Portland Jewish Film Festival

[April 2nd, 2008]

“It’s a very big thing among Jews when someone’s Jewish,” chuckles Jackie Hoffman in the documentary Making Trouble, which screens at the Portland Jewish Film Festival and is, in fact, about which female comics are Jewish. The lineup of the 16th annual NW Film Center event is bursting with the pride of the tribe. WW took a gander at the first week of movies.

Making Trouble A quartet of stand-up comediennes noshes on kosher dills at Katz’s New York Deli and reminisces about the acts that inspired them: legendary performers and writers from Fanny Brice to Wendy Wasserstein. Rachel Talbot’s documentary is revelatory and often quite moving. There’s just one problem: Making Trouble isn’t funny. The problem might be my failure to appreciate the distinctively female comic sensibility being lauded here (when Joan Rivers cited, as an example of such jollity, her quip that “if God wanted me to cook, he would have given me aluminum hands,” I struggled mightily to laugh, but nothing came out). But I suspect the real trouble is Talbot’s selection of material; she gravitates toward tales of personal struggle, and away from examples of wit. Anyone who keeps Gilda Radner from being hilarious has accomplished quite a feat. AARON MESH. 7 pm Saturday, April 5.

The Champagne Spy In this documentary by Nadav Schirman, a Mossad agent named Wolfgang Lotz infiltrates a network of German scientists working in Cairo, using horse breeding as his so-strange-it-can’t-be-a-cover cover. This is a world of 1960s espionage the little boy in me is thrilled to learn once existed: Ex-Nazis get letter-bombed, transmitters hide in bathroom scales and double agents get laid on trains. It’s like something out of Le Carré or Hitchcock, so it’s no wonder Schirman is already working on a scripted version. But he nails it here on his first try. Interlarding interviews with stock footage and home movies, The Champagne Spy is a fascinating mosaic of a man whose greatest act of sabotage was of his own family, from whom he kept his biggest secrets. This is the best kind of storytelling, where suspense and fascination carry us to emotional revelation. CHRIS STAMM. 4:30 pm Sunday, April 6.

The Cemetery Club Members of the Cemetery Club—a group of elders who meet at a park adjoining a cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl—have spent life surrounded by death. They’re concentration-camp survivors. They’ve witnessed the turmoil of Israel. Now, the group regularly meets under the same tree to read poetry and eat potato salad. As time passes, death continues to take its toll, dwindling the group’s numbers. And what do we learn from the elders of Tali Shemesh’s documentary? Old people love to bitch. Members of the Cemetery Club bitch about each other and food. The film opens with a woman bitching about the title of the movie. Unfortunately, they really don’t bitch—or even talk—about the momentous historical events they were a part of. The Cemetery Club is a lot like hanging out at a senior center for 90 minutes. It’s got limitless potential for insight, but it’s easily distracted by things like lackluster potato salad and semantics. AP KRYZA. 7 pm Monday, April 7.