Just as much as Chinese food on Christmas Day is a veritable Jewish tradition, so to is the movie you inevitably head to afterwards. This year, will you be seeing Judd Apatow’s latest man-child flick This is 40, or will it be the Barbra Streisand/Seth Rogen buddy comedy The Guilt Trip? You could always ditch both of those and go see Billy Crystal and Bette Midler as the ‘other’ grandparents in Parental Guidance—either way, your movie options are pretty damn Jewish this year.

Tablet’s movie critic J. Hoberman has some thoughts about the three films, all more Jewish than Chinese food on Christmas. Unfortunately, however, his diagnosis isn’t pretty:

But just what is a comedy? Their nominal happy endings notwithstanding, all three movies reek of male failure. Perhaps because they are played by beloved icons Streisand and Midler, the Jewish mothers in The Guilt Trip and Parental Guidance are wacky and endearing. What’s more, however annoying the advice, their wisdom is essentially right; the best that could be said for the Jewish men is oy vey. The Jewish father in This Is 40 (Paul Rudd) is in danger of going broke and having to sell his house, in part because he is helping to supporthis supremely feckless father (Albert Brooks); the Job-like Jewish son (Rogen) in The Guilt Trip can’t keep a girlfriend or successfully market his idea for a “green” household cleanser; the Jewish grandfather in Parental Guidance (Crystal) has lost his job and possibly his mind. Not a “Hebrew Hammer” among them.

A Jewy Little Christmas [Tablet]

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The problem is that, unlike Ali G, Borat, and Brüno, Aladeen is less a force of nature than a scripted performance. Despite Baron Cohen’s insistence on giving interviews in character, The Dictator—directed, like Borat and Brüno, by Larry Charles—is entirely fictional. Da Baron has given up da shtick.

A.O. Scott calls the film lazy in the New York Times, adding that The Dictator “gestures halfheartedly toward topicality and, with equal lack of conviction, toward pure, anarchic silliness.”

If it’s any consolation, here’s SBC in character, falling off a camel for real at the Cannes Film Festival:

(photo credit: TAL COHEN/AFP/GettyImages)

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Film critic J. Hoberman’s review of The Three Stooges includes the best sentence we have heard in a long time: “A Jew could be a shlemiel, a shlemazl, a shmo, a shmegegge, a shlepper, a shnorrer, a shtarker, a zhlub, a nudnik, a gonef, or a shmuck.” Ultimately, however, Hoberman argues that in their new film, The Three Stooges, the Farrelly brothers have “deracinated a Jewish classic.”

He explains:

As reconfigured by the Farrellys (and part of their concept from the script’s first draft), Curly, Larry, and Moe are the products of a Catholic orphanage and, to the degree that the movie has a narrative, it concerns their good-hearted, knuckle-headed, amply violent attempts to save the institution from being sold. In his recently published The New Jew in Film, Nathan Abrams ascribes specifically Jewish content to the Farrellys’ 1998 classic There’s Something About Mary in the grotesque schlemielishness of Ben Stiller zippering a bit of his scrotum. But the Farrelly Stooges are positively not Jewish—although there is a vestigial trace. The meanest nun in the orphanage, Sister Mary Mengele [sic], is played in drag by Larry David (the Farrellys’ original choice for Larry) as a de facto fourth Stooge.

Dumb, Dumberer, and Dumberest [Tablet Magazine]

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