MY PERSONAL VIDEO LIBRARY 20

Danger: Diabolik, a 1968 movie directed by Mario Bava inspired by the Italian Diabolik comics, recounts the adventures of genius but ruthless criminal “Diabolik” who steals treasures for his fantastically beautiful girlfriend. It’s nowadays considered a cult movie, but it hasn’t taken my fancy – the narrative pace is unjustifiably slow, the dialogue dull, and the story one-dimensional.

A new movie adaptation of the comics character was scheduled for release last December, but has been postponed to this coming December because of the ongoing pandemic. Let’s see whether the 2021 release will be better than its 1968 predecessor.

Two and a half Men, an American sit-com that aired from 2003 to 2015, was at its best when Charlie Sheen starred in it, as the depressed, filthy-rich Charlie Harper, a millionaire songwriter who can’t grapple with his alcoholism and sexual depravity both originating from the dysfunctional upbringing given him by his narcissistic, sex-maniac mother. To compound matters, his equally disturbed brother, a self-confessed “parasitic leech”, moves in permanently after being kicked out of home by his ex-wife, bringing along his pre-teenage son who will eventually grow into an adolescent dumb pothead.

The episodes are essentially yarns about sexual predation and failed relationships. In a sense, it’s a rehash of quintessentially Jewish themes: mother-son convolutions, fraternal envy, ambiguity toward sexual mores… stuff you’d expect to find in Freud. The series was Chuck Lorre’s brainchild, and Lorre’s a Jew.

Sheen and Lorre didn’t get on well together. During a radiobroadcast rant, Sheen called Lorre by his Jewish name, leading onlookers to conclude Sheen disliked him for his Jewishness. I, on the other hand, find Lorre’s Jewishness attractive. (The Jewishness theme is also explored in another Lorre sit-com – The Big Bang Theory – through Howard Holowitz, the character who keeps cracking mock-self-ironic jokes about Jewish mother-son relationships.)

Through the Jewish penchant for dissecting family dynamics, we possibly understand ourselves.