Monday Movies Is a Jew, and Our Friend Is Jewish Enough for Us

The Break-Up. It’s very clear why these two are falling apart, but we never get to see what bound Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn’s relationship in the first place. There’s a meet-cute at a baseball game followed by a title sequence followed by the beginning of the end.  Although fratty Chicago guys do possess an ineffable quality that somehow endears them to worldly, put-together Chicago dolls, so maybe this was a subtle exercise in anthropological observation. The drama follows, as it often does, from the two leads’ failure to have an open conversation about what they want. At the climax of the film, they get around to the conversation, and it’s like a breath of fresh air — the third act is lively and human, though not making up for the first eighty-five minutes’ airlessness.

• Magic Moment: A wordless sequence after the first big fight. She goes directly to the bedroom. He waits, then makes a bed in the living room. Everything follows from there.
• Screenwriting tips: The break-up depends on the two of them never having a heart-to-heart. There aren’t many subplots either, so the movie divides the second act in sequences, roughly Rules of Engagement (in which they divide up friends and space in the condo), Real Estate (in which they begin to sell their condo, starting a ticking clock), and Sex (in which Aniston starts flaunting a mostly fake social life in order to inspire the return of Vaughn’s affections.
• Pot Pourri: Vincent D’Onofrio and Vince Vaughn are the most believable screen brothers ever. Also D’Onofrio really is a good actor — he fills out his character much more than anyone else, in ways that don’t have any bearing on the story.

The Infidel. A spirited, broad farce. A Muslim man’s son begs him to become a more devout Muslim so that his girlfriend’s extremist-religious family will allow him to wed her. Then he learns that he was adopted from Jewish birth parents. British Iranian comic Omid Djalili carries the movie perfectly, with yeoman’s work from Richard Schiff as a Jewish-American hack driver in London. Very good schtick, some schmalz.

• Magic Moment: The dismay on Djalili’s face as he watches an intolerant cleric on television, followed by the elation as he changes the station to find a beloved New Romantic music video.
• Screenwriting tips: Strong goals and obstacles. You could imagine a decent-enough movie with good jokes that was motivated by a man with a Muslim family learning about his Jewish origin, but Djalili has two goals–he has to be the best Muslim possible for his son, and the best Jew possible so that a nursing home rabbi will permit him to visit his ailing birth father.
• Pot Pourri: Pleased with myself for getting an offhand reference to “the Knowledge.” Amit Shah is wonderful as the lovebird son, and delivers the line “Next time I need a dose of middle-aged Muslim misogyny I’ll call Hanif Kureishi.” Not nearly as delightfully vicious as Four Lions, but very good.