 to ThinkTech, I'm Jay Fidel. This is movies you can learn from. And today we're going to talk about the movie called Golda. It's easy to remember. It refers to Golda Maier, the first woman president, prime minister of Israel. And she was really something. And George Casey is going to help me do this. He's looked at the movie. It's a very engaging movie. And he's going to tell us what he liked about it, and maybe what he didn't like about it, George. I generally like this movie. It's encapsulated a period in the history of Israel that was traumatic because Syria and Egypt attacked Israel. And Israel's intelligence was down, and they didn't know until less than a day before that this attack was coming. So here was Golda Maier, prime minister of Israel, in this horrible situation. And she navigated it beautifully, a great, great navigator. And there were times when Israel was almost going to be obliterated because these guys were winning Syria and Egypt. But she's held on. She's a tremendous personality. I mean, I'm going to get into later what I felt Helen Mirren missed. But Helen Mirren is an excellent actress. And she did all the nuts and bolts real good. But she missed Golda's charisma, because at the end of this movie, they showed a short clip of Golda and Sadat, Anwar Sadat, as they were getting ready to have peace. And you could see Golda's charisma just came right through. In that short clip, Helen Mirren didn't quite capture that. With all her makeup and all her skills, she missed that. Now, what this movie, I'll kind of keep this short. This movie gets into all the back and forth when Israel was losing, when Israel was winning a little bit. And at the end, Henry Kissinger played by Lee F. Schreiber, who's an American actor. He's playing Henry Kissinger, how they sat down. And really interesting, she served him borscht. She, you know, women have a way that men don't have. And one of the things I always knew about Golda Mayer, because as a woman, she's more sensitive. She's sensitive to her staff. She's sensitive to Moshe Dayan, who was totally devastated because she screwed up royally, right? So she knew, you know, women have a way that she was, and she was not only the first woman prime minister, she was the only prime minister, woman leader of Israel. And she came through with flying colors. So, Ali, I'll let you get into some more, Jay, and then maybe I can chime in things will come to mind. Well, I watched the movie twice, because I thought that it captured historic events in 1973. And it captured the, you know, the soul of the Israeli government of the relationship between the prime minister, Golda, especially as a woman, and her management team and generals. And, you know, we've been all studying the Israel defense against Gaza terrorism. And we have spokesmen that come around from the IDF and give us, you know, reports on how things are going. But this kind of fills a gap, because when you put them all together, all the generals and all the leaders of the government together, as we saw in this movie, then you begin to understand, number one, how they collaborated on military and strategical decisions. I'm sure the collaboration that existed in 73 is the same kind of collaboration that existed today. And PS, the mistakes that existed in 73 are similar to the mistakes that were made before October 7. Now, furthermore, it's not just a matter of collaborating on strategy. This movie shows you how the Israelis did that in 1973. Their war rooms, so to speak, with all the computers and messages and audio from the battlefield, that was really interesting. And I say to myself, if they can do that in 73, you can imagine how real-time it is in 2023, how many years later. Notice that, is that, and I get that right. Is that 60 years later? 73, 93, 93, 20. Yes, 60 years, I think, 60. 60 years later. You can imagine what the war room is like today, with a live feed, live feed from the battlefield, with the voices of the commanders and the troops from the battlefield, feeding into a room with a combat information center in Tel Aviv, where they were studying on a map who was where and what was happening. I'm sure that's what happens today. We haven't seen the inside of that today in the news and in the YouTube videos that are available from the IDF, but I'm sure it's like that or way better. So this movie teaches you a lot and you have to wonder, I was looking, it was released in 2023. It might have been released even after October 7. I don't know, I can't tell. And that's really interesting because that puts a political bent on it. Here's a movie about Israel being attacked and Israel responding and Israel having troubles responding. And we're going through the same process right now. And it's a fair chance that the movie wasn't made before October 7, but it might have been released on or after October 7. And it's a statement. It's a statement about how Israel works under this kind of duress. So I really enjoyed it because it filled a gap for me about exactly how this kind of thing works in Israel. The one thing that's common, which maybe we don't fully understand, is that in 73 Israel was at great risk. The Egyptians were planning to march right into Tel Aviv. And the Syrians were trying to blow up and destroy the Israeli army and for that matter Israel. And so Israel was at great risk and Golda said so much, said as much to Henry Kissinger. We need to conduct this war or we will be gone. It will be the end of Israel. And for a while it looked like they were on the wrong end of that. And so if you look at what's going on right now, you have to see this as a multi-front war, a war that is at least as deadly for all these four fronts or more. There are all these countries that we'd like to destroy Israel. And there's a parallel there, although it's not articulated in the media. This is not as much as I would like to see anyway. This is a war for Israel's survival, just as the war, the Yom Kippur war, was a war for survival. I say Yom Kippur because remember that the Yom Kippur war was executed by Egypt and Syria and for that matter Russia in Yom Kippur, on the very holiest day of the year for the Jewish people. And the same thing here in October 7th, that was on the 7th. It was on Simqas Torah, which is a holiday. And so there's a parallel. It's like they played the same playbook again, but maybe worse. A lot of Israeli soldiers, the movie tells you, were killed in the 73 war and taken prisoner. And in the end, there was an exchange negotiated through Golda and what's his name in Egypt? Anwar Sadat. And Henry Kissinger. So it was a negotiated result, but only after Israel turned the tides. And they used some very clever ground strategies to actually turn a losing position into a winning position. And they had encircled the Egyptian army of 30,000 troops and who had no water. And they were going to destroy this army and they held that as a bargaining chip for Henry Kissinger to go to Nixon and arrange some kind of negotiation with Anwar Sadat. And I guess Syria was involved in it, too. And that returned to all the prisoners. Israel had a lot of prisoners, too, by the way. And the ratio was, I don't remember how many prisoners there were on the Israeli side, but it wasn't nearly the number of prisoners that the Israelis held from the Arab side. Anyway, this was instructive, a historical matter. And what happened then and how it relates to what happened now. The other thing I want to mention is that I never saw Helen Merrin do so well. Now, you can say that she didn't have the charisma that perhaps Golda actually had. But I think Golda was a grandmotherly type. That's why people loved her. And she did have a sense of humor. She was kind. She served borscht and chicken soup, like any grandmother, Jewish grandmother would do. And she was from Milwaukee. I don't know if you know. She was born in Eastern Europe. And she spoke of that. But then she came to the U.S. and traveled and moved from Milwaukee to Israel the way she became, believe it or not, the Prime Minister. She also lived in Colorado. Oh, okay. So she was an American person. And she understood and she knew Henry Kissinger, which helped her speak plainly to him and negotiate. And I really liked the script on this. It was really well written because she was telling him she was the power player between the two of them. And Lee Shriver did a great job, although he's too tall to represent Henry Kissinger, who's a shorter man. She really had him going. She told him what to do. She didn't mince any words with him. And so you can say that she, on the other side of her, which maybe we didn't see enough where she was charismatic, but the side that counted is when she brought him into her apartment there in Tel Aviv and fed him borscht and told him what for. She told him what for. And you say to yourself, gee, I wonder how that would work with Tony Blinking being there. Or for that matter, Joe Biden against Gold. Gold would have told him, hey, don't fool around with me. We'll conduct this war we want. And if you want to make any deals for a truce or a ceasefire, they'll be on our terms. And don't bother me. And she was, the script was fabulous. And I think it was probably faithful that people who put this together knew what they were doing. So, you know, the historic aspect is what appealed to me. And she played, my wife said to me, who exactly is portraying Golda? Because it looks like Golda. It sounds like Golda. You know, all the personal characteristics of Golda, I said, it's Helen Merrin. She said, no, it's not Helen Merrin. She doesn't look like Helen Merrin. So, you know, special effects, it was that that special effects was great, because you actually felt that that was Golda Maier. You know, I mean, she played it really good. I mean, I didn't have a problem with all the nuts and bolts of playing Golda Maier. It was just there's that little spark that I didn't find there, you know, that you see at the end when they actually show a short clip, as I said, with Anwar Sadat, then you could, it comes through within that 20 second clip, it comes through. It's true. But my answer to you is that she had two sides to her. She had that tough side with Henry Kissinger, which was, you know, I love you, I accept you, but you're going to have to listen to me. And the side where we saw her in the clips later where she had this sense of humor and a public engagement with Anwar Sadat. By the way, Anwar Sadat was later assassinated. It was assassinated because he recognized Israel. Exactly. She got him into that. She made him recognize Israel to save his army. But bottom line is a lot of people in the Arab world didn't like that at all. And I think the other one's responsible for assassinating him. To me, Anwar Sadat is a hero because he recognized Israel. It was Islamic jihad that assassinated him in Egypt, the branch of Islamic jihad in Egypt that assassinated him. Because they don't, they want to get, I mean, they don't want Israel to be there, period. Not on nothing. They want to just, you know, the whole thing about the river to the sea, get, you know, that's their, you know, these half things that, you know, two state solution, will the Arab, the Palestinians ever be satisfied? That's my question with a two state solution if they get part of the package. She was the one, she had a lot of quotable quotes. We haven't talked about that. And if you go on the internet, you will find these really memorable Yogi Berra type quotable quotes from her. And one of them was, you know, when you can't negotiate a peace with someone who was sworn to kill you. That's true as simple as that. That's what it was. And if you brought her back, died in 1978, if you brought her back today, she would say that again. And she would say, don't you, haven't you learned, you can't negotiate a peace with someone sworn to kill you? One of the scenes that I really liked between her and Kissinger, Kissinger is telling her where he's coming from, where the United States is coming from. He says, I'm an American first, I'm a Secretary of State, second, and I'm a Jew, third, right? And then she turns around, and you know, she understood because she was an American, you know, I mean, she, just like him, he was started off in Europe, Germany, and then America, and then, and she, Milwaukee in Colorado, said she said to him, but in Israel, we read from thing right to left. So that was a real interesting scene. She was so steely. The woman was brilliant. I mean, she was, you know, and I'm into astrology, she was a Torian, typical Torian, a lot, a lot sensitive, but really strong. She's like, like in England, you had that iron, she was the iron lady of Israel, you know, she's absolutely, she was no pushover, you know, and, and if she was in this Israel today, the Prime Minister is will be the better shape than it is now. True. We have to talk about that. We have to talk about leadership here. But I'd like to say that if Tony Blinken were there, his comment would be the same. You know, he's what, American first, Secretary of State, and he's Jewish third, same thing. So what I'm, what I'm saying is that there are so many lessons here. And you know, you mentioned that she was the steely lady. What made it all the more remarkable is that she was undergoing cancer treatment throughout this critical, stressful time. She's getting radiation on a regular basis. Seemed like it was every couple of days during the crisis. Under the machine getting radiation. And she was very weak, but she was a picture of discipline and will. And it defines her. She was smart. She was cagey. She was educated. It was kind of tricky. You know, on the one hand, you serve borscht and chicken soup. And on the other hand, you tell these men what for. And what kind of a fantastic leader is that? This is a story of a woman who was the only woman in the room with all her retinue and all her commanders in the army. It was no other woman in the room. And it was just her telling him what to do. So I thought that was an amazing statement about her and about Israel and about them. They listened to her. Oh, but Moshe Diane, I told you when we first spoke about this, it really touched me. Moshe Diane screwed up. He was advocating for a militarization, a mobilization of either zero or very small based on the intelligence they had the day before. And they negotiated and she was so she mediated the negotiation, right? And he wanted zero mobilization. And the other guy wanted 200,000 mobilization. When in fact, the Egyptians and the Syrians were already with huge mobilization, seven to one, you know, the ratio was. And so she had these two people at the table arguing and she negotiated 120,000. She made a mediator's ruling. We're going to do 120,000. Don't argue with me. That's what we're going to do. Well, actually it wasn't enough. And their intelligence was faulty because, you know, these guys were ready to really let them have it. So what I thought was very interesting is that Moshe Diane was ready to hang it up when he saw the mistake he made. He was ready to resign, retire, whatnot. And he was, you know, humiliated and embarrassed and very, very unhappy about it. And she put her arm around his shoulder and she said, Moshe, we need you. You have to continue to sit at this table. You have to continue to be, you know, in charge. Although there was one interesting scene where she said to one of his lieutenants, she said, see Moshe was talking about using atomic bomb. That's how desperate and unhappy he was. And she said to the lieutenant, she said, look, Moshe is a little stressed out. So don't take any orders from him. You're secretly in charge of this. What are the other things that was interesting? You know, she was the only woman in the room. And she said to her aid, she said, you know, in the olden days, when Ben Gurion, all these generals would stand when Gurion raised into the room and she, they won't stand for me. So it was a male kind of thing, you know. But I thought that was interesting too. There were a lot of little scenes like that that I felt were really profound, interesting, you know, like on this, in this movie. And we were watching history, history of being revisited. And Helen Muren has the gravitas to give you historical statements. And there are so many times in that movie where, you know, the voices were so serious and the events that were taking place were so critical, so turning point inflections of history right there in front of you. I mean, I felt that it was, you know, an accurate statement of what happened. But more than that, it was a completely engaging statement of what happened. And we have to mention, of course, don't we, George, that she was later investigated. In 1974, the Israeli government, very democratic, right, appointed a commission to look into what happened because they suspected that that the government, her government was unprepared for this attack and hadn't mobilized quickly enough and hadn't obtained the right intelligence. And in fact, it hadn't. There was a mistake in intelligence. I don't know if you caught that. Oh, yeah. So there she is all by herself smoking. She chained smoke, this woman, even when she was under the radiation. She chained smoke every day, every minute. There's always a cigarette. She would do that trick where you light one cigarette with the other, so you're always chain smoking. And she was chain smoking in front of this panel of investigators, probably half a dozen of them. And she had to tell them the story about all this. And the final comment that she made off the record in that panel, they said to her, how many people, how many Israelis died? And she said, well, let me look at my little books. She kept the record, okay, of everybody who was died prisoner and who was tortured and all that. She had, she had it all. And she said, I feel responsible for this. I will carry it to my grave. And then she turns around to the court reporter and she says, don't put that out the record. Don't put that out. But things honorated her. And that was appropriate. So what do you think about this movie as a movie? All in all, I like the movie. The smoking, I think was too much, too much smoke. And a lot of the reviewers said the same thing. I mean, you know, I'm really anti-tobacco. You know, I'm wondering, was that an ad for the tobacco industry or what? But it was too much smoke. And accept that other comment I made about, you know, Golda having charisma that didn't really come through. All in all, from a historical standpoint, I thought this was really good. And given the current situation, I think that it was really apropos for the current events to see how she handled this and how, you know, she was just a brilliant strategist. You know, she knew, I mean, at times she thought it was, everything was lost. But she stuck it out. And given the fact that she was dying of cancer, can you imagine what kind of a personality, steely personality she had to be able to save her nation while she was dying of cancer? A phenomenal, phenomenal human being. And I don't think any, Israel has had a lot of pretty good prime ministers, but I think she was, she, I mean, 67 war, I don't think the 67 war was it, was it as critical for Israel as the 73 Yom Kippur war? But this was a turning point that she carried it out. And hopefully the current, I mean, Antony Blinken is really trying not this thing to get at a hand where all these other players come in and play where it could just, you know, escalate. And so this is a very good movie. You want me to rate it? Or not yet? No, not yet. Not yet. So what did you think of the acting by the principles? What did you think of the production values? What did you think of? And I agree with you about the smoking. There was too much stress on the smoking. I mean, it invited your attention over and over again. And it really, it might have been true, but we don't need to know, we don't need to see so much smoking. And I would say that they were very careful about giving you a lot of detail. And I don't remember why the birds were so important. Did you notice in the final moments of the movie? What was that about? Even before there were things with the birds, I think the birds that the birds could sense that there was war in the air. You know, birds are, they feel things, right? And I think that they felt that even earlier in the movie they showed, initially they showed the birds when this battle was going to start. So I guess they sensed it. So I think that was the whole bird. And then she said to the commission, she said, I felt it in my bones. I should have done more. I felt they were going to attack us on Yom Kippur. And yeah, so the bird, and then she would look at the sky and see the birds flying. And that was part of her intuition, what the birds were feeling, she was feeling. Yeah, you're right. Acting, yeah, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off, Jane. Yeah. Like you meant, you asked. The acting Helen Mirren was good. Let Liev Schreiber as Kissinger really good. The guy that played Moshe Dayan, it could have been better. For me, it was missing something. And then all the other players, the key actors for me and the primo performances were Helen Mirren and Liev Schreiber. And also, what was her name? Katanz, Claudia. What's her name? Camille. Camille, yeah. She played Golda's assistant. She's a French actress. She was pretty good too. She played this thing pretty good also. But some of the other acting could have been better. I mean, it just sort of left. It wasn't really up to primo. And the scenes, you know, I mean, they did show maps of what was going on and also a lot of the reviewers felt they really wasn't that much showing the battles, you know, but that was sort of secondary. I mean, because the focus of this movie had to do with Golda Maier and how she handled it and her persona, her personality, and they did good with that, right? So, I mean, I don't really agree with the reviewers that they had to have so many battle scenes. And a lot of these reviewers, whenever they have something like this documentary kind of thing, this was not really a documentary. It was a biography. It was a showcase of who was Golda Maier. And they did really good with that. So that's about all I have to say with that. And then the inside of the war room and, you know, from that era, I mean, the furniture and everything was from the 70s, you know, and the clothing and stuff. So that was pretty good. So you chime in, Jay, how did you think about that? You know, give your two cents. You made me think of her legs. She had really, you know, swollen legs. She was an elderly person. And she made a crack about, they said, how are you feeling today? And she said, well, you would know if you had my legs. It's a motion diet. Someone said in the reviewers that it was, she said that to Kissinger, but no, she said it to motion diet. And she had her special shoes because of her feet, you know, someone in her 70s, like, you know, we are, you know, I mean, what a, what a powerful person. I mean, you know, I mean, amazing, just an amazing personality, that that's all I could say. And Helen, I had the same thought that you did somewhere in the middle, where you see all the war stuff, and you hear the sounds of the audio feed coming from the tanks and the troops, and you heard the screams of the dying men. That was extraordinary. And he imagined the frustration of the people in the war room. They're listening to this. It's happening, I don't know, 100 miles away or more. And there's nothing they can do but listen to their own brethren dying. And so I suppose, and I thought to myself, just as you did, I thought, well, you know, there could be more battle scenes, but somehow that would have corrupted the movie. Because what you were saying is true. This was a story about how a goal to operate and how she navigated such difficult terrain, how she worked with all these people, how she brought it together. And it goes to the question of the lessons in leadership. She was a leader. She understood the people around her. She understood how to bring them together. She understood the challenge of dealing with the United States and with Henry Kissinger and Nixon and all that. And that was sort of an example of leadership. So I felt that it was okay. We just, we know going in that this is a story about how she averted a crisis, how she saved the state of Israel in 1973. And she was the one most responsible for that outcome. The rest of them were following her. So I didn't miss the war scenes. In fact, I was I was torn listening to those poor guys at the front who were getting killed on the radio. And all the generals are standing around listening. And Gold is beside herself because she's on the feed. She's got a headset on. And she's listening. So very powerful stuff. And very informative. And I think, you know, I learned a lot about Israel and about leadership and about the relationship of the two countries and about the, you know, the Russians and how awful they are and Assad and Syria and how awful he would pull the finger. Remember this? He would pull the fingernails out of the Israeli soldiers, all of whom are 18, 19 years old. They would pull the fingernails out to torture them. Really gross. The only foreign leader that came out well was Assad, the Egyptian. Anyway, so let's talk about rating with all of that. What do you think? Because I like the whole idea of the movie and what I will give it a 9.5. But that smoking bothered me really. I mean, I was thinking 9, but I'll give it a 9.5 because of all the other factors that are pretty good. You know, as I said, acting by Helen Mirren and Leif Schreiber and superb, right? And but I'll give it a 9.5. I got some issues, some of the other actors as well, but we'll leave it at that. Yeah, the smoking didn't bother me that much. What they were trying to do was give you an intimate portrait of her. And it was really intimate. I mean, I don't know how they did this, but they had shots of her face right down to her eyeballs. They had shots of her skin. And it spoke of the makeup that was involved here. You couldn't tell that it was Helen Mirren. She was made up to a fairly well. And yet when the camera got really close to her, you couldn't tell. You know, it looked to me like real skin. So I think there was a certain level of outstandingness on how they made her up to look like, you know, a golden. And you know, throughout the movie, I was I was waiting for a time when I would be able to recognize Helen Mirren as Helen Mirren. It never came. It was an intimate portrait of golden right down to the pores on her face and her hands and her legs. It was so I think I forgive the of the smoking because of the excellence of the makeup, because that was really outstanding. This movie is not going to get, you know, Oscars and awards, though. And I'm not sure I understand why not. It got it got three stars from Rotten Tomatoes, which made me feel that Rotten Tomatoes should get three stars too. For a low rating, it was that was way low. And I feel that, you know, it could be that we had progressive liberals at Rotten Tomatoes that didn't like the idea of supporting Israel. And so they made their rating, you know, after October 7th, so they decided to give them a low, low rating. Jay, Jay, one thing, if you look at some of the individual things that rated it number one, a lot of them were Arabs, they really stormed that and, you know, and gave really poor reviews. And some of the reviewers also gave poor reviews that the public, a lot of them, they just, there were a lot of those number only ones was Arabs or people of Arabic background. So that that's a factor, you know. Sure, I totally agree. And I, I'm glad you said that because that's what I came away with here. This is this is a politically charged movie. It is a statement about Israel. And it is a statement about these Arabs attacking Israel on the holiest day of the year. And doing very bloodthirsty things in 73 and, and the, you know, the ultimate messages Israel suffers the risk of this kind of attack every day. And it has had like five wars where somebody else has attacked it or a number of Arab countries have attacked it in a coordinated effort all the time. That and that's the statement. And that's the truth. If they want to deny that, they're denying history. Anyway, for all those reasons, I would give it a 10. I was, I was not only entertained, but I was historically entertained. And I learned a lot. After all, we're here to learn from the movies, aren't we? Yes, definitely. Okay, see you in a few weeks, Jay. We'll find another one. Thank you, George. George Kasin, movie reviewer par excellence.