I love this movie. I watched it for the first time some time last year and it instantly turned me onto Barbra Streisand, who I’d previously thought of basically only as a punchline, thanks to the guys at South Park :-p Some people seem to hate Yentl, and that I find pretty hard to understand. Hokey, yes, maybe not for everyone, yes; bad, absolutely not. Michel Legrand’s music is absolutely amazing: if nothing else, this is one of the best musicals of all time. The acting, from Streisand, Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving (god, I love her in this movie), is excellent. The production design and photography, all the technical stuff, is pretty damn superb for an early 80s movie.

One thing I noticed this viewing: spot all the resemblances to Disney’s Mulan. Somebody I was talking to online and wanted to know what the movie was about and I came up with the perfect description, I think, it’s the Jewish Mulan. No, Yentl doesn’t go off and fight, and Mulan’s father doesn’t die, but otherwise, the themes and plot points are exactly the same. There’s even a scene early on with her father talking about the growth of a tree in their garden.

I don’t know exactly how often I’d find myself sitting back through this one; I’ve been lucky this past year never to have taped it, so by the time it came back onto the TV this week, I was overjoyed to see it again. It’s an amazingly rich movie (but then, that’s why I love it), and feels even longer than it really is at over 2 hours. But that huge finale on the boat at the end (“A Piece of Sky”): that I could probably watch on a loop for ever.

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