Christmas is for everyone, or
Jews say the funniest things!
For Ira Finkelstein, Christmas is something that's not for him. As a young Jewish boy living in California, he's never even seen real snow. But all that's about to change because he and his parents are going to Aspen for the holidays! That is until those plans fall through because his dad, an up-and-coming movie producer pushes up production on his new film. Now he's going to Florida for the holidays to visit with his grandparents while his parents make the movie. I'm not kidding, his Jewish grandparents live in Florida. Oy vey (by the way, the first oy makes an appearance at just four minutes in).
During his layover at O'hare, he meets another unaccompanied minor, Mikey who's going to Christmastown, WA to visit cousins. Simply hearing the phrase Christmastown makes Ira light up with joy. Of course Mikey is not excited for more snow (living in Chicago) nor for the fact that he has to bring a picture with him to find his cousins because they've never actually met. This sets the stage for the real plot, Mikey pretends to be Ira and heads to Florida, while Ira becomes Mikey and goes to Christmastown. And everything works out perfectly.
Haha, I'm obviously kidding because then there would be no movie.
 |
| Guess if this is Mikey or Ira |
On Mikey's trip, he successfully finds Ira's grandparents. Elliot Gould plays the living stereotype of a grandpa. He's also the only name you will recognize and gets top-billing, despite being maybe the fourth-largest role. Gould is demonstrating his amazing ability to take any role as long as the two descriptions of the character are Jewish and over-the-top (looking at you, Elliot in Mulaney). So because Jews are awesome (which really could have been the title for this), they welcome Mikey (thinking it's Ira) with open arms, heaps of compliments, food, and a dictionary's worth of Yiddishisms.
On the other side of the country, Ira is enamored with the idea of Christmastown, but quickly realizes that it's not all that amazing. First of all, Mikey's parents are divorced and his cousins' parents are clearly having some marital problems, due to the father losing his job and taking to the drink. I'm not saying that the film is trying to editorialize anything, but the Jews we see all have happy, complete families, while the Christian ones are either broken homes or struggling to stay together (spoiler, this somewhat changes by the end).
Not only the family issues, but Ira also learns that a cartoonishly mean bully named Jack the Jerk "runs" the town and makes Ira's first day miserable. He also has a pit bull named Killer, who of course is actually a very nice dog. About to lose hope in the magic of Christmastown, Ira meets a Jewish Santa (Jewish Santa? "Of course, who else would work on Christmas?" This was the best line from the movie) who explains all the amazing things that Jews have done for Christmas, which mainly focuses on all the Christmas movies and songs that were written by Jews. More or less, it's a "Jews control the media" bit, even when it revolves around Christmas. But this gives Ira the idea to follow in his father's footsteps and produce a Christmas pageant!
And because Ira's journey starts poorly and gets better, Mikey's starts great and goes downhill, leading to him breaking his arm. Ira's parents fly to Florida to make sure he's okay and, of course, discover that Mikey is not Ira. The group freak-out leads to the final setpiece of all the families (Mikey's mom and cousins, as well as Ira's parents and grandparents) present at the pageant. And no one is mad because Christmas is so amazing!
For a silly premise, this movie actually had some good laughs and nice moments, although I will fully admit that many of those may come from being Jewish and having Jewish grandparents spew a string of nonsense words at me whenever I'd see them.
Rating on the feel-good-o-meter: 5 out of 10 hugs
No comments:
Post a Comment