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In This Issue

• The Monkey Election College
• The Goshen, CT County Fair
• Freak Babies: Gotta Catch 'Em All
• Interview with author Louis Silverstein
• Animals, Placentae and You
• Letters to the Feditor
• 114th Street Rat Rock Exploration
• Bodacious the Rebel Bull
• Fed Arts Review: Columbia Unbecoming
• Mary Had a Little Lamb... with Potatoes
• John Jay Pet Deathmatch
• A Letter to the Columbia Gospel Choir
• DARE: 8 Ways to Say No
• Ice Bitch Comic
• Guide to Naming Suburban Housing Developments
• THEY WATCH

Mike Ilardi

Ready for a feel-good movie about shared values that the whole family can enjoy? Just in time for the Holiday Season (that'd be Christmas, Kwanzaa, or Hannukah, maybe Diwali, but not Ramadan) comes the blockbuster hit that has everyone talking! Yes, it's Pixar's latest animated tour through a magical world where reality and fantasy seem to cross over, Columbia Unbecoming, with Daniel Pipes, David Horowitz, and other ideologues providing voices for amusing computer-animated caricatures of Jewish Columbia students.

You might have heard about the decisions made by the filmmakers to simulate reality-television cinematography through the use of constant auto-focus zooming, poorly framed shots, and wooden delivery of lines, which does indeed succeed in producing a ‘lo-fi' ‘home-movie' effect, where we feel the palpable terror of the Jewish students, alone in the dark woods, with their food supplies dwindling and only old legends to fuel their fear. However director Rachel King ("Anti-Apartheid is Anti-Me", "The Truth About Israeli Cats and Arab Dogs") apparently lost her nerve, and instead of delivering the money shot of topless Orthodox Jewesses "going wild'"we are treated to her attempts at "highbrow art." When title cards explaining who declined to appear in the film are juxtaposed with oriental music, we are left wondering. Is King, in Tarantino's footsteps, delving into parody or is this loving, honest homage to the racist stereotypes of old?

You might want to keep the younger kids at home for this one as many of the staggering logical gaps and flailing paranoid claims might disturb the littlest of viewers. Also, don't forget to bring something absorbent to wipe up the wad of self-pity and denial that was shot at the end of the preview screenings this reporter attended.

Columbia Unbecoming showing soon-but only through the organization of pro-Israel groups to Columbia administrators and trustees, or through the pro-Israel groups themselves, so as to limit the amount of honest debate around the issue.