Think of it as a wilful provocation from transgressive sexual conduct to a perhaps unfortunate preoccupation with anal polyps, Urban Tale agitates for our attention from its very first frames. It is, I suppose, the film-maker’s right to make a film as misanthropic, sexualised and stylised as Urban Tale. Including, it seems, this risibly misjudged film.
Urban tale israeli film full#
From now on it is finally full sex, 24 hours a day, sex in your face, in Hi-Definition on prime time. No more self righteous programs with hidden messages. We’ll watch with our tongues hanging out. Don’t just hint, give us full penetrations. Women accentuate everything except their minds. We do not speak to each other in words, we declaim at one another in paragraphs. They tell us the things they think that we do not know. Sometimes, the others talk as well as fuck. Our father, he left us when we were small. Our mother has died and we are alone in the world. We have a preternatural passivity, and we speak only in declamatory monologues. We don’t have names, because we are Everyman and Everywoman. This is Urban Tale, written and directed by Eliav Lilti, and we are Boy and Girl. Maybe I will just stare meaningfully instead, and then you will understand. Too complacent and too bourgeois, I repeat in case you did not understand the first time. Producers: Seth Kramer, Daniel A.I want to shock you, shock you because you have become too complacent and too bourgeois. But we never get the feeling that this was a tale that truly needed to be told.ĭirectors: Seth Kramer, Daniel A. It’s nice that some of the players took the opportunity to connect with their Jewish roots, and that Israel was able to take pride in a national team, albeit one playing a sport that has little popularity in the country. Much like the real-life story it chronicles, Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel ultimately seems a curiosity. But the documentary too often strives for cutesiness, including the frequent use of clips from such comic sports films as Cool Runnings, The Bad News Bears and Major League, as if to accentuate one commentator’s observation that “the team is an island of misfit toys.”
There are some moments that will make you verklempt, such as the players taking off their caps to reveal that they’re wearing yarmulkes underneath, or when several gather together to say kaddish for a coach’s father. The mascot apparently received twice as many media requests as the players. Comic relief is provided by the team’s mascot, the life-size “Mensch on a Bench” doll of an elderly Jewish man, that we eventually learn was a product featured on Shark Tank.
It’s clear that the filmmakers were more interested in their story’s cultural angle than its sports aspects, since the subsequent games against South Korea, China, Taipei and the Netherlands, which the team won, and Japan, which it lost, are given little screen time. More interestingly, the area’s tensions are reflected in a scene in which they banter with a Palestinian vendor who tells them he won’t be rooting for their team, and the dedication of a baseball field named after an Israeli athlete who became a terrorist victim. Perhaps too closely, as evidenced by the predictable travelogue-style footage of them swimming in the Dead Sea and visiting such sites as Masada, the Wailing Wall and the Holocaust Museum. The doc follows the players closely during their time in Israel. To prepare for the competition, the team traveled to Israel in style, flying on a private plane lent for the occasion by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson. Thus was assembled a team of ringers including Ike Davis, who hit 30 home runs in his rookie year with the New York Mets Josh Zeid of the Houston Astros Ryan Lavarnway, formerly of the Atlanta Braves and other current and former major league players. “Ironically, it was also the rule determining who was a Jew in Nazi Germany,” admits one of the team’s coaches, sheepishly adding, “Maybe don’t include that in your movie.”
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