There’s something to be said for the irreverent holiday movie. Too often, cheap sentimentality rules the day. Leave it to loud-mouthed actor Seth Rogen and fellow actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Anthony Mackie. Though ultimately uneven, the movie, which opens today area-wide, provides a few good laughs as it satirizes holiday traditions.
The rather flimsy premise revolves around a holiday tradition that finds long-time friends Ethan (Gordon-Levitt), Isaac (Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) heading out to celebrate the holiday by bar-hopping. Since Isaac and his wife Betsy (Jillian Bell) are set to have a child soon and since Chris has become a big-time football star, the tradition will come to an end. So the guys plan to go out in style. And much like that motley crew in The Hangover, they get a little crazy.
To start the night off, they meet up with a creepy drug dealer Mr. Green (Michael Shannon) to score some weed for the night. Shannon is great as Green, who acts as the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Though a total stoner, he still manages to give them bits of advice on how to get through life. His half-baked moments are the film’s true highlights.
As the guys set out to find a secret holiday party that’s the stuff of legend, Isaac ingests a slew of drugs and begins hallucinating, something that doesn’t go over well with his wife when he joins her at a midnight mass and starts apologizing on behalf of Jewish people everywhere for what happened to Christ.
Some of the hijinx are hilarious. Ethan has a go at singing “Wrecking Ball” with Miley Cyrus, who makes a cameo. And the guys do a good rendition of Run D.M.C.’s “Christmas in Hollis.” But while these would make for good skits on Saturday Night Live, they don’t necessarily contribute to the story.
In fact, when the film turns serious as Isaac contemplates fatherhood, Chris questions his decision to juice and Ethan tries to get back with his ex-girlfriend, it wavers some and doesn’t effectively balance the satire with the serious stuff.
This article appears in Nov 18-24, 2015.
This is another racist movie where fat ugly Seth Rogen plays an explicitly Jewish character, while good-looking Jewish actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Lizzy Caplan, this time) play non-Jews. As a matter of fact, despite being the son of two Jewish parents, Gordon-Levitt has never explicitly played his own ethnicity once in his entire 30 years of acting. Is there a problem, Joey?
This is the same racist trick Rogen pulls every time. He always casts himself as an explicit Jewish character opposite non-Jewish characters played by good-looking Jews (Paul Rudd, James Franco, Dave Franco, Zac Efron, Halston Sage, etc.).
And this new film is from the same studio, S.S.ony, that released last year’s Fury, about fighting Nazis during WWII. Fury starred no less than four Jews (Logan Lerman, Jon Bernthal, Jason Isaacs, and Shia LaBeouf), yet none of the characters were Jewish and Jews and the Holocaust were never mentioned. Gee, maybe they should have cast Seth Rogen as a “funny” Jewish soldier who died early on in the film.
Actors of fully Jewish background: Logan Lerman, Natalie Portman, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Mila Kunis, Bar Refaeli, James Wolk, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Julian Morris, Adam Brody, Esti Ginzburg, Kat Dennings, Gabriel Macht, Erin Heatherton, Odeya Rush, Anton Yelchin, Paul Rudd, Scott Mechlowicz, Lisa Kudrow, Lizzy Caplan, Emmanuelle Chriqui, Gal Gadot, Debra Messing, Robert Kazinsky, Melanie Laurent, Shiri Appleby, Justin Bartha, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Margarita Levieva, Elizabeth Berkley, Halston Sage, Seth Gabel, Corey Stoll, Mia Kirshner, Alden Ehrenreich, Eric Balfour, Jason Isaacs, Jon Bernthal, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy.
Andrew Garfield and Aaron Taylor-Johnson are Jewish, too (though I don’t know if both of their parents are).
Actors with Jewish mothers and non-Jewish fathers: Jake Gyllenhaal, Dave Franco, James Franco, Scarlett Johansson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Daniel Radcliffe, Alison Brie, Eva Green, Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, Emmy Rossum, Rashida Jones, Jennifer Connelly, Sofia Black D’Elia, Nora Arnezeder, Goldie Hawn, Ginnifer Goodwin, Amanda Peet, Eric Dane, Jeremy Jordan, Joel Kinnaman, Ben Barnes, Patricia Arquette, Kyra Sedgwick, Dave Annable, Ryan Potter.
Actors with Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers, who themselves were either raised as Jews and/or identify as Jews: Ezra Miller, Gwyneth Paltrow, Alexa Davalos, Nat Wolff, Nicola Peltz, James Maslow, Josh Bowman, Winona Ryder, Michael Douglas, Ben Foster, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nikki Reed, Zac Efron, Jonathan Keltz, Paul Newman.
Oh, and Ansel Elgort’s father is Jewish, though I don’t know how Ansel was raised. Robert Downey, Jr. and Sean Penn were also born to Jewish fathers and non-Jewish mothers. Armie Hammer and Chris Pine are part Jewish.
Actors with one Jewish-born parent and one parent who converted to Judaism: Dianna Agron, Sara Paxton (whose father converted, not her mother), Alicia Silverstone, Jamie-Lynn Sigler.