Mendy

Honest and insightful. Also, very entertaining
I watched this movie in the Manhattan theater in June of 2006.This is one great movie that you will fall in love with. Although it's my belief that some knowledge (of) and/or Jewish background is necessary in order to grasp the meaning of the movie and not to misjudge the characters and the plot. Otherwise, you'd be asking (just like Bianca in the movie did) "So, your G-d is a racist then".

I think that this is a very honest movie and raises some important issues that we don't usually want to deal with or even admit to ourselves (well, this does apply to me) they (issues) exist and affect us in one way or another.

Excellent film, not very accessible
Firstly, I thought that the depth of this film lay primarily in the portrait of its three central characters. It does not have a particularly compelling narrative, but then my spouse likes to point out that I am attracted to films that lack a clear narrative. It is beautifully acted.

I should add here - and this point is really why I bothered to write this - that the film is not terribly accessible to an audience that is not acquainted with Chassidic culture (or at least Orthodox Jewish culture). Unlike in cheesy movies like "A Price Above Rubies", in Mendy Chassidic culture is neither spoon-fed to the viewer, nor is it avoided. It simply textures most of the film, which is exactly how it functions in real life. (A brief aside: I am an Orthodox Jew, very familiar with the culture being portrayed on screen, and I have never seen it more convincingly portrayed. Neither in English language or in Israeli cinema. The actors' command of Yiddish (in Hungarian dialect) is...

Hard to say...
As a non-Jew I was hoping for a way to learn more about the orthodox life, but I'm not at all sure I found it in this film, interesting though it was at times. I certainly appreciated hearing Yiddish...something I had never been exposed to at all and was thankful for the subtitles.

I think some of the meaning and the questions presented were sincere and reasonably well conceived, yet the obvious effort to be edgy and raw with ugly street language, doping, sex, etc. made the film into something rather mundane. The acting was okay, direction okay, production in general okay...but overall, at least for me, it was disappointing and no better than two stars.

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