Kippur (2000)

Touches You

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

In October 1973 during the Jewish festival of Yom Kippur an Arab coalition led by Syria and Egypt launched a pre-emptive strike against Israel . The Israelis wre caught with their pants down and the Eygyptians made initial gains in the south of Israel . Within three days the Israelis managed to rally their forces and by the end of the month the Israelis had managed to deal a decisive blow to the Arabs in general and the Eyptians in particular that Egypt never again threatened Israel . That said the 1973 war remains the closest the Israelis have come to losing a war and this 2000 Israeli film makes a powerful anti-war statement that war is a brutal and terrible thing even for the victors . As Bertrand Russell once said " There's no winners or losers , only survivors " Congratulations to director Amos Gitai for showing war for what it is . Based upon his own experiences of the conflict this is both straight from the heart and straight from the horses mouth which shows the human cost of conflict . The story centres around a small microcosm of the war where two Israeli soldiers caught up in the chaos volunteer for a medical unit carrying out cavesac of wounded IDF troops If there's a problem to KIPPUR it's probably too realistic for its own good . The camera doesn't do much , the average shot length is overly long , there's long segments devoid of dialogue and there's little in the way of incidental music . In other words this is a movie that should be studied long and hard at University film classes as an example of realism in cinema , but possibly won't be better known beyond that . By a bitter irony it won't be acclaimed as being an anti-war classic because .... well you know who's going to feel sorry about Israeli soldiers being maimed and killed in a conflict where it's the Arabs who are the aggressors ? As a footnote one thing that is distracting is the tanks used which are Merkava tanks which didn't enter service until 1979 . In 1973 the Israelis would have been using the British made Centurion as their main battle tank , but that said nearly every single war film you'll ever see has the same type of anachronism where tanks are involved

Where do I sign up???? I can produce a movie with MUCH better quality and I'm not even a director much less in the film industry!!! In the comments I read earlier, someone hit the nail on the head and pointed out that there was no real sense of danger. I laugh at those people who thought that this film was realistic. Realistic my ass!!! To quote what someone said earlier, there was no acting, no plot, and to add to this, the affects were cheesy at best!!! The helicopter being shot down for example. One initial blast and then another later on, this didn't match the story the pilot explained to the doctor. Again, no sense of danger. And where was all the debris, where were the helicopter blades on the topfof the helicopter? And the battle scenes? all they did was grab 4 or 5 Israeli tanks and wheel them back and forth. I managed to see ONE tank fire a shot at some point. PLEASE!!! I'm not even IN the army and I'm quite sure that is NOT the way you fight a battle.You want to see REALISTIC!!!???? you want to see a REAL anti war film? Then you go watch PRIVATE RYAN, NOW THAT IS A MOVIE! The scenes in the movie were so realistic is brought back a lot of memories and shock thatto the veterans that watched the movie and were there. If they say it was realistic, then that's good enough for me.

When I screened Kippur, I was very enthusiastic. I had waited a long time to finally be able to see it.Huge disappointment.There is no story line. No acting. No directing. No Camera work. Nothing with the exception of a constant annoying helicopter hummer and the never-ending noise of a diesel engine.Save time. Avoid the movie.

Kippur was a big disappointment for me, to see such an experienced director like Gitai come up with such a poor film like this. The opening scene -the boy running in the deserted streets during war time- was really very beautiful. The shot was very successful, with great direction talent. Then, after this scene, little waves of disappointment started to flow through me. Firstly in the scene where the boy and his girlfriend were making love in the paint, the music was so inappropriate and annoying and the scene took too long. Having seen the same guy in these first two scenes, I thought ''ok, he is the leading guy''. And in all movies, you feel the need to sympathize with a character in order to be able to get yourself in the movie. This is how you can feel for the people in the film, and how you can get into the director's head. Anyway. What I felt all through Kippur was not a sense of sympathy for any of the actors, but rather that the film was like a parade of people wandering around. No one was the leading character. One character comes up and says something important and you never see him again. One character begins telling a story in one scene, yet he does not continue with it in the rest of the movie and you try so hard to figure out where that should belong in the film as a whole. Dialogues were very poor. The sentimental side of the war was trying to be conveyed to the audience obviously, but the words used were so poor at describing soldiers' feelings. Most scenes were so unnecessarily long, long silences didn't carry any meaning, and editing was very bad %90 of the time. As for the ending, it was so plain and so poor. Not only could I not sympathize with a character, I also could not get that feeling of relief when the guy returned to her girlfriend and they started making love again. At the start they made love, in the middle he made war, and at the end, love again. This was not such a unique idea and especially when it's tried to be given in such unsuccessful and wrong ways, a great disappointment is caused for the audience. I had hoped to ''feel'', but I couldn't unfortunately. The film lacked that emotion and philosophy.Having seen an excellent movie like Thin Red Line, I cannot help but compare and contrast Kippur with that. The weakness of Kippur is highlighted then. I absolutely felt something during Thin Red Line -the war, the pain, the anguish, the lightness of death and all- especially in the final scene where the leading actor James Caviezel -there was a leading actor there- was floating free in the water and talking freely in his mind, I felt something in my throat, keeping me on the edge of crying. I felt him, I felt what the director meant, I felt the war, I felt the movie. Thin Red Line is an incomparably successful war film. I have seen Saving Private Ryan too, a beautiful film more showing the war zone and with great special effects, but Thin Red Line is the one in my all time favorites. Not everything that starts well goes well...