A Judy Greer Holiday

Pottersville

The Hebrew Hammer

Happy fifth night of Hanukkah and Merry Christmas eve-eve-eve, readers! If you’re like me, you like to celebrate this hectic holiday season with calming activities like movie-watching. But if you’re like me: half-Jewish, half-gentile, and feeling half-hearted about the Holiday season this year, it may be hard to decide what to watch. Before we cap off the holiday season next week, with my favorite holiday subgenre, let’s kick back and celebrate this last half of Hanukkah and the last moments of pre-Christmas hype with two silly, only somewhat sentimental films. It’s so hard to find a unique Christmas film, and it’s even harder to find a Hanukkah film, but this year I miraculously stumbled upon both of these things! The only thing that connects these two disparate but equally goofy films is the fact that they both star the wickedly talented, beyond iconic character actress: Judy Greer. You probably know Judy Greer from every film ever made since the 90s, including, but not limited to: Jawbreaker, Adaptation, 13 Going on 30, The Village, Cursed, 27 Dresses, Carrie (2013), Ant-Man and the Wasp, Halloween (2018) and to a lesser extent Halloween Kills (ugh). While she’s typically relegated to the role of the “best friend” Judy always shines and leaves a lovable, memorable impression. The sheer fact that I picked a Christmas movie and a Hanukkah movie at random, and they both just happened to have had Judy Greer in them, solidifies her ubiquity and her status as an icon. And apparently I’m starting a tradition of watching films with Judys in them during Christmas, so it only felt right for Judy Greer to make an appearance on this blog. I began with a Christmas film that I saw Super Yaki mention recently, that starred many of my favs like Michael Shannon, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks, Ian McShane, Thomas Lennon (Lt. Dangle from Reno911!), Greta Lee, and of course, tonight’s leading lady, a film from 2017 called Pottersville. I went into this movie completely blind, literally only with the knowledge that Michael Shannon was in it. But within the first ten minutes we see Ron Perlman dressed as a furry, so I was very quickly a fan of this film. Pottersville is a Netflix film, with Netflix money, that feels like a fairly cheaply-produced Hallmark film with better writers and a story that is intentionally funny. Pottersville follows Maynard Greiger (Shannon), who owns and operates a general store in a very small town called Pottersville, a town that has been struggling to produce revenue and jobs since its last factory closed down. Maynard works very hard alongside his coworker Judy Greer, never charging customers who can’t afford their goods and providing them with his trademark icy stare, but after coming home from work early one day and realizing his wife is a furry AND cheating on him, Maynard doesn’t know what to do. So, naturally, he gets really drunk, puts on a gorilla costume, runs around town, and is mistaken for Bigfoot. Suddenly the entire town of Pottersville is thrown into Sasquatch-mania, and Maynard realizes that his drunken foolish night must now become a nightly commitment—to keep the Bigfoot hype up, and to keep the tourists rolling in. The whole town begins to flourish and thrive, and even though the film maintained a peculiarly off-putting yellowish-green aesthetic throughout it, the warm fuzziness was impossible to ignore. Don’t get me wrong, this movie was stupid, and to see Michael Shannon play such a goofy character was a bit unnerving, but the whole thing was surprisingly clever, and perfectly dumb. Strangely, my biggest grief with this film (other than “not enough Thomas Lennon”) was the fact that the romantic subplot between Michael Shannon and Judy Greer felt a little neglected. There’s so many films that force a romance upon two characters with no chemistry, but here there was actually a weirdly cute chemistry! And yet the romance didn’t occur until the very end! Michael Shannon may be steely and intimidating, but Judy Greer’s warm cheerfulness complimented him well. And if he can play a convincingly sloppy drunk ranting about furries, he can certainly be a romantic lead. Pottersville made me chuckle, and Jonathan Kesselman’s 2003 film The Hebrew Hammer positively shocked me with its peak-early 2000s Comedy Central-esque comedic sensibilities. I only recently heard about this film as well, when I read about it in my former English professor Helene Meyers’ book Movie-Made Jews. The Hebrew Hammer is part neo-noir, part Jewsploitation, and all-around dumb and ridiculous. It opens with a message: “This film is dedicated to all of the Jewish brothers and sisters who had enough of the gentile”—and we are transported to a Hanukkah of the past. The Hebrew Hammer follows Mordechai Jefferson Carver, who we meet as a young child at Peter, Paul, & Mary Catholic Elementary School, where he is bullied by his anti-Semitic gentile classmates. They tease him for being Jewish, for celebrating Hanukkah, and even the teacher and several other adults join in to call him every slur and stereotype in the book. The cherry on top of this abuse is when Santa himself shows up, to step on the dreidel Mordechai got for Hanukkah. We then cut to the Hanukkah of the present, where Mordechai has transformed into a buff, shockingly-hot-in-a-way-I-never-thought Adam Goldberg (of Dazed and Confused fame) AKA The Hebrew Hammer—a guardian of his community and a Shaft-like superhero for Jews. The Hebrew Hammer is made up of every staple from Blaxsploitation cinema: the intense zoom-ins, the sexism, groovy music, and jive-talking—this time mixed with some Yiddish. The Hebrew Hammer was, unsurprisingly, not politically correct… but it was also, kinda fun? I mean, I obviously rolled my eyes several times, but in a time where anti-Semitism is pervasive and casually perpetuated by celebrities on a daily basis, it was enjoyable to watch a Jewish superhero—regardless of his morals, or lack thereof. And yes, violence isn’t always the answer, but I took great satisfaction from seeing this Jewish man kill a bar full of nazis. Plus, there just aren’t enough Hanukkah movies. There are lots of movies that tell Jewish stories, but when it comes time to light the candles every Winter, I long to watch anything beyond Adam Sandler’s confusingly depressing Eight Crazy Nights. So, for that reason alone, honestly, I welcome The Hebrew Hammer into my collection of beloved Jewish stories. With cameos from Rachael Dratch, Peter Coyote, xmas movie icon Tony Cox, and the queen Judy Greer, I couldn’t not enjoy myself. Andy Dick was also there, playing an evil(er) coke-snorting descendant of Santa named Damian who had a right-hand man named Tiny Tim. Everyone in this film committed to the bits hard, and Judy Greer was a gorgeous Jewish femme fatale—even though she’s not actually Jewish in real life. But one notable fact from her Wikipedia is that she changed from a Catholic to a Presbyterian church as a kid because she thought the boys were cuter there, so maybe we’re not so different, Judy. The Hebrew Hammer really hits you over the head with the religious and cultural stereotypes, but it’s also one of the only films (that I’ve seen at least) whose narrative includes Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa. (We still need to do better, obvi…) If you want to laugh, and I mean like, a shocked and appalled kind of laugh that could likely only come from the humor of yesteryear, then you should most certainly check out The Hebrew Hammer. Just don’t show Kanye and risk him believing that this story is true. That’s all for this week, dear readers, but you’re a mensch for reading along. And you better watch out, because a different kind of holiday subgenre is coming next week… Happy Hanukkah, Happy Holidays, and Judy Greer, if you’re reading this, you’re a star! (even if it’s only a five-pointed one)