I’m assuming you’re being sarcastic. Zohan is a joke. It’s a joke movie. A novelty summer joke movie. The Zohan is not a hero, he’s a parody based upon ethnic stereotypes. Those can be funny, but don’t try to say that it’s actually supposed to be a serious hero.
Zohan’s a comedy, sure, but a Jewish guy kicking ass made me feel good about my ethnicity.
Incidentally, it occurs to me that we never see Danilov doing any stereotypically Jewish things. The only evidence we have that he is Jewish is that he says he is, to Tania, a character whose pants he wishes to invade. Maybe he made it up.
By the way, the hero of Black Sunday is a Mossad agent, played by Robert Shaw (admittedly, he played NAZIs in other movies), and that was in 1977.
One other thing I forgot to mention earlier- Koulikov was a real person, and unlike the film, he survived the war.
I’ll be interested to see if anyone makes a movie about Simho Hayha, who is generally regarded as the top-ranked military sniper with over 500 confirmed kills…
In fairness, the makers of the movie drew the character of Danilov from Craig’s book of the same name. Craig’s account of the sniper duel is almost certainly bullshit, so if Zaitsev knew anyone named Danilov, it was an incidental thing.
There WAS a Tania Chernov, and she really was Zaitsev’s lover and a sniper of considerable accomplishment, but she was otherwise not really anything like the character portrayed by Rachel Weisz.
Compared to the rest, he wasn’t that bad. Compared to Khruschev, the Nazis…remember Perlman’s teeth had been bashed out by his own people or the Soviets gunning down anybody who dared to retreat…
Plus Tania was Jewish, and she was out there courageously fighting with the men. So at least there’s some balance.
I dont think that the thing about the lack of Macho Jewish heroes is strictly true.
Here in the U.K unless they are Orthodox is it ?Jews of which there doesn’tseem to a widespread amount about you probably wouldn’t notice by accent,dress or manerisms if he was Jewish or not.
I once worked with a bloke for ages and only discovered that he was Jewish after he turned down my offer of a bacon sandwich after he’d been complaining about hunger for sometime.
Yeh, well, in that case, maybe we, as a culture, need to re-evaluate, not our conception of the Jew, but our conception of the male.
You probably know it already, but that’s not the answer I wanted to hear. Sorry.
What I wanna know is why did Danilov think that Tania was dead? I watched it last night on the telly and it seemed like he just disappeared after she got hit with the schrapnel.
A total of 300 Jewish generals served in the Soviet army during WW2.
In the U.S. military: 1.
Daniel Craig’s portrayal of rather bad-ass Jews in Munich and Defiance seems to go against what you say, although the fact that Craig isn’t Jewish is interesting.
Damn, Mosin-Nagants can be cheap. And here is one sporterized in Afghanistan. (“It’s hand carved!”) I wouldn’t fire a rifle sporterized BY HAND in Afghanistan on a bet.
I didn’t see him as treacherous, or weaselly. Jewishness aside, he was an ambitious true-believer of Communism, even if my upbringing tells me to not like that sort of thing. But he took a fairly brave stand against Kruchev (yeah, yeah, I know; “the plot was on his side”), advocating a politically unpopular position in order to save his homeland.
Yes, he pulled an underhanded move to try to win the girl, but in the end he redeemed himself.
A “flawed hero,” perhaps, but not a bad guy. And his Jewishness is irrelevant to that.
“How about this leaflet, Famous Jewish Sports Legends?”
Sandy Koufax? Hank Greenberg? Mark Spitz? Moe Berg, who was assigned to determine if Heisenberg could build an A-Bomb, and, if so, to kill him?
ETA: FTR, he couldn’t and Moe let him live. He had that uncertainty thing down, but not how much matter he needed.
Hank Azaria, as Abraham, in Year One: “We are the Hebrews. Righteous people. Not good at sports.”
I wouldn’t necessarily consider Danilov to be unheroic. We first see him travelling alone in the front lines to distribute propaganda leaflets. After that, despite not knowing how to shoot, he’s willing to attack the Germans instead of playing dead. In the interview scene with Khruschev he is not too cowed down to propose his plan. And his last act of redemption speaks for itself.
Mini-hijack, but about the book, since I don’t remember if this was in the film.
Apparently, the Germans had some kind of warning device hooked up consisting of cans tied onto a string, and because when those cans made noise, they had to stand up and check it out, they’d get their dumb asses shot.
What I don’t remember is how did the Russians manipulate that string of cans so they could “trip” it?
Thanks
Q
This reminds of the outrage at the Geena Davis / Samuel L. Jackson movie because Jackson did not get to kiss the girl. I just loved that relationship, and loved that the woman didn’t have to be anyone’s sweetie to be in an action movie. I think it was a pivotal movie for that reason.
Why aren’t more gentile men complaining, “Why is the smart and sensible guy always a Jew? Why does the gentile always have to be the one with testosterone poisoning?”
I bet most woman would admit they might do Zaytsev in the heat of battle, but Danilov, he’s a keeper, he’s the one you marry.
I’m going to go look for a quote by Molly Ivins about stereotyping in movies …
Found it right off - bottom of page 123. (God, I miss that woman.)
I’d rather be the Jew.