If you want to understand why, 55 years on, Cecil B. DeMille’s epic retelling of the story of Moses, from his birth to ascendancy into Heaven, is still as beloved today as it was when released during the first term of the Eisenhower administration, all you need do is watch the director explain the theme of his masterpiece in the short segment that opens the film. It’s an odd moment. After all, how many movies open with the director stepping out from behind a curtain to lay the groundwork for what’s to follow? This unconventional decision more than works, though, as it sets a thoughtful and reverential tone that will carry you through the upcoming 220 minutes.

Mr. DeMille tells us outright…

“The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God’s law or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Ramses. Are men property of the State, or are they free souls under God? This same battle continues throughout the world today.”

Yes, today, and not just where “The Ten Commandments” is set — throughout the Middle East in countries such as Egypt — but also here in America as we watch an ever-growing federal government burden us with debt and chip away at our liberties. I’m not comparing Egypt’s current struggle with our own in any way other than how DeMille’s use of this universal theme speaks in some way to everyone and will for as long as there’s a civilization. As his epic unfolds, this is the theme DeMille holds on to, straight through to the story’s final line of dialogue — Moses’ (Charlton Heston) parting words to Joshua (John Derek) before he joins the God who has put him through so much:

“Go. Proclaim liberty throughout all the lands, unto all the inhabitants there of.”

Last week I watched the entire film straight through twice, once on the big-screen at a special event commemorating the film’s Blu-ray release, and again just a few days later on the actual Blu-ray. The finest compliment I can pay one of Hollywood’s all-time great epics is that I could watch it again tonight and enjoy it just as much. DeMille’s world is so vivid, so detailed and all consuming, that after spending nearly four hours visiting, you just want to return to lose yourself into it again and again. The story stays with you for days and you truly do miss spending time with those wonderfully drawn characters.

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Alfred Hitchcock was reputed to have said, “In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.” While this enigmatic statement can be read and interpreted several different ways, one thing’s for certain: implicit is the idea that documentary filmmaking is powerful, heady stuff. It can, and has, been used to instruct and inform and – regrettably – propagandize and confuse. Generally, it’s left up to the viewer to decide if what they’re seeing is of the first or second variety.

And so it is for a viewer who happens upon an alarming film called Iranium, a 60-minute window into the very real threat of a nuclear-armed Iran. Released by the Clarion fund and directed by Alex Traiman, the film is at once gritty, brutal, terrifying and hopeful. And most importantly, if the professional and political pedigrees of those interviewed in the film are any indication, frighteningly true.

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Traiman, a journalist living in Israel and covering the Middle East, says he became fully aware of the threat of a nuclear armed Iran after attending a 4 day conference that focused on the subject in Israel in 2009. “So I started reading,” he says.  “After reading ‘The Rise of Nuclear Iran’ by Dore Gold and ‘Persian Night’ by Amir Taheri, I realized that there were several components that most Westerners did not know about the threat: There is a deep ideology guiding Iran’s leaders since 1979; there is a 30 year history of killing Americans that continues today; and that Western leaders have repeatedly misread the intentions of Iran’s leaders.”

In fact, Traiman adds, Westerners have a tendency to misunderstand the true nature of the threat because we insist on filtering the events in the Middle East, from the Iranian Revolution in 1979 to the events occurring today in Egypt and Libya, through a decidedly Western value system.

“There is most certainly a huge disconnect between the nature of these oppressive regimes and how they are viewed in the West,” Traiman says. “We view events in the Muslim world, including the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, through a prism of values that is uniquely American.  But those nations across the world have a completely different system of values that were established long before America ever became a nation.”

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So like you, I’ve been watching Egypt the same way I watch the Pro Bowl. In my underwear, confused.

Because I think I don’t have a dog in the hunt, I check out what people are wearing. Eyeing the men crowding the streets of Cairo, I realize what Goodwill did with Billy Crystal’s old sweaters.

Look, I can’t tell if these events are a good thing. And I’m inherently suspicious of any stateside protests that erupt so quickly with ready-made signs. I also don’t embrace revolution for the sake of revolution. I assume Mubarak is far from a great guy, but I’m not sure his replacement will be any better. And I can’t help getting spooked by the name, “Muslim Brotherhood.” It sounds like a prison gang from Oz.

(I have a feeling they don’t like Israel. Or us, either.)

And some of the commentary kills me. We have climate change alarmists linking unrest to global warming, which makes me want to throw up repeatedly, on climate change alarmists.

But they’re half right. Rising food prices do make people angry. And food prices are going up – since we’re turning corn into ethanol, instead of chowder. That’s surely the fault of climate change, or more precisely, climate change alarmists.

But my guess is, this revolution arrived via four things: Mubarak fatigue, a crummy way of life, an ever present radicalism waiting in the wings, a timid west. (more…)

In November 1974, Werner Herzog received a most distressing phone call. Lotte Eisner, the beloved doyenne of German cinema, was dying. Part film historian, part published critic, part heroic preservationist, and part muse to the filmmakers struggling to piece together the broken shards of German culture left in the wake of the Nazis, Eisner was a legendary figure in Herzog’s eyes, and had inspired him to persevere through a decade of near-poverty as a struggling director. Now, at seventy-eight years old, she was deathly ill and not expected to survive.

Herzog was in Munich, Eisner in Paris, and their mutual friends implored the thirty-two-year-old director to fly to France post-haste so that he might say his goodbyes while there was still time. But Herzog would have none of it. “This must not be,” he remembered thinking. “German cinema could not do without her now. We would not permit her death.” And so, suddenly afire with what he once called in another context “the fervor and woe of pilgrims and prayers and hopes,” Herzog made a momentous decision: he would set out from his apartment in Munich and walk the five-hundred miles to Paris “in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot.”

Days stretched into weeks as he trod alone through the winter sleet, sometimes breaking into barns or empty cottages to survive the cold nights and taking only a single detour, “to the town of Troyes, because I wanted to walk into the cathedral there.” Finally he arrived exhausted at Eisner’s Paris apartments to find her “still tired and marked by her illness,” but recovering against all odds. She would live nine more years, until at last, “when she was nearly blind, could not walk or read or go out to see films,” she called Herzog back to Paris and told him, “Werner, there is still this spell cast over me that I am not allowed to die. I am tired of life. It would be a good time for me now.” Herzog recalls that, “Jokingly I said, ‘OK, Lotte, I hereby take the spell away,” and three weeks later Lotte Eisner died. (more…)

I am on vacation in South East Asia visiting friends and touring some areas that I am quite familiar with and some not so much. I have not had much access to news or the internet until the last two days. However, from what I have heard recently, there are definitely a few things that need to be addressed.

A few days ago, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech in we he agreed for the first time to the possibility of a two state solution. To many countries in the world, this is considered a major breakthrough in the Palestinian conflict. For the first time in recent memory, Israel is ready to consider giving the Palestinians a homeland. The entire western world applauded the concessions. Of course, the Palestinians did not: they condemned them. (more…)

First Arabic Language comedy in Saudi Arabia in 30 years

This last week, “Menahi” became the first feature film shown in Saudi Arabia in more than 30 years. I worked as a supervising producer on the film last year in Cairo, Egypt for two months. I even appear briefly in a scene in an airplane as an American asking the film’s principal, Menahi, if he is crazy – “Ana magnun!?” – in Arabic.  Since I wrote the “Citizen Soldier Handbook: 101 Ways For Every American To Fight Terrorism” and Saudi Wahabism is a primary ingredient in terrorism these days, my head spins with the juxtaposition of my work and the film’s groundbreaking venue. The fact that “Menahi” is an Arabic language comedy makes it all the more surreal.

Films are prohibited in Saudi Arabia.  Shown in the western city of Jeddah, more “open” than Riyadh, the audience was composed of men and children younger than 10.

Well. It’s a start. (more…)