The Hebrew Hammer (2003)

One of my top 5 favourites of all time, so many inside jokes. A classic! Can hardly wait for the sequel , which apparently is still moving forward. I once gave DVD copies to my Jewish friends on Chanukah. A great date movie to help break the ice with your Jewish princess (or prince) The sequel is titled "THE HEBREW HAMMER VS Hitler" How can you go wrong with a title like that. OK, now I'm filling lines for posting requirements Find a part for Sandy Koufax , Kesselman Gilbert Gottfried ? Jackie Mason before, you know. Where can I get a good corned beef sandwich in this town, that's not too dry? Nobody makes good corned beef anymore.

The Hebrew HammerThe irony of Jesus being Jewish is he'd likely celebrate Hanukkah over Christmas.However, this comedy speaks to the other Christmas mascot.Bullied as a kid for his beliefs, Mordechai grows up to protect Jews from persecution as The Hebrew Hammer (Adam Goldberg).When his services are needed by the black community to help stop Santa's son (Andy Dick) from eradicating Kwanzaa, Hammer is hesitate until he learns those plans include Hanukkah as well.Backed by the leader of the Kwanzaa Liberation Front (Mario Van Peebles), the chief of the Jewish Justice League (Peter Coyote) and the chief's daughter (Judy Greer), The Hebrew Hammer hunts down Damian.With a surprisingly funny performance from Andy Dick, The Hebrew Hammer is a self- deprecating spoof of every religious observance in December with the streetwise sensibilities of a 1970s blaxploitation film.Besides, without Kwanzaa and Hanukkah decorations retailers would have half of a shelf to fill.Yellow Lightvidiotreviews.blogspot.ca

I admit a weakness for these types of self-conscious parodies when done well.For me, that means a mix of riches. First, it has to be brutal. There's no sense in toying with something stupid and at time showing sympathy for that stupidity. All the better if the targets of the thing have some sort of societal proscription.MASH was funny (when it was) because it treated war like something completely without honor or value. Anything that Mel Brooks does fails the brutality test. He's merely juvenile, and not ashamed to shift perspectives for a giggle.This is funny because it destroys two boundaries. The most obvious is the Jewish stereotype. Yes, it exists. Yes, like any other group, they identify themselves, quite actively bending their lives, by drifting toward those very characteristics as a matter of definition.There's a long tradition of stage humor where Jews make fun of themselves and I assert that all these societal parodies spring from it, at least in the US.But the other bit is ever so clever. What they've built on is a pastiche of blaxploitation movies (and a few others as well). Part of the cleverness is in revealing these things to be even dumber than we readily admit; they take us to extremes we wouldn't otherwise go. Its a bit risky, that.So we have a triple layer here: Jews making fun of the kind of Jewishness they cling to. All of us making fun of a similar dynamic in blacks that black culture isn't mature enough to disparage. (Though half of Chris Rock's stuff comes close.) And on top of that we get some posturing, not much, but some that rigorously belittles us for being the moviewatchers we are. In recent memory the second Charlies Angels did it best, but there wasn't the delicious edge this has.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.

I picked up this movie because it caught my eye as movie with a Jewish comedy focus - something I had not seen before. I approached this film with an open mind, and was interested in the way it began. The opening is well put together, and the first half of the film gave me many reasons to laugh, and this is good.However, the humor soon became repetitive, the plot became confused and strained, and I realized I was no longer enjoying the film. I have tried to avoid saying this, but the movie became rather "cheap" - not a bad thing for a comedy if the humor holds up, but it didn't. I confess that I may have missed some of the humour, not being Jewish myself, and having little experience with Jewish culture. However, considering how heavily telegraphed the bulk of the humour was in this film, it's unlikely I missed much.The idea is a good one, and perhaps if a little more thought was put into it the film would have been watchable all the way through. I wish I could give the movie a higher rating, but strictly speaking it would have been better as a TV series or as a series of skits. There was just not enough worthwhile fresh material for a full-length movie.One thing to say about the casting - the lead role looked as if it had been designed with Ben Stiller in mind, but I don't think the movie would have been any more worthwhile if he had been in it.