At the beginning of Knocked Up, when a group of nerdy Jewish dudes find themselves unexpectedly admitted to a nightclub, schlubby Ben Stone (Seth Rogen) tells his friends that “If any of us get laid tonight it’s because of Eric Bana in Munich.” Magic City, Starz’s next attempt to burnish its reputation as a provider of high-quality drama along with its standard doses of reasonably explicit sex and violence, follows the noble and recent pop culture trend of portraying Jews as something other than nebbishes. It stars Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Ike Evans, a recently-remarried widower who built his dream hotel, the Miramar Playa, on Miami Beach, just in time for Castro to take Havana and kick out the casinos, creating a hot new market for a Caribbean vacation spot. It’s the first of the current crop of period shows to put Jewish characters at the center of the frame, and it’s one of the best decisions Mitch Glazer, the show’s creator, made in standing up this gorgeous-looking but uneven drama.

Magic City‘s a personal story for Glazer, who in a conversation with me in January described starting out as an “assistant engineer”—or janitor—a job his father, a lighting engineer who ordered the chandelier for the Eden Roc and put in gambling machine hookups below the floor of the Fountinbleau lobby, got him. Living in the city was also his introduction to both Cuban immigration and the Civil Rights movement. “My parents, I was 7, dragged me to Civil Rights marches in Flagler Street, and we had rotten garbage thrown at us. I remember, because they were very active in what was then a very Southern town,” he told me. “Most of my friends when I was in sixth grade, the first-wave of Cubans, were the white-collar Cubans who came to America, guys who had been lawyers who became short-order cooks. Those were my best friends’ parents. I tried to pass for Cuban for about six months. They just seemed cooler. My high school was 60 percent Jewish, 40 percent Cuban, and Mickey Rourke.”

Magic City is at its best when the show reflects that transition. Ike’s second wife, Vera (Olga Kurylenko) contemplated converting to Judaism on the eve of Ike’s daughters bat mitzvah, and Ike and his father squabble over which of them is the worse Jew. Older Russian emigrees play balalaika on the beach and a louche State Senator from Tallahassee goes on at length about the “Aryan” charms of a potential beauty queen. We’ve had Jews at the margins of Mad Men for years, and with the arrival of Michael Ginsburg in the office, we’ll finally have one at the center of the frame. But I enjoyed how Magic City puts Jews and Jewishness at the forefront of the show, giving a Florida Jewish community far richer than the stereotype of retirees we have today. And Jews aren’t the only community Magic City examines. Work in the Miramar Playa kitchens grinds to a halt as word comes over the radio of Castro and Che’s advance on Havana. And Ike plays off the black residents of Overtown against white picketers who want to unionize the hotel, busting up the picket line by violence. It’s that kind of conflict that shows how perceptive characters are of how the world around them is changing, and how bold they are about taking advantage of shifting power dynamics.

It’s less good when it overreaches in search of drama. Starz’s existing viewers may depend on a heavy dose of nipples and killings, but the gratuitousness of both elements in shows like Magic City or Boss seems more likely than not to turn off the new subscribers Starz would like to woo. There’s a troika of characters in Magic City that should have been recast and rewritten: Steven Strait as Ike’s oldest son Stevie, a sullen seducer whose charms are inexplicable to me but appear to turn every woman around him stupid, Jessica Marais as Lily Diamond, the wife of mobster Benny Diamond (an insanely over-the-top Danny Huston), who begins an impossibly foolish affair with Stevie that serves only to fulfill the sexual quotient, and Huston himself, who lurks around killing dogs and threatening to feed people to sharks. Maybe these things really happened. But I wouldn’t mind if Glazer appeared to trust the power of his memories a bit more.

On many of your recommendations after our discussion some time back about the comparative visibility of Christian-influenced fantasy in comparison to fantasy that draws its concepts from other faiths, I just finished The Lions of Al-Rassan. I quite enjoyed it, though I think it has perhaps a reverse George R. R. Martin problem—there are a lot of fascinating concepts there that feel wildly underdeveloped, like a Reconstructionist-sounding strain of Kindath theology, or the actual mechanisms of reconquest, and I wish there’d been more room to explore them. But as an exploration of the weaknesses of theocratic governance, it’s a convincing argument with all sorts of resonance today.

I’d say there’s a stupidity to what Almalik does to Ishak after performing the world’s most successful cesarean section on Zabira, the king’s chief concubine: “he had ordered the physician’s eyes put out and his tongue cut off at the root, that the forbidden sight of an Asharite woman’s nakedness be atoned for, that no man might ever heard a description of Zabira’s milk-white splendor from the Kindath doctor who had exposed her to his cold glance and his scalpel.” But the Kindath don’t have power in Al-Rassan such that they can squander it being appalled. And religion doesn’t only lead to individual bad acts of state: it guarantees a constant cycle of escalation, whether it’s Alvar’s mother getting hyped up to send him off to war by visiting Vasca’s shrine and reaffirming her sense that non-believers need to be annihilated, or providing an enormous list of slights that seem to need avenging:

At certain moments, Jehane thought, in the presence of men like Husari ibn Musa or young Alvar, or Rodrigo Belmonte, it was actually possible to imagine a future for this peninsula that left room for hope. Men and women could change, could cross boundaries, give and take, each from the other…given enough time, enough good will, intelligence. There was a world for the making in Esperana, in Al-Rassan, one world made of the two—or perhaps, if one were to dream, made of the three. Sun, stars and the moon. Then you remembered Orvilla, the Day of the Moat. You looked into the eyes of the Muwardis, or paused on a street corner and heard a wadji demanding death for the foul Kindath sorcerer ben Avren, who drank the blood of Asharite infants torn from their mothers’ arms.

It also makes people unpredictable and irrational. The governor of Fezana gets frustrated because “being deeply cautious by nature, couldn’t quite believe that Ramiro of Valledo would be so foolish enough to come and make war here, laying a siege so far form his own lands. Valledo was being paid parias from Fezana twice a year. Why would any rational man risk life and his kingdom’s stability to conquer a city that was already filling his coffers with gold.” Choices like this, or the destruction of Sorenica aren’t good for the peninsula’s economy and social stability, something its new rulers recognize when they ask the Kindath to resettle and rebuild their shattered city.
Read more

By now, I’m sure you’ve all seen the trailer for New Year’s Eve, the latest multi-track ensemble dramedy that is the benighted offspring of Love, Actually:

There are many things that drive me nuts about these kinds of movies, from the ridiculous salaries people get paid to mail in a couple minutes of work, to the emotionally-manipulative storytelling, to the treatment of holidays as the most critically important turning points ever. But it’s also irritating because I think ensemble movies where stories are moving on several parallel, not always related tracks, can be a really powerful form of storytelling. Here are five books that, if adapted, could show us why:

1. Underworld, Don DeLillo: Nuns! Conceptual artists! The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation! Baseball games! It would be hard to corral DeLillo’s attempt at defining an age into a series of coherent narratives. But that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t provide a useful set of arresting images and emotional moments to set against each other. Eras can be defined by grand personalities, but they’ve also got their distinct tones. And who doesn’t want to see that baseball game sequence as a movie (or an episode of television) on its now, not even counting what comes after?

2. People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks: Brooks’ interwoven narrative of a book restorer who’s taking care of the Sarajevo Haggadah in preparation of its exhibition and Brooks’ fantasies about how the extraordinary book came together over the centuries and survived despite its exposure to everything from the Jewish expulsion from Spain to the censorship of the Inquisition is more of a short story collection than a novel. And it’s a remarkable testament to the power of art and to interfaith collaboration. The stories don’t have to be directly connected to each other for readers — or viewers — to see how they support those common themes.

3. The Sparrow and Children of God, Mary Doria Russell: These narratives are related, of course, but how awesome would it be to juxtapose a Catholic investigation on Earth, a Jewish-inspired uprising on an alien planet, and the flashbacks to how both the rebel and penitent got where they ended up? Plus, throw in a parallel social history of two alien species — Andy Serkis can totally play Supaari.

4. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison: Hollywood should give us Song of Solomon anyway as an apology for The Help. And a fair number of these stories intersect. But these powerful, parallel tales, about the impact of faith and the strange, sometimes wonderful, sometimes terrible things that develop in our private lives, would be amazing to see spiral out on a big screen. And it would be awesome to see a big, prestige picture that would provide this many unusual, moving roles for black actors.

5. Canterbury Tales or The Decameron: Yes, I’m a ridiculous dork. But stories about the stories we tell ourselves under conditions of stress, or exploration, or extreme hope are revealing, moving, and as both of these collections reveal, often extremely funny. Plus, personal movies about ordinary and ordinary-ish people experiencing big events like plagues and pilgrimages would be a welcome break from all the Borgias and Tudors we’ve got running around.

I’m intrigued, if not entirely convinced, by some of the arguments Erik Kain explores here about whether fantasy is an inherently Christian genre. He quotes D.G. Meyers on C.S. Lewis, who writes that:

Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise that fantasy depends on the idea of another world. Certainly there’s some fantasy that depends on escaping entirely to a parallel universe, whether it’s accessible at the back of a wardrobe or through a competitive, Ivy League-style entrance exams process. But another world is hardly a Christian concept: Islam has highly developed and debated visions of limbo, judgment, hell, and heaven.

And there’s also fantasy based on the idea that we simply don’t know everything about the world that we live in, that there is power that we can access here and now if we know where to look for it and are determined enough to exercise it, all of which give us plenty of hooks in Jewish and Islamic tradition. In the former, take the legend of the golem, the idea that by very hard work and access to esoteric knowledge, rabbis were able to summon protectors for the Jewish people from the earth. There’s also a strong tradition of Jewish mysticism and Messianism, which suggests a permeable boundary between realms and regimes. Judaism has a demonic tradition that includes creatures like Dubbyks and Mazikeen, just as Islam has Jinns, Ifrits, and angels. Christians aren’t the only ones to have fairy realms or ghosts. And in Judaism, the Reconstructionist drive toward human transcendence and elimination of oppression is a framework for an epic quest that can take place in the here and now.

I think the point is more that, as a modification of how Erik puts it, that the fantasy that we see on the American market is “not founded in Christian themes so much as it is rooted in distinctly Anglo-Saxon mythology. And not just the mythology of the Medieval, feudalistic period, but the pre-Christian myths of the faerie-folk as well.” That we see certain things on the market doesn’t mean that fantasy is limited to those things, or inherently grows out to those things. It just means that we’re reliant on old patterns. I don’t think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is perfect, but it is a rich illustration of the possibilities of Egyptian gods of death, of pre-Christian totem spirits, of Ifrits on the streets of New York for fantasy even if it doesn’t fulfill all of that promise itself.

The last time NBC tried to do a show that was primarily about non-white, non-Christian people, it ended up with Outsourced. By which I mean a show rooted in the idea that Indian people have funny names, Indian food is poison, Hinduism is pretty strange, and Indians either over- or under-adapt to American culture. To be fair, Outsourced is also about the fact that Americans have deeply terrible taste in novelties, inclining towards the racist, purile, violent, and drunken. But still. Not a victory for tolerance and mutual understanding.

Which makes the news that the struggling network’s taken the intriguing step developing a comedy based on The Infidel quite heartening. The original movie follows the misadventures of a moderately observant British Muslim, played by Omid Djalili (who has had a deal with the network in 2002 but never seen a project come through) who, on the eve of his son’s engagement to the stepdaughter of a radical imam and shortly after his mother’s death, discovers that he was adopted — and that he was born to observant Jewish parents. And to complicate matters further, his father is alive, but gravely ill, and being taken care of by a rabbi who won’t let the son his charge gave us see his father unless the son makes a serious study of Judaism. So he seeks out the tutelage of a depressed, divorced Jewish cabbie, played brilliantly by Richard Schiff.

A lot of the movie’s power is in its rawness. When Mahmud, the main character, first tells Lenny, the cabbie, that he’s Jewish, Lenny spits back, “I’m the shoe bomber. Pleasure to meet you.” In prepping Mahmud to go to his first bar mitzvah, Lenny goes through a checklist of things Mahmud probably shouldn’t bring up, including “Hitler. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Hitler. The fact that you’re actually a Muslim.” And in a raw showdown between Mahmud’s father’s rabbi and Mahmud, Lenny pits cultural Judaism against Jewish religious knowledge, telling the rabbi, “My friend has drunk my chicken soup. He’s danced like a Cossack in my living room, he told a funny story at a bar mitzvah and got a good laugh. I’m a Jew, and my friend is Jewish enough for me.” Jews aren’t the only ones with intra-faith tensions. “Give me one reason that can calm me down about inviting Arshad Al-fucking Stalin into my family!” Mahmud despairs as he grapples with how to reconcile his son’s happiness and the prospect of ending up permanently connected to a preacher of hatred. The show even has one of the funnier, more effective satire of British hate speech laws I’ve ever seen, complete with Jack Benny jokes.

The movie’s not perfect. It ends in a really profoundly stupid twist ending, which fortunately doesn’t invalidate any of the very funny work that comes before it. In a fall that’s felt divided between not particularly funny comedy and drama that’s excellent but that can be spiritually wearing (I love Homeland, but it does not make me feel very good about humanity), the prospect of a show that is extremely precisely irreverent is bracing. With faith, extremism, and terrorism in particular, when folks have gotten open about their feelings in American culture in recent years, it’s resulted in stuff like Holy Terror, art that’s dialogue-ending rather than continuing the conversation.

There are lots of questions here: whether NBC will be able to execute The Infidel with the same courage as the original; whether Richard Schiff can be peeled away from Criminal Minds to reprise his role; what the long-arc plot will be. But this is a worthy experiment. It shows signs of the genuine daring and ambition Bob Greenblatt demonstrated at Showtime. And while it doesn’t really make up for NBC’s cowardice regarding projects that involved Djalili in the aftermath of Sept. 11, it’s a small step in the right direction towards making good use of his talents, and for the cause of getting us toward a Muslim Cosby show.