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Best movie of this year hands down!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Blistering performances.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The Israeli movie Mita Tova was shown in the U.S. with the title The Farewell Party (2014). It was co-written and co-directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon. It's described as a drama/comedy, but it's not very funny.I like the concept of the movie--a group of older people in a retirement home are brought together to help members of their group who are suffering. Can they technically manage euthanasia? What are the ethical and moral implications? What are the legal implications?The most difficult situation does not involve physical pain. Levana, played by Levana Finkelstein, is a beautiful, intelligent woman who is showing signs of dementia. She's astute enough, in her lucid moments, to understand what's happening to her. What is the wisest answer to her terrible problem?The directors made a brilliant casting decision when they chose Ms. Finkelstein as the actor to play Levana. We tend to think of patients with dementia as being very old, with disheveled hair and clothing. Finkelstein does not conform to this stereotype. She is youthful, attractive, and stylish. We realize that this woman had a reasonable expectation of many more years of happiness. Sadly, that expectation will not be fulfilled. It's tragic.I found the comic portion of the movie to be problematic. Certainly, you can have comic interludes in a tragedy. However, I don't believe directors Granit and Maymon succeeded in making the comedy work. To me, this was a drama, and I think viewers should approach it as a drama. If you enjoy the comic aspects of the movie, all the better.We saw this film at Rochester's Little Theatre, as part of the fabulous Rochester International Film Festival. It will work very well on a small screen.

The Farewell Party was probably the funniest film at this year's Palm Springs film festival. It had to be. It's about euthanasia. By making it equal parts farewell and party the comedy made the sombre reality bearable.In an Israeli retirement home a modest inventor Yeheskel devises a machine to add a mortal combination to a hopeless patient's IV. The delicate operation is done by a heavy combination of gears and chains that looks like it would raise a drawbridge. That's a comic paradox akin to "mercy killing." He makes it for his old friend Max, who begs for release. The only doctor who will help is a vet, another resident.Yeheskel and his accomplices do not take their enterprise lightly. At every step it's a battle of conscience, to determine whether they're taking a life or saving it. It's a fight between the law and justice. When the home's administrator scolds them for an indecorous generosity, her piercing, personalized insults make their justice superior to her law. They're also supported by an incidental news report, which features the daily traffic mortality count — an unsolved problem larger than mercy killing — and the story of an 80-year-old man who with no other alternative killed his suffering wife then himself.Yeheskel's wife Levana is at first the most strenuously opposed to the death machine. But as she slips into humiliating dementia she comes to crave it herself. At the first sign of that Yeheskel destroys his machine. He won't use it on her. Or rather, for her. Then he remembers serving his beloved's needs should trump his own, so he rebuilds it to let her die in comfort and dignity.The framing story of one Zelda provides the religious context. In the first scene she gets ostensible phone calls from God, advising her to continue her treatments because there's not yet a vacancy in heaven. At the end she lets on that she knew it was Yeheskel all along. When she gets his treatment it's interrupted twice by power failures. She takes that as a sign from God and resolves to live on. Thus we contrive a higher power to direct us, i.e., to let us do what we want.Even these modest saints remain human, too. The vet's lover — who literally comes out of the closet — is venal enough secretly to collect a fee for the service. He's banished from the group and the affair.When Yeheskel gives his Levana the last "duckie kiss," it's what he gives his granddaughter. The characters' playfulness expresses their essential childishness, a vestigial joy and innocence. As Levana tells the administrator, "Their bodies are old but they're still children inside." To their credit. Retired from work and responsibility they're free to be young again however they can. That's the last joy in life. So, too, the old veterinarian is still trying to find a way to tell his mother he's gay.The fall setting outside reminds us that death is just a part of the natural cycle. That continuity also impels the musical interlude where the dead join the living to sing about Neverland.This marvellous film is required viewing for governments considering regulations to allow for assisted suicides. They all should be. .

I'd like to give this movie a 10 for acting and a 2 for content, because it weighs in on the side of euthanasia, with humor and sentimentality, and euthanasia is a treacherously slippery slope. Who should be more aware of what can happen when society starts ending lives deemed not worth living than the Jewish Israelis who made this movie and the Germans, of all people, who godfathered it? But to give the movie its due, it includes fine acting, including many dynamic and demanding close-ups, from Ze'ev Revach, Levana Finkelstein, and the other major players. Revach won Israel's annual Best Actor award for this role, and the angelic Finkelstein, portraying a woman with incipient Alzheimer's, was unjustly passed over for Best Actress in favor of the colorless but personally popular Dana Ivgy. The movie also won awards for its cinematography (which, it's been complained, makes sheltered housing look too attractive) and for its soundtrack.

This movie has brought be to tears - which is extremely unusual for me.Going through a similar process with my late father, I can say that the movie is very accurate.Such an amazing mixture of laughter and tears. So real, and so different from the run-of-the- mill, dime-a-dozen, Hollywood films. The kind of movie that provides you with real food for thought and a long lasting impression. I was greatly impressed by the very high quality of acting, direction, editing and cinematography, which is rare in the Israeli films landscape. I would most definitely rate is the best movie I've seen the past year.