not provide details on what he had written that was deemed to be offensive.
The vagueness regarding Mansur’s comments is also problematic, because it does little to put Egyptians on notice for what types of “insults” can result in jail and hard labor. Read the ” title=”@religionnews”>@religionnews)
Who knew that eating ice cream could be so erotic? Popsicles, hot dogs, bananas—sure. Maybe even kebabs. But two scoops of rocky road?
One of the more unusual stories I’ve read out of Israel, courtesy of the ” title=”sentencing a dog to death”>sentencing a dog to death by stoning because it carried the spirit of a cursed lawyer. But the rest of me hopes that this story is just as false because it is otherwise ” title=”ultra-Orthodox Jews”>ultra-Orthodox Jews are really out of touch with civilized life in Israel.
It’s one thing to actually think that ice cream cones make people horny and lead to sin. But it’s something far more extreme to trash an ice cream parlor in the name of G-d.
I was walking out of a screening of the cheeky new animated film, “Puss in Boots,” starring Antonio Banderas as the titular bad kitty, at Grauman’s Mann Chinese 6 Theatres when a splattering of fake blood on the cinema’s glass doors, gaunt skeletal figures and assorted skulls caught my eye. This was the setup for the eleventh annual Screamfest Horror Film Festival, the largest horror fest in the United States (at the Chinese 6 through Oct. 23), which for the first time is including a slasher flick from Israel, titled “Kalevet,” or “Rabies.” The movie screens Oct. 22, 6 p.m. and is billed as the first slasher film ever from the Jewish state.
Since the Israeli film industry in general is making waves at Cannes and other fesitvals around the world, it’s not so surprising that its first genre movie made it to Screamfest—dubbed the “Sundance of horror”—which has hosted filmmakers such as Wes Craven, Sam Raimi and Eli Roth (of the “Hostel” films, who also played the bat-smashing Bear Jew in Quentin Tarantino’s Holocaust-tinged fantasy “Inglourious Basterds”). According to festival founder Rachel Belofsky, Screamfest also discovered and premiered 2007’s “Paranornal Activity”—the brainchild of Israeli-born American director Oren Peli—now a monstrously successful franchise (the most recent installment having been the box office phenonemom “Paranormal Activity 3”) .
Screamfest’s brochure describes “Rabies” thusly: “A brother and sister in their 20s run away from home after their dark secret is discovered. They find temporary refuge in a deserted nature reserve. When the sister falls into a hunting trap, set by a psychotic killer, the brother sets out in a race against time to rescue her.”
I haven’t seen ”Rabies” – nor have I seen any horror films from Israel (save for those that deal with the real-life horror of war)—but the movie caught my eye in part because it stars one of Israel’s famous leading men, Lior Ashkenazi, who also stars in Joseph Cedar’s “Footnote,” Israel’s best foreign film submission for the 84th Academy Awards.
Since “Rabies” premiered at the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival, critics have lauded the curveballs it lobs viewers expecting the typical genre flick.
Popcornaddiction.com describes it as “Opening with a scene indicative of your average torture-porn – a bloodied woman trapped and later drugged by a deranged killer, harbouring a grudge against dogs – [but] the rug is quickly pulled from beneath your feet as the filmmakers take an inspired wrong turn into largely unexplored territory. We meet the usual hapless teens, the obligatory bumbling police officers (Ashkenazi and Danny Geva) and a forest ranger husband and wife, yet not once do your undoubtedly informed predictions come to pass….. Like an earnest “Scream,” a softly-spoken “The Cottage” or a ruthlessly efficient “Severence,” “Rabies” is less a horror than it is a gore-soaked comedy.”
While the actual disease, rabies, does not make an appearance in the film, by Navot Papushado and Aharon Keshales, Dreadcentral.com notes, “Sexual deviancy, knives, guns, landmines, and the looming threat of serial murder invade the landscape and the minds of the characters…showing that the title acts as more of a metaphor for our rabid tendencies as humans instead of actual infectious disease driving us to lunacy.”
Los Angelenos can next see Ashkenazi in “Footnote” at the AFI Fest 2011, which runs from Nov. 3-10 (“Footnote” screens on Nov. 6). Ashkanazi—a former paratrooper—plays a role quite different from the deviant cop he portrays in “Rabies.” “Footnote” – which won best screenplay at the 2011 Cannes film festival – tells of a father (Shlomo Bar Aba) and son (Ashkenaki) who engage in a power struggle as they teach in the Talmud department of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Footnote” is the fourth film by Cedar, who also directed 2007’s Oscar-nominee “Beaufort.”
