Yom Yom

I think I'm one of the three people who actually paid to see this movie in the cinema. When I went in, I knew what the hype (as much as there was) told me. That is - Amos Gitai, Israel's most famous director, went and did a film with the Israeli actors elite. That is - Moshe Ivgi (the current godfather of Israeli cinema), Julianno Merr (An actor of epic abilities who was born in the wrong place), and Keren Morr (leading theater actress and T.V. comedy goddess). And we were told this was an intelligent comedy (something almost unheard of in nowadays cinema).

None of that was true. The movie is a series of eight-minute long-shots about the uninteresting life of two childhood friends in down-town Haifa (a harbor city in northern Israel). Mostly they deal with the stagnation of their life, compared to the massive urban development going on around them. Its very artsy, very boring, very unfocused, not intelligent enough to make you think, not touching enough to make you care. too Israeli for an outsider to understand, too pompous for Israelis to like. and of course not funny at all.

So, what good is there in this movie ? a lot of things nobody expected. First of all, Hana Maron, an extremely talented actress who used to be the wunderkind of German cinema before World War Two, simply steals the show, every second she's on it. Its a rare chance to see someone who should have been the European Shirley Temple and could've been the European Bette Davis. Secondly, the film is probably the last documentation of down-town Haifa, a place which used to be the pearl of the eastern mediterranean, and is now bulldozed over. It also has in it the not-so-casual reference to it being the only place where Arabs and Jews coexist and even marry. And third, and that is the reason this movie still gets viewers - Israeli no. 1 model and would-be actress, Natali Atia, in real live sex action with Julianno Merr for eight minutes. It looks like someone must have left the camera there and caught them on film. Considered by many to be the hottest sex scene in Israeli movies ever.

This film has the honour of being the only film I have actually walked out the cinema on. I suffered until the midpoint watching at least three fourths of the cinema walk out before me. I had previously seen Kaddosh by the same director and had loved it, so had gone to see Yom Yom prepared to be impressed. However this film is one of the most irredeemably boring, disjointed and pedestrian film I have ever seen. You get introduced to too many characters in a much too rapid-fire and jarring manner, and all their stories seem so banal bordering on the annoying. I love slice of life films (Omar Ioseliani is one of my top directors), yet this film doesn't show the love and empathy for its characters, nor the respect of its viewers attention, that is needed to make a film like this work.

Like the first commenter said, it was a bunch of vignettes -- some related, some not -- which were mostly boring. Some naked and/or sex scenes spiced it up.

Not sure why some highly-acclaimed actors would participate in it, except to get a pay-check during a lull in their careers. Seemed odd that most of the movie characters had same first name as the actors' first name.

It wasn't clear to me that it was about Jews and Arabs, perhaps mostly Arabs, until near the end. I didn't recognize anything as being Haifa or any other specific place -- mainly scenes of semi-squalor or ongoing construction -- despite my one trip to Israel including Haifa about seven years ago.