Audience Member
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'This Is Sodom' is everything the name suggests
At an arranged marriage, a Rabbi tries to break the ice by telling a joke.
"Why was the first man the happiest?" he asks.
No one answers.
"Because he didn't have a mother-in-law!"
No one laughs.
The rabbi has the decency to recognize his pathetic attempt at humour and stops. Israel's biggest blockbuster in 25 years, This is Sodom, however, doesn't - resulting in an overproduced, underwritten excuse for a comedy, lasting an interminable 88 minutes.
The film opens with a door-to-door salesman, named 'god', selling a new religion to a man named Abraham. To prove his omnipotence, the salesman promises the destruction of Sodom, the most famous Sin City in history.
However, Abraham protests, informing god of his nephew, Lot, who is the one righteous man in the city. As a compromise, god gives an ultimatum - Lot has three days to get out of Sodom before the city, and everyone in it, is destroyed.
At first, the film shows a lot of promise. The exchanges between god and Abraham prove to be both funny and satirical, shedding light on the farcical dogmas of contemporary religions.
In one instance, Abraham is eating shrimp. Not wanting to share with the salesman, he gorges them all in one swift moment, proclaiming that there isn't any left. God, clearly perturbed, makes a note of it in his notebook.
From these interactions, we come to expect a Monty Python style of a biblical farce, but instead, when the film focuses on Lot and his story, we get another Year One type of disaster.
The film's central premise (which should've been called Escape from Sodom) feels like a simple Saturday Night Live sketch, and it indeed feels like one. Much of the jokes rely on ill thought out puns, while the gags and physical humour can be extremely ridiculous and juvenile.
It's as if the writers, if you can call them that, came up with a series of biblical-era sketch comedies and attempted to paste them together. You literally know when you're being told a joke because the film will stop the narrative in order to tell you it.
What's worse, the few jokes that slightly work are gratuitously repeated, until they become as repetitive and tedious as the rest of the film.
This hurts the movie immensely because it betrays its initial intelligence. There are some instances of social commentary, but because the film's tone is so fatuous and infantile, it's hard to take them seriously, no matter how pertinent or insightful they may be. Furthermore, the banter between god and Abraham, when looked at retrospectively, seems out of place by comparison.
This Is Sodom commits the cardinal sin of being an unfunny comedy. Even so, the film is recognized as Israel's biggest blockbuster in 25 years, with the directors, Adam Sanderson and Muli Segev, drawing comparisons to Monty Python and Mel Brooks. But thou shall not bear false witness; a more apt comparison is to say that they're the Israeli equivalent of Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.
Rated 1/5 Stars •
Rated 1 out of 5 stars
02/06/23
Full Review
Audience Member
'Zohi Sdom' is a feature film spin-off of 'Eretz Nehederet', Israel's most successful sketch comedy show for nearly a decade now; like in a National Lampoon movie, the cast of the TV show play various roles in a kinda-linear storyline.
There was a strange attempt to market 'Zohi Sdom' as a local version of Monty Python's Life of Brian. But other than the fact that it's set in biblical times, there's absolutely no similarity (other than the lead character's outfit). There's no real satire in 'Zohi Sdom'; a shame, because with a feature film the writers had the chance to make satire more biting and more universal than what they could afford to do on network television. Instead, they used that opportunity to have more sex jokes. The humor in 'Zohi Sdom' is a neverending series of gags, none of which have any bearing on the story, and most of which are anachronism gags in the level of The Flintstones (only with a lot more sex).
The movie does have a few chuckles, but the humor is so local as to never have any real impact anywhere but Israel in the early 21st century, which is a waste. It does actually have a pretty decent production, and some good actors - Assi Cohen's performance is deliciously hammy (he clearly realized how dumb the script was), and local legendary satirist/journalist Mordechai Kirschenbaum as Abraham is one of the movie's few saving graces. But ultimately it's a failed attempt, which owes all its success to marketing, and will - I believe and hope - disappear into anonymity.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/23/23
Full Review
Audience Member
nice parody on the sodom & amora story of the bible
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/15/23
Full Review
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