The latest Israeli celeb

May 23, 2011 - 12:12 PM by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Blogging, Entertainment, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Movies, Pop Culture 

Gal in the Fast Five movie poster in the homeland

The latest Israel celeb on the publicity trail is newly minted actress and Miss Israel 2004, Gal Gadot. She’s playing the feminine but tough Gisele Harabo in the newly released “Fast Five” film with a bunch of tough guys, including Vin Diesel.

As she tells Curt Schleier in The Forward’s Shmooze blog, she led the life of a fairly regular Israeli teenager until winning the Miss Israel pageant — although she was clearly heading in that direction for a while. She then modeled for three years before serving her full two years in the IDF as a fitness instructor.

After finishing her army service, Gadot was cast for Fast & Furious, the fourth installment in the series, and she told Schleier that director Justin Lin used her weapons knowledge to good effect in the film:

Giselle is not Israeli. How was it decided to now have it that she worked with the Mossad?

You don’t have to be an Israeli to work with Mossad. [Director] Justin Lin and I knew we were going to work on [three films together], and we wanted her to evolve. I think the main reason was that Justin really liked that I was in the Israeli military, and he wanted to use my knowledge of weapons.

According to IGN’s Babe of the Day posting, Gadot is “not only an ass-kicking action movie hottie, but she’s got the skills to back it up. At just 25 [now 26], Gal Gadot has already served in the Israeli Defense Forces and now as our Babe of the Day.”

The famous Maxim photo

IGN notes that the world began taking notice of Ms. Gadot after being featured in Maxim Magazine’s “Women of the Israeli army” photo shoot, when her photo was featured on the launch party invite and then on the cover of the New York Post.

Good luck to Gal.

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Bruno strikes again

July 6, 2008 - 3:16 PM by · 3 Comments
Filed under: Pop Culture 

Bruno, yet another alter ego of Sacha Baron CohenSasha Baron Cohen has been making a living by messing with people for ten years now. Ever since the first appearance of Ali G on England’s Channel 4 in 1998, he’s been refining his art of taking on provocative personae and interacting with real people. The results end up revealing quite a bit about his interviewees: their true beliefs and the limits of their capacity for tolerance of “the other.”

While many of us have been tracking Cohen’s exploits for close to ten years, the global mainstream media and its consumers were largely oblivious to the phenomenon until the release of the Borat movie (subtitled Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) in 2006. The resulting exposure meant that Cohen could no longer get away with his antics in the same manner, as potential targets began to know what they were getting into, so he announced a few months ago that his primary personae, Kazakh journalist Borat and Cockney-Ebonics poser Ali G, would be retired.

In the meantime, development and production for the Bruno movie has begun in earnest. A flamboyantly gay Austrian MTV-style talking head, Bruno has was sighted a few months ago in a Wichita airport, dancing provocatively with a balloon salesman.

Cohen, meanwhile, has been to Israel many times. Having grown up a Jewish preppie in London, he even volunteered on a kibbutz for a year with Labor Zionism’s international Habonim-Dror youth group. And despite Borat’s headline-making staunch anti-Semitism, the blockbuster Cohen persona promoted his movie extensively here, even giving interviews in Hebrew – I mean Kazakh.

But now Bruno has been sighted in Israel for the first time, having duped a peace-making duo self-branded as Bitter Lemons into actually explaining why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is slightly more important than the Jennifer-Angelina one, explaining to him the difference between hummus and Hamas and so forth.

This according to a memoir, written by Bruno’s victims for The Forward. The Israel-oriented media world is, of course, lapping it up. Some have wondered if Bruno came to Jerusalem to participate in the city’s recent gay pride parade. Others have focused on putting the incident into the context of Cohen’s long, storied career of putting stuffy diplomats in their places. And still more have pointed out that the Bitter Lemons guys need to perhaps down-play their own supposedly tongue-in-cheek bitterness if they want to be seen in the movie as anything but partners in suckerhood – the ultimate Middle Eastern taboo.

Cohen “is exploiting our tragic and painful conflict in the most cynical and deceptive manner,” laments peace-nik Yossi Alpher in his Forward column. “I doubt he’ll give us anything in return,” Well how about giving us an excuse to unpuff our shirts? As Robert Plant once yelped, “Does anyone remember laughter?”

Until the Bruno movie hits theaters in about a year, though, all we have to deal with is a big buzz over a production spoiler – a mere footnote in the annals of Zionism that has captivated pop culture fans and detractors alike.

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