| Movie Review |
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| Written by Miriam Felton-Dansky | |||||
| Monday, 17 January 2005 | |||||
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Hebrew-School Hammer By day, Shimmy fields spitballs fired by the burly schlemiels at the back of the yeshiva. By night, he pops a snore soundtrack between his sheets, slips on a black trench and fake mustache, and heads out the window to save the world. No, Shimmy is no ordinary yeshiva buchor—he’s Agent Emes, star of a self-titled video series for the young frum set. Under this alias, Shimmy spends his spare time preventing catastrophes orchestrated by Aveiros (“Bad Deeds”) International—the anti-mitzvah Death Star—headed by Dr. Lo Tov (“no good”), the bald, vaguely French purveyor of evil whose mission is to disrupt Jewish life however and wherever it occurs. Agent E. is presumably designed to give the young and Orthodox someone to idolize who actually looks like them. But the videos—a study in Orthodox home life, yeshiva buchor-dom, and outdated special effects—are appropriate for anyone who is eager to revisit the days of being picked last in gym class, and wants to learn a little halachah to boot. Episodes One, Two, and Three—the most recent, entitled “The Case of the Missing Pushka”—are out, and optioning by Miramax is sure to follow. Each episode demonstrates one tenet of Jewish life through the solution to a high-stakes crime. Its pilot, entitled “The Talking Fish-Head,” hinges on the near-homophones of “chauffeur” and “shofar”: Shimmy is in the supermarket, shopping for Rosh Hashanah, when a fish-head confides in his younger sister Baila. “The shofar isn’t kosher!” warns the piscine prophet from its perch in the ice bucket. Then it clams up—and Agent Emes kicks into high gear. The next day, on a field trip to the local shofar factory, he deduces that the rabbi’s chauffeur is Dr. Lo Tov himself—currently attempting to sneak treif shofarim into synagogues. A more global plot is attempted in “Rabbi-napped,” when Dr. Lo Tov tries to trigger an apocalypse by tinkering with a crucial factor in world order: Jewish children learning Torah. (Jewish kids, Agent E. learns, were designated as the guarantors of God’s covenant with the Jews, and they fulfill their end of that bargain, keeping the universe intact, by studying.) But they won’t study uncoerced, so Dr. Lo Tov arranges for the rabbi-napping of several rabbis from Shimmy’s yeshiva. Thus ensues a series of scenes of Orthodox rabbis being apprehended and forced into the trunks of black Caddys. With learning at a standstill, a string of earthquakes spreads citywide panic—but only until Agent E. wises up and organizes an emergency study-session. For all their halachic earnestness, the creators don’t try to portray a saintly Orthodox community: When the fish gets vocal, the supermarket owner greedily doubles its price. Shimmy’s classmates are shallow oafs—the same shleppers who torment Shimmy receive Agent E. with slack-jawed wonder. And Emes gripes at visiting the Chacham (“wise one”)—a chubby know-it-all who soaks up Talmud 24/7, then doles out just enough for Agent E. to solve the latest crime. The Agent Emes videos appear to have been filmed in the suburbs, using a camcorder. The acting and dialogue are amateur; the plots simplistic and often lacking basic logic. But these things are more than bearable when combined with the pleasure of watching a yeshiva buchor turned crime-fighting super-spy spot a package of “Treifa” brand hot dogs on the supermarket shelf, replace it with kosher dogs—then turn up his collar and slip away into the Shabbos sunset.
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