Seeking Ferret

Eight Gifts of Hanukkah

For the past several years, the Hallmark Channel has aired one Chanukah movie a year along with its slate of, like, a Christmas movie premiere every day for all of November and December. So you can see, Much Jewish Representation. What is more, these movies have typically featured romances between one Jewish character and one Christian character. Whatever the merits of such relationships, the consequence is that even these so-called Chanukah movies have also had the character of Christmas movies, often much more than they had any Chanukah narrative. Furthermore, some of these movies trafficked in Unfortunate Jewish Tropes: Holiday Date required the Jewish male lead to be a sneak who was constantly lying about his identity in order to woo a Christian woman; Love, Lights, Hannukah made a meal out of Jewish blood being the dominant determinant of Jewish identity. In Mistletoe and Menorahs the Jewish lead literally had horns.

So I was not exactly expecting much of Eight Gifts of Hanukkah, and... it's not per se a good movie? But it's quite good for a Hallmark movie, and it was responsive to all of our complaints about previous Hallmark Chanukah movies, so, Good Job Hallmark! It's an actual Chanukah movie where nobody thinks about Christmas. It portrays a range of Jewish observances from the half-Jew for whom Jewishness matters but isn't a central concern to the romantic lead who prioritizes observance of Jewish holiday rituals because it connects her to family and tradition. And it's funny! The jokes actually land, they made me laugh out loud several times both with verbal humor and physical comedy. And the romantic chemistry between the leads is real, and the female romantic lead has chemistry with her other suitors too so that the conflict in the plot feels real, and JEWS DANCE. Like, a lot. Jews dancing not because we are good at it but because it's fun and finding ways to celebrate is important to us is actually the driver of one of the movie's key scenes. The male lead tries to teach the female lead how to dance and instead she settles for just swaying with him because the act itself is more important than doing it "right".

Inbar Lavi was great in Impostors and she is perfectly charming here. So yeah, if you want to watch a Hallmark Chanukah movie, a dubious if, I recommend this one.


PEN15 S2 Part 2 Episode 1 "Bat Mitzvah"

I do not find PEN15 funny, but they've been hyping the Bat Mitzvah episode for a while and it kept getting its airdate pushed back because of pandemic, so I was kind of delighted that it aired the same day as Eight Gifts of Hanukkah. JEWS DANCE IN THIS EPISODE.

Legally Blonde

(sequel to my post on the socioeconomics of You've Got Mail, and just as in that post, I come at it with no academic background in socioeconomics and a determination to imprecisely spill way more words than are deserved)

I've seen a number of smart and thoughtful analyses of the gender politics of Legally Blonde, but an additional thing that strikes me when I rewatch the movie is the strangeness of the class politics. Because the weirdest thing about Elle Woods is her blind spots about the performance of class.

Elle is, in the world of the movie, the first fashion major accepted by Harvard Law. This might seem obvious but in our world I would find it hard to believe. Lots of weird people get into Harvard Law! The guy who created Party of Five went to Harvard Law. Singer/Actor Ruben Blades went to Harvard Law. It wasn't too hard for me to look and find multiple Miss Americas who went to Harvard Law. You don't need to be a nerd whose entire life revolves around the alien tort statute to get into Harvard Law.

One thing that does help get you into Harvard is being rich. Elle Woods is rich, and mixes in elite social circles. Her boyfriend in college is the son of a US Senator; her sorority has connected her to alumnae including important American business leaders; we don't know much about her parents but judging from the style of their house and her father's general vibe, it is likely that they are significant players in the entertainment industry. Elle Woods spends a lot of time around rich and powerful people.

This makes parts of her experience of class in the film hard to explain. She shows up at her dormitory with professional movers and a declasse warddrobe, drawing stares from many of her soon-to-be classmates, one of whom quips that she is "Malibu Barbie". And obviously we need to engage with this from a feminist perspective, obviously Elle's performance of gender, her embrace of pink and other symbols of conventional femininity is one of the lenses through which the movie is inviting the audience to judge her, and then ideally to rethink that judgement. But...

But I try imagining that scene with Paris Geller from Gilmore Girls doing it and I can imagine almost all of the same details happening, except that if Paris Geller did it, she would be fully aware of the stares. The stares would be the point. Bringing professional movers to your college campus while wearing an outfit designed to stand out is a power move about asserting dominance and Paris Geller would never miss an opportunity to assert her dominance. But Elle seems to have no awareness of the response her move-in is provoking. She sails blithely by. One is tempted, if one is me and always reading crypto-Judaism into everything, to try to read Elle Woods, privileged daughter of Hollywood royalty, as Jewish. But it's impossible, there is no way that Elle Woods could possibly be Jewish, because Jews are always aware of how the world is judging us to a different standard.


Her college application essay plies similar avenues of blitheness. Granted, she has a 4.0 GPA and a near-perfect LSAT, supreme initial qualifications for Harvard Law. But Harvard Law is extremely selective from a pool of people with superior academic qualifications. You need luck and some other way to stand out to get accepted. Her video essay is... not how you do it. There is a language that the American upper class uses to communicate dedication to its values. All Elle's video essay communicates is that she has no use for that language or those values.

Nevertheless it works. There is a subtext there that I can't quite figure out. The second most obvious reading is that the admissions officer who advocates for her is turned on by Elle in a bikini and accepts her solely because of the bikini. It's a believable reading, though it's played so broadly in the film that it strains my credulity because the admissions officers very nearly breach some of the protocols of the American upper class in order to advocate for her. The more believable reading to me, which one must search more deeply to find, is that the admissions officer advocates for her because she is rich, because the subtext that he got out of her video essays it that she is so rich that she doesn't need to bother to try to perform upper class values. Elle Woods doesn't get into Harvard because of her competence, or because of her refreshing differences. She gets in because she was destined to get in. She was wealthy enough that it was a fait accompli- just as we learn later that her ex-boyfriend the-son-of-the-Senator got in because his father placed a phone call. (The most obvious explanation, however, is that the admissions officer advocates for her because the movie requires her to get into Harvard, somehow and the screenwriters didn't try very hard, but I will needless to say not entertain that idea any more in this post)


But what's hard to suss out about this kind of blitheness to the niceties of social class is that Elle Woods is otherwise depicted as a sharp observer of societal rules- the rules of clothing, the rules of nonverbal communication. She knows the poolboy is gay because he knows the brand of her shoes. She knows the techniques to pick up a man, techniques that depend on a constant awareness of how he is responding to her seduction. As a lawyer, her grasp of the technical nuances of the law seem essentially fine, good enough for Harvard even! But she seems to excel in empathizing with her clients, with getting them to trust them, with getting them to work with her. How could she be unaware of the unwritten rules of how to get into Harvard? How could she be unaware of the tactics required to make friends at Harvard? It seems impossible to me.

So I think you must consider the alternate approach, which is that Elle Woods's performance in her early days at Harvard is not premised on a lack of awareness of social expectations. She portrays herself as a trashy nouveau riche blonde bimbo on her application intentionally, she makes enemies among her classmates with her gauche entrances and eye-drawing clothing on purpose. Why? Because she doesn't care about Harvard Law, she only cares about winning Warner back, and winning Warner back, she is aware, involves making him aware that she is nonthreatening to his masculinity. And as a tactical decision, she is willing to sacrifice her reputation for that, because of her internalized misogyny, which she spends the movie gradually learning to be more thoughtful about. I mean, it's not like I can premise this analysis entirely on class and ignore the way it intersects with sexism. Clearly sexism is at the heart of what this movie is about.

So Elle is using the mechanisms of the American class system as a performance tool to woo the son of a US Senator, at the expense of Harvard Law and her own dignity. She suffers the indignities of Harvard's paternalistic, sexist culture with a knowing wink- showing up to a cocktail party in a sexy, scanty dress that lays bare the lies these scions of wealth are telling themselves about their personal caliber. They are not any better than Paulette's trailer trash ex.

And consider: the best man in the movie, the one who requires no arc of moral correction as Luke Wilson's character does, is Paulette's new Fedex deliveryman boyfriend. He is gentlemanly and courtly without being disrespectful, he appreciates a working woman and makes no unreasonable demands on her career or time, he applies no untoward pressure but makes himself available with a winning smile and waits for her to approach on her own terms. One of the things that Legally Blonde wants to say is that terms of how we assess sexism, class matters in presentation but not in substance.

This is premised on the fact that Elle has no respect for Harvard as an institution. It is not a hallowed hall, it is not to her the place where the nation's finest minds come to prove themselves. Its status games are empty, so it can be her playground.

But as she learns about the law, as she learns about all of the people in her study group that her winking pose predisposed her to dislike, Elle finds that she needs to reevaluate her strategic goals. Does she want to be married to a mediocre thinker with little empathy who seems better than he is because he has been propped up by the American legal and class system? Or does she want someone whose elevated social status (we learn nothing of Emmett's background in the movie, but he at least has manufactured status as a Harvard Law grad) is backed up with competence and kindness?

I think it's likely that this reading of the movie has to accommodate some degree to which Elle gets seduced into her own status game, and she has to unlearn things, too, about the way she uses her money. There is heroism in Elle's defense of Brooke, in her seeing the true self of a selfish, somewhat narcissistic, wealthy blonde woman when everyone else underestimates her. (I think there is a moral tragedy in Brooke's story, it is that she has created herself, to make money, by selling herself as someone to underestimate, and it comes back to bite her as people underestimate her all the way to a possible life sentence. That is Shakespearean tragedy in its essence.) But there is much greater heroism in Elle using her legal training in bullshit and jargon to reclaim Paulette's dog. I think in many ways the dog scene is the lynchpin of the movie. In that moment, Elle realizes that the law can actually help people, not just serve the system. She realizes that the lip service Harvard's professors pay to the nobility of the legal profession need not be entirely empty platitude. If people are willing to stand up for justice, they can have it. But Warner is not willing to stand up for justice, he's not been having the same moral epiphanies she's been having. And it therefore makes Elle realize that she has been acting in a way that reflects moral emptiness, pursuing the law without pursuing justice. And with that realization comes the realization that some of her Harvard classmates are not entirely empty, soulless neolibs. There is something worthwhile in the friendships she has formed at Harvard, and together they can work to make the world better, but only if she becomes a better version of herself. So she needs to deconstruct her pretense designed to seduce Warner and become a person worthy of friendship, not to mention being able to look herself in the mirror. The Elle Woods who went to Harvard because she decided it was how she would win Warner replaces herself with the Elle Woods who graduates Harvard because she is proud of the effort it took, and the person it made her.


Which is of course an awfully pro-Harvard take. In my observation, Harvard Law is, in actuality, full of empty, soulless neolibs. Not to say there aren't any worthwhile people who went there, and also not to say that there isn't value in the Harvard Law education- clearly there is. But I'm not overwhelmed with the evidence that Harvard Law teaches students, even inadvertently, how to be thoughtful people who inhabit the world humbly and try to make it a better place. In fact, it strikes me that Harvard Law's primary objective seems to be the perpetuation of itself as the standard of elitism in public service. Which, like, you know me, I think that's both a good and a bad thing. As a conclusion to an essay on class in Legally Blonde, I think that's a good final note to end on.

I rewatched the first Terminator film last night for the first time in ages. Still an excellent action movie, though not as good as T2, I think. But I was struck by some stuff I don't think I'd caught to the same degree on previous watches, this is definitely not the Terminator movie I have most obsessively watched.


The first half of the movie is very much about Reagan-era anxieties about urban crime, to a degree I don't think I'd picked up before, but which resonated uncomfortably in this era of BLM. Kyle Reese shows up in an alley in downtown LA and is immediately pursued by multiple police cars. His only crimes are stealing pants from a man sleeping in the alley, and appearing shirtless and suspicious to the cops; this is enough to provoke armed pursuit from multiple cops. He eventually acquires a long, ill-fitting trenchcoat to round out the outfit; the uniform of the 1980s Los Angeles homeless man.

Sarah spends quite a while running from Reese, who is just trying to find her and keep an eye on her to protect her from the Terminator, but because he is dressed like a homeless man she is convinced he is stalking her and planning to rape and kill her, and she immediately calls the police, who instantly believe the same because she is a threatened white woman, and once more send multiple squad cars to track him down. In fairness to the police, they also have evidence of a serial killer murdering people named Sarah Connor, but they have no profile for this murderer, easy to assume it's some homeless drifter.


Meanwhile, the Model 101 has no problem finding clothing that fits him well, and never faces the same kind of harassment Kyle Reese does. There's a weird theme I'd sort of forgotten from this movie because later movies do the same theme better, that Terminators are infiltrators, impossible to tell from real people. There's very much an anxiety about robots replacing humans animating the movie, of course, culminating as Terminator stories have multiple times in a fight in an automated warehouse with no people in it. But there's also an answering machine message in Sarah's apartment we hear multiple times that says "This is Ginger... no, it's actually a machine." The anxiety is most deeply that in the way that automation is already taking blue collar jobs, it will start stealing white collar jobs. You know, real jobs. :P

There's a flash-forward to a scene in Reese's time where a Terminator just opens fire in the middle of a human base that emphasizes this Terminator as infiltrator idea. But it's kind of a hilarious theme in the circumstances, because Arnold Schwarzenegger was also clearly chosen for the part because he is massive and kind of robotic, a little bit improbable-seeming as a human being. This is the body Skynet chose for its infiltrator, capable of fooling any human? Starting in T2 we see, both in Arnold!Terminator and in the various Patric!Terminator bodies, much more convincing impersonation, which in Arnold!Terminator's case involves some self-awareness about the preposterousness of the terminator body and assuming roles that can still be believable. But in Terminator I the idea that Ahnold can just fit in as a Terminator is silly and serves to reinforce the class warfare of the police against the underclass of LA street people.


In any case, the anxiety about Kyle Reese being homeless dissolves when the T-101 assaults the police station, trying again to kill Sarah. The police mostly disappear from the movie after this, because it confirmed the viewer's latent fear that against the kinds of criminal threats out there, the police are powerless to stop it, requiring something stronger than the police to make us safe.


I was also struck by the clarity of the feminist dynamics of the Sarah as damsel arc. In the final chase scene Reese tells Sarah that it's time to trade places, meaning that she takes the steering wheel while he attacks, but a minute later he is shot and it's clear the movie means something deeper than that. Sarah needs to switch places so that Kyle is the damsel to be rescued and Sarah is the one who saves him.

I do not know how I feel about The Rise of Skywalker.


Jews do not dance in this movie.


Oh, I guess I do know.

Life During Wartime

My first Todd Solondz movie, because the whole idea of a Todd Solondz movie never quite grabbed me. I didn't enjoy watching it, even though I love several of the film's actors, especially Allison Janney. And I was puzzled that it's labelled a comedy, I barely laughed at all.

Still, Jews dance in this film, in the climactic Bar Mitzvah scene.


[Redacted]

[Review redacted for Equinox reasons, sadly, as I have opinions and want to talk about them]


The Cakemaker

Jews do not dance in this film.

Still, it is a pretty good movie about grief and love, and as someone who has something of a fetish for films that have closeups of hands making things, I really enjoyed a lot of the bakery scenes.

The premise is that the titular cakemaker is a German twenty-something who has an affair with a married Israeli businessman visiting Berlin. When the businessman dies in a car accident, he travels to Israel and starts working in the businessman's widow's cafe, making cakes and cookies and intertwining himself in the life of his lover's family, seemingly trying to learn something about the businessman's other life that he was carefully kept out of in order to sort out his grief. If that wasn't already too complicated and messy, religion and kashrut rules make things even messier. First time I've ever seen bishul akum as a plot point in a movie.

Avengers: Endgame

Jews do not dance in this movie.

As usual, I am that asshole who posts spoilers.


Jews do not dance in this movie.

I thought it was overall a lot of fun, but I thought the flashback-heavy beginning made for a disjointed movie that took a while to hit its groove. Which is okay if you want to make a movie about amnesia and memory, but the groove the movie eventually did hit didn't seem to me that it was really about those things, it was about action and ethical heroism.

The movie uses its amnesia premise to set up a reversal from Kree warrior Vers, invested in the struggle of the heroic Kree warriors against the evil, manipulative shapeshifting Skrulls. When Carol regains her memories, she realizes that actually the Kree are evil imperialists and the Skrulls are being victimized. But this is annoyingly simplistic, what I really wanted was the version of this story I've seen a few times in the comics where eventually the realization is that both the Kree and the Skrulls are causing damage with their war and our hero picks the third side, fighting for innocents. The film doesn't quite get there. And in fact as Abigail Nussbaum points out, the movie ends up concluding with Nick Fury learning all the wrong lessons from his encounter with Carol. He concludes that humanity needs bigger and more powerful weaponized humans - the Avenger Initiative- if it wants to be secure in the universe.

For all these reasons, overanalyzing the politics of the movie is ultimately going to be frustrating. But I liked Carol a lot and I liked the satisfying clarity of her realization that she owes her mentor Jude Law nothing, that she only needs to prove herself to herself and not to the men trying to dictate her world.

And I liked that the movie lived in a technicolor world of bright shades and sparkles, it was a really joyful visual ambiance from start to finish.

And the movie made me have Nextwave feelings so I made this.




And the vid I have already started to plan is a multi-movie Tesseract vid to Tom Lehrer's "I Got it from Agnes" because the movie added a bunch of people who handled the Tesseract including a perfect lyrical match for "She then gave it to Daniel/ Whose Spaniel has it now" with Fury--> Goose!

The Courageous Heart of Irina Sendler

Jews do not dance in this movie

American Pastoral

Jews do not dance in this movie

Call Me By Your Name

Jews dance in this movie

A Simple Favor

Mystery thriller starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, directed by Paul Feig. EXTREMELY gay subtext. Fun and mostly engaging, but with occasional lulls and some headscratching plot twists. But mostly if you want to watch a movie where Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively flirt with each other, you should check this out. Highly recommended on those grounds.


The Good Wife Season 1

Enjoyable, thoughtful legal drama, with a really smooth balance between arcy stuff and case of the week. I mean smooth like a whiskey metaphor- the case of the week stuff helps the arc stuff go down smoothly. On really arcy shows I'm sometimes anxious because I know something will resolve unpleasantly but I don't know if I'm going to be anticipating it for one episode or ten, and that really bothers me. I thought The Good Wife would be like that, but it's thus far been reliable at balancing out that anxiety by giving you reliable case of the week happy resolutions. It's a show full of anxiety-causing material deliberately designed to minimize those anxieties.

I knew from osmosis I'd love Alicia and Kalinda and Diane and Will, but nobody prepared me for liking Logan Cary. But I do! Matt Czuchry is such a perfect casting, he plays privileged jackass so well. Every move he makes says I went to Harvard, but because Czuchry gives Cary a humanity too, that privilege foils Alicia's dark edges really effectively.

I particularly appreciate how carefully the show sets up that Alicia is constantly aware that other people are watching her and having opinions about her. From the opening shot of the series, periodically revisited, of Alicia performing the role of The Good Wife, the show explores her awareness of others' awareness in so many different, subtle ways. But it's almost never a topic of the show's dialogue, this is a theme the show explores exclusively in blocking and camera angles and meaningful glances. Which is really cool and filmic.

I'm also really enjoying the judge stunt casting. It's a neat calculation the showrunners made, that those sort of former star actors who are having a career lull either on purpose or by the vicissitudes of the industry would love to take on a guest role as a judge that doesn't take up much time that'd risk them losing out on other work, but lets them push themselves as actors. Peter Riegert, Ana Gasteyer, Joanna Gleason, etc... It's fun.


Slow Burn Podcast

Not exactly what it sold itself as: The show introduces itself by claiming it's going to be about stepping through the Watergate scandal as it was experienced by people as it unfolded, rather than in the retrospective way that history books/movies convert it into a narrative. But Watergate is simply too complicated and multifaceted to actually step through in any kind of meaningful step by step way... I knew that going in, and had hoped that the podcast would revel in that sprawling glorious chaos, but it only had eight half hour episodes to work with, so that was never going to happen. Rather than retelling Watergate, Slow Burn is about taking a close look at eight key figures or events in Watergate that aren't usually reported in detail. By looking at these smaller narratives, the podcast implicitly (and explicitly, eventually) asks that central question: How does the strange, chaotic, unpredictable flow of news and events that people are struggling to process as they come out somehow converge and convert itself into a set of composed narratives that are transmitted as history? Are individual moments inevitable as they seem in those composed narratives, or were they subject to the unpredictability of human whim?

I wanted something more sprawling, which I had thought was promised by the opening, but the podcast itself was ultimately satisfying and illuminating for what it turned out to be instead.

Season 2, about the Monica Lewinsky scandal, is coming out now and I'm finding it equally fascinating. There's a great, gripping moment in episode 4, which I just listened to, where a female reporter recounts the details of Lewinsky's growing relationship with Clinton, and as she relates a set of details that wouldn't have been out of place in a romance novel, she lets out a giggle. Then she recoils at herself, recalling that it's now 2018. "This isn't funny," she says. "But I can't help but laugh." As a nation, we are rethinking once again the relationship between sex and power, and it's really interesting to rethink the Lewinsky scandal through the new lens, and to watch the people who grappled with the scandal back then have to force themselves to reexamine everything they believed.

It's also great to set the two seasons besides each other... The Lewinsky scandal exists, almost definitionally, in comparison to Watergate. Every early scandal of the Clinton era got a Gate name- Travelgate, Troopergate, etc... The notion of a special prosecutor and their wide purview to investigate stems from Watergate. The way all the figures interviewed knew and told each other at the time that the coverup was worse than the crime... Watergate is the story of this unthinkable thing happening, of a president being brought down by a scandal when everyone involved told each other that it could never happen. Clinton's scandals take place in a landscape where everyone knows that it's possible for scandal to take down a president.

Last summer when I still working my way up to longer bike rides, the Target store about five miles away was one of my, er, targets. For nominative determinist reasons, yes, I'm a terrible person. I kept failing to get there, not because of endurance but because of various other reasons. Mechanical problems, forgetting my wallet and obviating need for the trip, bad timing forcing me to cut trips short.... The trip was cursed. This year I've routinely being doing longer rides, but still failing to make it to Target. I got a flat last weekend halfway there, swerving to avoid a pedestrian. I fixed the flat yesterday morning and biked over to the Target for the first time, to watch a movie at the theater next door. It wasn't all that strenuous a ride, even with the 85 degree heat. Still, feels good to cross it off the list.

Oceans 8

Definitely a movie that worked better in the moment than in thinking about it afterward. Zippy, with fun, colorful characters throughout, but not a lot of depth, and the plan had a number of obvious holes in it (which are more fun to try to fanwank than to nitpick. It's easier to say that Frazier also felt that Becker had gotten away with something the last time and didn't mind sending him away for this one than to say he actually felt that his job was done. And very little about the Oh by the way we stole a whole bunch of other jewelry from the Met holds up, not least because of Debbie's insistence on not having any men on the team, but I'm okay with that because the aha about the submarine was sufficiently satisfying.)

Also, just really generally satisfying in the way it didn't truck in the action movie tropes you expect about female characters. What, you mean it's possible to do a conjob movie with female characters and not have a femme fatale seductress on the team?

And satisfying in the generational update to Millenials, too, in several ways. In Clooneyverse, the money was retirement money for people who otherwise were holding down jobs that were not the most emotionally fulfilling, but were more or less economically stable. But for Connie this was Moving Out of Queens money. For Amita it was quit living under your parents' emotionally manipulative thumb money. There was something significant in that difference, I thought.