45 Minutes to Ramallah (2013) Reviews

• Fast paced entertainment with a twist.

  fg-844-6632092013-11-14

  I saw it at a small festival in Germany. It's really well done. The two actors, which were unknown to me before are very likable and believable and I also enjoyed the music. It's not the heavy intellectual and dramatic kind of film that you'd normally expect from a film about Israel and Palestine. It's more of a slapstick comedy with an air of sarcasm that sometimes make you stop laughing and start thinking. Maybe it comes closer to reality than any of us Westeners would believe? I really enjoyed it and with me the whole audience (it has won the audience award and the main award at the festival). So I can recommend it to anyone who doesn't have to many prejudices about the Middle-East.

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• Flawed in many regards

  Horst_In_Translation2013-12-11

  Four years and an actually really good documentary on the Green Revolution in Iran after "Salami Aleikum", director Ali Samadi is back to fiction. And just like in his previous works, the Islamic culture plays again a major role in "45 Minutes to Ramallah". Unfortunately, I felt for several reasons, this movie never really worked. Of course, it's quite a challenge to make a good comedy or road movie with the previously mentioned background, but it's not impossible. The film neither succeeds as a story of two estranged brothers bonding nor as an entertaining comedy movie. It has funny party occasionally, but these are matched by scenes which are just cringeworthy and totally misfire humor-wise, such as the scene early on where the one brother gets out of the car and is smacked down by the other early on. As a whole I was also disappointed by the acting, although part of it was probably due to a really weak dubbing effort that may have lost some of the humor in translation. The only one I want to exclude from that perception is Karim Saleh who did a fine job with his character mostly and the film would have been even worse without him. The actor who played his brother did nothing for me and same can be said about Julie Engelbrecht. She has shown glimpses of talent before, but here she was really just a pretty face. I almost felt a bit sorry for her as her character was such a bad caricature full of stereo-types that maybe even the best actress on the planet couldn't have saved the way the character was written. The audience that sat with me was fairly divided in terms of opinion. Some left early (the film didn't deserve that) and others laughed pretty much from start to finish. If the humor is your cup of tea, you'll probably have a good time. It's vey dark and frequently hit-or-miss. Some of it is really crass, especially referring to the Israeli-Arab setting, which is always a risky endeavor as if you don't like it, it's always gonna leave a bad aftertaste and that was certainly the case for me. All in all I can't say the film entertained me the way I had hoped it would. Somehow I felt it went nowhere and it's really only remotely recommendable if you're into culture clash movies that you don't want to really think about that much, just suck it in. However, I'm still curious about the director going in a totally different direction next from his previous work with a Petterson & Findus film and I hope I'll enjoy this one again just like his last documentary feature.

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