There are a lot of holiday movies out there, and even more if you count pseudo-holiday movies that are set during the holidays but not necessarily about the holidays. The first Die Hard movie is a good example of that. It’s hardly a movie that Grandma will sit down to watch with the grandkids, but it is set during the holidays. Frankly, there aren’t a whole lot of them I like, but I do have a few favorites. And there are two that I watch every holiday season because I love them that much. The first is Love, Actually, which is not just a great holiday movie, it’s a great movie, period. Lots of big names in it and the movie is just so well done. The second is a somewhat obscure comedy that has become a cult classic. No, I don’t mean A Christmas Story. I mean The Hebrew Hammer.
There is an article over on Salon that talks about how the movie’s creator wants to make a sequel, and it sounds like the sequel is going to be just as over-the-top as the original.
In “The Hebrew Hammer vs. Hitler,” it’s a decade later and Mordechai (Goldberg) is no longer the Jewish superman that the kids on the block looked up to when he walked the streets of Brooklyn wearing a long leather coat and a feather-topped fedora over his shaped-with-spittle sidelocks (payis). Now he’s settled down with a job selling trees to Israel for the Jewish Justice League in order to support his expecting wife (still played by Judy Greer). Mordechai’s incensed by it all and by the fact that the kids admire the Semitic Jewish Man – whose name, Hammer chafes, is not even an acronym for anything!
When the plan goes awry to send the Semitic Jewish Man to kill Hitler in a time-traveling Succah (the structure from the Jewish holiday Succoth), it gives Hammer and the “Shaft”-like Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahim (Mario Van Peebles) a chance to travel through Jewish history and meet characters like Abraham and Isaac, Moses and Jesus, Anne Frank and Hitler.
“It’s sort of a combination between ‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ meets ‘History of the World,’ which is my favorite Mel Brooks movie of all time” explains Kesselman, who feels more comfortable with his Jewishness now than he did ten years ago when he first came up with the idea.
Oh yeah. I can hardly wait to see it.
-Geoff
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