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Love, Lights, Hanukkah
This year's Hallmark 'Hanukkah' movie was worlds better than last year's efforts. It wasn't a Christmas movie in which a Jew learned the beauty of Christmas. It actually took Chanukah and Jewish culture seriously. That said, there were still some issues.
The premise of the film is that Cristina is an Italian-American restaurant owner (Mia Kirschner, and I had a little trouble with her being so different from Jenny from the L Word) who discovers that her birth mother is Jewish- she was nineteen when she got unexpectedly pregnant and gave up her daughter for adoption. Over the course of the film she meets and gets to know her birth mother's family, including a half-brother and half-sister, and struggles with feeling like she's betraying her dead adoptive mother by doing so. Also she has a romance with Cory from Boy Meets World. But it was one of those lovely romances where the family story is more important than the romance story. Hallmark is good at those, and this one worked.
The best part of the movie was the half-brother's string of terrible latke puns, which included the whole enchi-latke and the choco-latke. Nothing gave me more joy in the movie than that.
The second best part of the movie was a public menorah lighting scene set to the Leslie Odom "Ma'oz Tzur" I linked the other day. It was beautiful music and the scene did a great job of highlighting the best parts of Chanukah as an American Jewish holiday.
I was a bit uncomfortable, though, with an "I got a DNA test telling me I'm 50% Jewish, guess I'd better go out and learn how to celebrate Hanukkah!" line early in the movie. The relationship between blood tests and Jewish identity is and ought to be minimal if not nonexistent, and having a movie make a thing out of it made me anxious.
Also Jews did not dance in the movie. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/365630.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.
This year's Hallmark 'Hanukkah' movie was worlds better than last year's efforts. It wasn't a Christmas movie in which a Jew learned the beauty of Christmas. It actually took Chanukah and Jewish culture seriously. That said, there were still some issues.
The premise of the film is that Cristina is an Italian-American restaurant owner (Mia Kirschner, and I had a little trouble with her being so different from Jenny from the L Word) who discovers that her birth mother is Jewish- she was nineteen when she got unexpectedly pregnant and gave up her daughter for adoption. Over the course of the film she meets and gets to know her birth mother's family, including a half-brother and half-sister, and struggles with feeling like she's betraying her dead adoptive mother by doing so. Also she has a romance with Cory from Boy Meets World. But it was one of those lovely romances where the family story is more important than the romance story. Hallmark is good at those, and this one worked.
The best part of the movie was the half-brother's string of terrible latke puns, which included the whole enchi-latke and the choco-latke. Nothing gave me more joy in the movie than that.
The second best part of the movie was a public menorah lighting scene set to the Leslie Odom "Ma'oz Tzur" I linked the other day. It was beautiful music and the scene did a great job of highlighting the best parts of Chanukah as an American Jewish holiday.
I was a bit uncomfortable, though, with an "I got a DNA test telling me I'm 50% Jewish, guess I'd better go out and learn how to celebrate Hanukkah!" line early in the movie. The relationship between blood tests and Jewish identity is and ought to be minimal if not nonexistent, and having a movie make a thing out of it made me anxious.
Also Jews did not dance in the movie. This entry was originally posted at https://seekingferret.dreamwidth.org/365630.html. Please comment there using OpenID. There are
comments.