Hey, so this Jesse Eisenberg movie about Hasidic drug-smugglers, Holy Rollers, actually looks really good:
I don't have particular feelings about Eisenberg. But I like Justin Bartha. And more than that, I like movies that explore religious identity in interesting ways. I'm, uh, obviously not that observant, but I'm not a real fan of movies that see very religious people as people to be tossed into debauchery narratives, as if it's some proof that All Religious People are Hypocrites. I've always been amused/annoyed by the tagline for The Holy Land, which, if I recall correctly, runs along the lines of "A yeshiva student. A stripper." and continues from there. One of the things that's fascinating to me about this trailer is the constant repetition of "and act Jewish" as a mantra, an instruction for mules. The main characters' Jewishness is what makes them such good smugglers, but the injunction makes their Jewishness, something that's so ingrained as to be intuitive, something they have to break down into its constituent parts, make a checklist, and make sure they're performing correctly. It's actually a clever way to get at who these guys are, and who they want to be.