Lothar and the Hand People*
Oh, oops, I mean “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan”. Yes, I went to my last (for the most part) unsupervised (by kids) movie for the summer. I had no interest at all to see this movie, but then I saw a trailer and it looked pretty funny, so I ended up seeing it. Like “Sex and the City” (I’m sure you’d never expect anyone to compare those two movies, did you?), it was much longer than it needed to be. “Sex and the City” was 2 1/4 hours, and “Zohan” was 2 hours.
There were some very funny scenes in “Zohan”. I laughed out loud many times, but then again I may have been the only one laughing. And someone did walk out. But it tried to be too serious, uniting the Palestinians and Israelis, which really could have been cut out of the movie, or at least if they had trimmed it down to 1 1/2 hours it would have been much better.
The story line is that The Zohan (Adam Sandler) is a career soldier in the Israeli army, and can do everything. John Turturro is his counterpart in the Palestinian Army, Phantom. When Zohan realizes they traded a big enemy while he was on vacation, he becomes disillusioned about having to do everything for the Army, fakes his death, and reinvents himself as a hairdresser in New York City (only with a 1980s Paul Mitchell hair catalog for reference).
There are some hilarious scenes as Zohan indulges his interest in older women (one of which being “Mrs. Garrett” from “Facts of Life” 
), and figures out that he is himself in love with a Palestinian woman, who ends up being Phantom’s sister.
I did think this movie was funny, and you might like it on cable, but it’s definitely not worth watching in the theater.
And I didn’t even get any knitting done! The sweater I brought with me had lost a few stitches so I spent what light I could on trying to get it back to a knittable state, which didn’t work out. Maybe next time.
*Besides being an old SNL sketch, in the ’60s, Lothar and the Hand People were “singing” group that did a pretty great cover of the “Woody Woodpecker” song.
2 Comments
Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI
Leave a comment
I have never heard of them. Not that tha’ts all that shocking but stil.
The movie really doesn’t look like it’d be worth the price of a ticket but the trailers have been cracking me up.
Ummm… that movie sounds like a total miss for me!