2024 So Predictable

For too many of us contemporary culture vultures, everything feels predictable.

Okay, for this culture vulture but let me speak for the group.

We long for something or someone to surprise us since at this point we usually can predict the outcome of an election, the top winners at any major awards show or whether a new person will bomb or crush in their film or TV debut with at least an 85% accuracy rate.

It’s not that we feel brilliant or above it all… most of the time.

It’s more that there is so much coverage and traditional wisdom around these events everywhere you turn that it’s hard not to be correct.

This is especially true when you’ve made wasting your time following these things your principal side gig because it makes you feel in control of… something.

That is why I’m particularly unhappy to report that after frittering away my Saturday on watching the results of the South Carolina Republican presidential primary, the SAG awards and the Saturday Night Live hosting debut of comedian Shane Gillis (Note: He of the well-documented racist and homophobic jokes, imitations and remarks) not a f-ng thing out of the ordinary happened.

-Trump beat Nikki Haley in her home state of South Carolina by a whopping 20%.

-The Screen Actors Guild awarded Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) and Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) top film actor and actress [Note: Turned out it didn’t matter how much WE all wanted an upset by Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Emma Stone (Poor Things)]; and the top honor for best motion picture cast to Oppenheimer to literally NO prognosticator’s surprise.

-Shane Gillis turned out to be as good of a fit for Saturday Night Live as The Chair would be as a guest on one of his infamous podcasts where he does imitations of Asian people, makes Jew jokes and manages to stay timely with snide remarks about the trans community.

At the end of the day, it’s all a bit tiresome.

Meaning, if the world is going to continue to devolve on such sour notes and drag pop culture down along with it, the least it can be is a little unpredictable.

Perhaps the problem is that the last time the majority of us were truly surprised by a political contest, an awards show or the virgin performance of an entertainer in any field was with the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

We all remember that feeling, right? Even those who hoped for that outcome were surprised.

(Note: Yes, Michael Moore, I know YOU knew and I’m still a fan but please, stop SAYING it).

Look, it’s easy to underestimate or overestimate the political the power of Aspiring Orange Hitler, but it didn’t take a genius to imagine he might emerge with a decisive victory this weekend in a state where six of ten voters identify as White Evangelical Christians.

What’s harder to figure is how some of them might not fall away given the 91 criminal charges against him, including the rape of one woman and the bribing of another who just happens to be an adult film star… that he had his lawyer pay to stay silent… about the adultery he committed with her… several times.

You’d think my meter would be broken by now

It also begs the question of thinking that surprise might be coming for him considering his opponent was a popular, two-term former governor of the very state they were running in.

Until you consider that opponent is a WOMAN. And a non-white one at that.

Shame on any one of you, or us, for believing the inside skinny that at the very least this would narrow his margin of victory.

Or that anything could except the literal reappearance of the son of God himself. (Note: But, well, you do know that a subset of said evangelicals do believe He was anointed by God to become POTUS again, right?)

Speaking of God, or goddesses, this brings us back to the SAG Awards and one of the few divine moments in all of those competitive events on Saturday – the acceptance speech by Barbra Streisand for SAG’s Life Achievement Award.

Right, the Chair is gay, AND Jewish, AND from the New York boroughs so OF COURSE he loves Barbra.

But that aside – see for yourself if you don’t find her musings on why she became an actor, and her love of the movies and the people who make them, especially honest, disarming and, well, a bit unpredictable given all the buildup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TPfQvu2KB8

This is to take nothing away from Pedro Pascal (The Last of Us), who provided the other small surprise of the ceremony when he went onstage to pick up his award for best actor in a TV drama series and admitted he was a little drunk and could get drunk because he thought he’d never win.

Yeah, many predicted one of the Succession guys would but I actually had an inkling PP might get the nod because… well… he never wins, he is THAT good and he is the kind of actor who can admit he drank too much but still manage to be charming and semi-coherent..

Not to mention – the just-a-tad too open, but not unwelcomely open, white shirt.

Alas, on Saturday Night Live a somewhat uncomfortable Shane Gillis made his entrance onstage wearing a loose-fitting plain black T-shirt and seemed to do everything he could to make amends by not making amends.

Admitting as he began his monologue, I shouldn’t be here, he then performed a somewhat flat, rather undistinguished ten minutes affirming SNL’s decision more than four years ago to fire him from the cast before he even filmed his first episode. This was due to the treasure trove of free-wheeling online remarks and bits targeting all sorts of minority and majority groups found after his hire that any bro fest across the country might discuss, but only in the privacy of their own, um, bar. (Note: Sadly, times and tastes in the podcasting world have changed since then, and not necessarily in a good way).

What we discovered in Gillis’ SNL appearance this weekend, is what most of us from any of the above targeted groups could have predicted. In the unforgiving spotlight of network TV, his humor level was revealed to be practically nil because it’s not particularly funny, or clever, or timely to begin with, especially when you take it out of the kind of bars where members of groups like us are not welcomed in the first place.

Jokes about the handicapped, the Black community and the gay community are couched by Gillis confessing he has family members in the first two groups, presumably meaning that anything he says about them is now okay. Then, by admitting that he himself was once gay for my Mom as a boy until the first time I whacked off, at which point I then began to wonder, when is that bitch gonna leave the house, he seems to grant himself permission to speak about the third.

So okay, here’s the thing. Portraying yourself as a little gay boy onstage by making shy little gay bows and sways is the kind of very predictable, unamusing stuff that one expects from the guy. Ditto the jokes about Down’s Syndrome just because his sister has a child born with the condition, or the ethnic ones preceding it since she had adopted Black daughters…

There really was only surprise.

Why he, in particular, was brought back to host in a time when we all desperately need to get past our differences and laugh at ourselves. Also, just how utterly predictable and inadequate so much of what is being offered up to us in the public square has become in election year 2024.

Barbra Streisand – “The Way We Were”

08.27.23

by notesfromachair

Adam Sandler, My Bar Mitzvah, and Jewish Visibility on Screen

You might think the new Adam Sandler movie that dropped this weekend on Netflix, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, is a slight comedy about a Jewish ritual that he produced to give his two teenage daughters co-starring roles in.

Well, yes, but also no.

Yes, I am writing about a Sandler Netflix movie

If you eliminate the Holocaust, Neil Simon and the neurotic angst of the typical adult Jewish male as subject matter or author, the list of mainstream American feature films filled with Jews at the center grows pretty small.

Oh, sure there are some, but well, not all that many.

Ah yes, those Fabelmans are a recent entry

So it was with great intrigue that I spent my Saturday night with the Sandler family. (Note: Sunny Sandler is the star, Sadie Sandler co-stars, Adam Sandler plays a key supporting role, and even his real-life wife, Jackie Sandler, appears in a small part).

And, may I say, they did not disappoint.

To have fictional Jewish siblings, family and friends casually fill a space that is mostly reserved for white bread John Hughes-esque characters living cleverly in a typical American suburban landscape felt new and, actually, sort of groundbreaking for a wide-release American feature.

Especially since the so particularly Jewish story beats they were engaging in were more than ably filling in the space of the most thematically typical studio coming of age scenario imaginable.

And, trust me, I know where of I speak.

It was 30 years ago this year that a movie I wrote loosely based on my family and the events that led to my bar mitzvah, Family Prayers, was released.

And though it was more of a drama with only some comedic elements, at the time the script was considered too specific, too niche and too…okay, let’s face it, Jewish, to have even a snowball’s chance in hell of breaking into the mainstream.

And that was if the film was made perfectly (Note: As if THAT exists), which ultimately it wasn’t.

Not that I was thinking about any of that back then.

It just seemed like a good way to tell the story about the disintegration of my parents’ marriage, my Dad’s gambling addiction and a kids’ (Note: Um, my) confusion about, well, what it means to be an adult.

So I only wrote it as a writing sample that could show off my talents and maybe get me work of some kind, any kind, since I knew:

a. Action movies and Saturday matinee sci-fi/comic book stories were what was commercial

b. I was squeamish with blood and the only comics I read were Archie, Betty and Veronica, and…

c. A Jewish kid or family going through anything particularly Jewish, except maybe Nazis, was simply not considered a thing.

Did I hold out small secret hope it would get made? Sure, in the same way I briefly fantasized about being straight some years before.

But we all are who we are, right?

So it was with great defiance that I decided to write about one of the worst, yet dramatically fertile moments of my then relatively short Semitic life.

That, in itself, was ironic. Truth be told, NO ONE in my family EVER even went to temple. Still, we were culturally Jewish. What this meant for me, and many other Jews who came of age when I did, was:

a. We celebrated a handful of key Jewish holidays over family dinners, sans prayers.

b. We ate a lot of lox, bagels, deli food and brisket (Note: And Chinese food on Sunday nights. Don’t ask me why this is even Jewish but on the east coast it sort of was/is), and:

c. We kvelled (aka basked in pride) when Barbra Streisand became a movie star and Steve and Eydie (Note: Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme) appeared on TV.

Oy vey.

I guess that’s one of the things I appreciated about You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah. Based on a 2001 novel by Fiona Rosenbloom, it’s essentially a story about teen culture, Jewish culture and a Jewish girl who is rolling her eyes at everyone and everything except for her own needs.

It’s funny and silly and mean and sad and infuriating and, ultimately sort of meaningful. It takes apart Jewish friendships and family life in sweetly relatable ways that weren’t available back when I came of age. And even if they were, the specific worlds they were offering were certainly not deemed broadly relatable.

This is a Sandler movie — can you believe?

When I wrote my screenplay in the eighties I chose an event from my life I figured would work as a structuring device to explore my world.

But what I discovered in the writing was that my bar mitzvah, and what it turned out to be – a VERY pared down SMALL reception due to a lot of family drama – really did symbolize my coming of age.

What I get from the Sandler movie is a bit of the polar opposite. A coming of age story that is very much about a bat mitzvah girl and the Jewish kids, and even non-Jewish kids, who surround her.

The ritual, even as it is sometimes played for comic effect, is as important a part of her life as her parents, siblings and friends she fails but ultimately learns to appreciate.

Idina Menzel is her mom, so I mean, how bad could it be?

She’s a Jewish girl/woman the movie offers for audiences to embrace, rather than a kid who just happens to be Jewish that a film is asking audiences to listen to.

And to me, that feels like progress.

Even if bat and bar mitzvahs have never been your things at all. Or never will be.

Adam Sandler – “Bar Mitzvah Boy”

notes from a chair

Tag Archives: Barbra Steisand

2024 So Predictable

Adam Sandler, My Bar Mitzvah, and Jewish Visibility on Screen