Growing up, Phil Weinstein, executive producer of “Mickey Mouse Funhouse,” celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah.

“My uncle had a religiously blended family,” Weinstein says. “We would go to their house and they would have a Christmas tree and a Hanukkah menorah. It was kind of awesome.”

That cherished childhood memory is present in “Hanukkah at Hilda’s,” one of the first “Mickey” episodes to celebrate the Jewish holiday. In the episode, premiering Dec. 6 on Disney Junior, Mickey and his pals get stranded in a snowstorm at Hilda’s house and learn that she is Jewish and celebrates Hanukkah. The gang then celebrates both December holidays with Christmas sugar cookies and jelly-filled doughnuts known as sufganiyot.

Each year, starting around Thanksgiving, culture vultures get to unwrap an early present: a raft of films, TV shows, concerts and more that fill the calendar through the end of the season. And this week, The Times is happy to be your guide to some of the most noteworthy offerings, from Oscar contenders and crowd-pleasers to holiday specials you and the family can curl up with. Read on!

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Since its premiere in 2021, “Mickey Mouse Funhouse” has highlighted many culturally diverse holidays including Nochebuena, a Christmas Eve tradition celebrated by Latinos; the Korean holiday Chuseok; Día de Muertos and the Armenian holiday Vardavar. “In our show, we have these stairs to anywhere, which is really about imagination,” Weinstein says. “Imagination can take you anywhere and then, as we got into the show, we realized it doesn’t just have to be fantasy places that they go off to. We can really celebrate real things like Hanukkah and Nochebuena.”

That ethos is shared among the Disney Junior shows that will highlight the Jewish holiday this season. In an episode of Marvel’s “Spidey and His Amazing Friends” titled “Hanukkah Heist,” premiering Dec. 3, Spidey and the Thing help his Aunt Petunia save her beloved latkes from the show’s villains, including Rhino and the Green Goblin. “The Thing is a really special character, and he’s Jewish so it was very natural to tell a story through his point of view,” says Becca Topol, “Spidey’s’’ story editor and co-producer. “The Thing might be tough and gruff but ultimately he’s a softy when it comes to family and holidays and things he loves.”

The “Hanukkah Heist” episode of “Spidey and his Amazing Friends” will premiere Dec. 6 on Disney Junior.

(Disney/Disney)

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The hook of the story is that all the bad guys want Aunt Petunia’s latkes because they are so delicious. Aunt Petunia’s secret ingredient, in addition to the potatoes, oil, salt and onions, is love. “I know that’s true for people in other religions, that the food always ends up being so closely connected to the celebration of holidays,” Topol says. “The real beauty of the episode is that I think audience members can connect with it whether they are Jewish or not. It is the togetherness of the family and the really close relationship that the Thing has with his aunt.”

Topol says at her Hanukkah celebrations, there are always a few people who have never had a latke before. “Every culture has their food that they are really proud of that everyone wants to have. You can appreciate this and learn more about the Jewish culture and what traditional Hanukkah is like and connect to it,” she says. “[We are] taking the specific and making it universal and relatable on a bigger level. Spidey is also having latkes for the first time so Spidey is a way in for our audience.”

“SuperKitties” songwriter Keith Harrison Dworkin wrote “Hanukkah Lights” for the “Hanukkah Rescue” episode that premieres Dec. 4 and finds the heroic felines lighting the menorah. “I grew up in a Jewish household so I know what it is to say the prayer over the menorah and go through that ritual. That’s really the centerpiece of the holiday,” he says. “That first version of the song is kind of in lieu of the prayer. And then at the end of the episode, we get the full song, which is kind of the danceable fun party version, and that’s just a lot of fun.”

Dworkin loved being able to create a song that feels modern and relatable “because sometimes Hebraic music cannot feel that way.” The central lyric of the song is that “even when hope grows dim together, we will make it through.” “That was the line that’s really what Hanukkah is about for me thematically,” he says. “It’s about hope. In this particular episode, we are teaching the kids that cultural diversity is good and Hanukkah is a positive and valuable and beautiful part of the holiday season. What a wonderful message to share.”

Each of the episodes take the time to explain to their young audience what Hanukkah is. As she did for the Rosh Hashanah “Spidey” episode that aired last year, Topol worked with the nonprofit Tanenbaum as well as Disney Junior’s internal education and inclusion team.

“For our audience we need to explain it in a digestible way,” Topol says. “How are you going to explain something that’s relatively complicated? We really did want to go into the heart of it, the miracle of lights. The idea of introducing a holiday to viewers that they may not have celebrated before or know much about and introducing it with joy and love and family and togetherness is a way to really allow those universal themes of holiday to come out and bring more happiness and joy to the world.”

These may be preschool shows but for all involved, it’s also an opportunity to help impart positive messages on the young minds watching.

“We are all just people and we can treat each other with respect,” Weinstein says. “We are always consciously thinking about how we can hopefully help kids to learn how to treat their fellow humans.”

After delivering a successful film, Gaami & not so successful film, Gangs of Godavari this year already, Vishwak Sen came up with his third film of the year, Mechanic Rocky, an action comedy film under the direction of debutant, Raviteja Mullapudi. Meenakshi Chaudhary & Shraddha Srinath did the female lead roles and Jakes Bejoy who scored a hit recently with Saripodhaa Sanivaaram, scored the music for the film. It’s a crucial film for producer Ram Talluri who delivered a disaster with Matka last Friday. Did Vishwak Sen score a hit with Mechanic Rocky? Did the debutant director deliver a memorable film? Did Ram Talluri get a sigh of relief? Let’s figure it out with a detailed analysis.

What is it about?

Nagumomu Rakesh Aka Mechanic Rocky (Vishwak Sen) works as a mechanic and driving teacher at his father’s (Naresh) garage. Ranki Reddy (Sunil), a real estate settlement goon agrees to grab Rocky’s lake-view garage and hand it over to a businessman for ₹25 lakhs. Rocky makes a deal with Ranki Reddy for ₹50 lakhs and asks him to give him ten days to adjust the money. While Rocky & Ranki Reddy making the deal, he gets a call from Maya (Shraddha Srinath) who says Rocky’s father has a two-crore insurance policy in his name and Rocky will now get the two crore as his father passed away. Will Rocky get the two crore money? Who is Maya? What is her connection with Priya (Meenakshi Chaudhary)? Forms the rest of the story.

Performances:

Vishwak Sen as Rocky Aka Nagumomu Rakesh did a decent job with his performance but he looked odd as a student during the college episode in the first half. The film has two female leads and both of them have good character arcs.

Meenakshi Chaudhary as Priya who takes responsibility for her family after her father and brother passes away, did perform well. Shraddha Srinath got a meaty role as Maya and utilised it so well. It is safe to say that she is the best performer in the film out of all the other actors. Senior actor Naresh’s comedy worked to an extent. Sunil, Harsha Chemudu and Hyper Aadi were wasted in insignificant roles. Harsha Vardhan and Raghu Ram Ambadapudi (MTV Roadies Creator) are just decent.

Technicalities:

Jakes Bejoy’s background score is a mixed bag. It was good at a few parts and was out of sync at a few parts. His songs are forgettable. The film has a total of five songs and none of them worked. The cinematography by Manoj Reddy Katasani is adequate. There’s nothing much to talk about his work. Anwar Ali’s editing should have been much better. He should have edited at least fifteen to twenty minutes of the film, especially in the first half. SRT Entertainment’s production values are decent. Debutant director, Raviteja Mullapudi should have avoided adding unnecessary commercial elements to a plot that has a very good potential to become a good thriller.

Thumbs Up:

Core Plot of The Film
Two Twists In The Second Half

Thumbs Down:

Routine Template-Driven Screenplay In The First Half
Boring Songs
Poorly Written Dialogues
Unnecessary Action Episodes
Climax

Analysis:

‘Your phone number won a lottery’, ‘You have received a parcel from abroad, ‘Click on the link to check your CBIL/Credit score’, etc., almost all of us must have got calls or E-Mails or messages from fraudsters who say one of the aforementioned things to loot money from us. As mentioned in the movie, around twenty-thousand such crimes are happening in India every day.

The debutant director, Raviteja Mullapudi took a very relatable point of crime happening by targeting middle-class people in India, as the core plot and he added a couple of good twists to the plot that worked well. But, in an attempt to include commercial elements, he lost the plot completely in the first half. The first half of the film tests your patience with a routine template-driven screenplay with three songs, two fights, a beaten-to-death hero & villain track and a romantic track. Everything in the first half looks forced and dragged forever.

Even in the second half, when the core plot is unfolding interestingly, he included a celebration song between Vishwak Sen & Meenakshi Chaudhary that comes across as a speed breaker to the proceedings. After a good sixty minutes in the second half, the director chose to end the movie very routinely with an action sequence and poorly written ‘punch’ dialogues that are uttered by the hero.

The core plot of the film should have been worked as a proper thriller film with a crisp runtime and tight screenplay but the director’s attempt to make it an ‘Action & Romantic & Comedy & Thriller’ film worked against it. Just like most of Vishwak Sen’s films, Mechanic Rocky also has a lot of curse words throughout the film.

Overall, the core plot of Mechanic Rocky has a lot of potential but the overall feel of the film is spoiled by unnecessary commercial elements and runtime. Given the potential of the core plot, Mechanic Rocky will end up remaining as a missed opportunity.

Mechanic Rocky – Lost In Commercialization

Rating – 2.5/5

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Great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensively private and didn’t share much about the inspiration behind his books — or about himself. However, the author, who died in 2023, apparently lived out much of his bestseller “All the Pretty Horses” with a woman named Augusta Britt.

She was 16 when she met the then 42-year-old writer in 1976.

Britt, now 64, guarded her identity and her story for nearly five decades, publicly revealing herself as the author’s “single secret muse” in a Vanity Fair profile published this week. Writer Vincenzo Barney argues that many of the Pulitzer Prize winner’s leading men were inspired by Britt, a “five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl … whose reality, McCarthy confessed in his early love letters to her, he had ‘trouble coming to grips with.’”

Britt’s story has “always been there, below the surface, between the lines in the novels’ coy subconscious,” Barney writes. She had a strong presence throughout “The Road” author’s acclaimed “Border Trilogy,” inspired Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men,” was Alicia in “The Passenger” and a nurse named Wanda in “Suttree.” Horses identical to her breeds appeared in the 2013 film “The Counselor,” in which Penélope Cruz plays a character based on her.

“Cormac always wanted me to tell my story,” Britt said. “He always encouraged me to write a book. He’d say, ‘Someone will do it eventually, and it might as well be you.’ But I just never could bring myself to.”

Barney said he connected with Britt after she left him a pointed comment on his Substack review of McCarthy’s 2022 novel “The Passenger” — a review that McCarthy told her “something good will come of.” Then, she sought out Barney, insisting on speaking only to him rather two other McCarthy biographers vying for her attention.

She invited Barney to Tucson to hear her story, and they spent nine months together. McCarthy, she said, had warned her that she “couldn’t hide forever,” and she readily shared 47 (occasionally erotic) love letters the “Blood Meridian” scribe wrote to her that illuminated their relationship and, in McCarthy’s own words, his “undying devotion.”

Britt said she’d been “so afraid” to tell her story — after all, who would believe her? But he had warned her that one day his archives would open and people would learn about her.

Britt also inspired the slapstick sidekick Harrogate in “Suttree,” which McCarthy was writing when they first met at a Tucson motel swimming pool where she went to safely shower away from her foster home.

She was in foster care in Arizona after she experienced “a traumatically violent” event that destroyed her family and returned to the hotel to ask McCarthy to sign a copy of his 1965 debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” McCarthy, she said, wanted to know why she was wearing a holster with a Colt revolver in it. It turns out she had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home. She also had a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole, the hero’s name in McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy,” which follows three runaways who have a stolen Colt revolver.

“It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me my opinions about things,” she said. “And to have this adult man that actually seemed interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little spark of hope.”

Growing frustrated with issues in Britt’s personal life, McCarthy tweaked her birth certificate on his typewriter so she could run away with him to Mexico. It worked but left trouble for both of them in its wake.

The optics of their three-decade age gap weren’t ideal for them either. Despite characterizations of premeditated grooming, Britt asserted that she felt safer with him than with any of the many men in her young life at whose hands she had, in Barney’s words, “suffered unspeakable violence.” McCarthy — who was married to the second of his three wives, singer Annie De Lisle, when he met Britt — still worried about statutory rape allegations and the Mann Act in the early days of their relationship.

She said that he was 43 and she was 17 when they first had sex.

“I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good,” she said. “I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young. What I had trouble with came later. When he started writing about me.”

She said that McCarthy’s letters, many of which she received before they consummated their relationship, made her uncomfortable at the time because they were so different from how he talked on the phone or in person. But, she insisted, she never felt anything inappropriate about their relationship and was more concerned McCarthy would be misunderstood by the wider public if she came forward.

“One thing I’m scared about is that he’s not around to defend himself,” she said.

About two years into their relationship she learned that he was married. About a year later, she learned that McCarthy had a son who was about her age.

“It just shattered me. What I needed then, so badly, was security and safety and trust. Cormac was my life, my pattern. He was on a pedestal for me. And finding out he lied about those things, they became chinks in the trust.”

Britt left him about three years into their relationship. They continued to keep in touch, talked regularly for years and saw each other when he visited Tucson. When McCarthy sent her the manuscript for “All the Pretty Horses” in the 1980s, she was confused by how much the novel was “full of me, and yet isn’t me.”

“I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated,” she said. “All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. … I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a train wreck to write about?”

Britt said she declined two marriage proposals from McCarthy and lamented how nearly all the characters she inspired him to write died. But, she said, after decades she realized he was “killing off the darkness” of what happened to her.

“Those things that happen to you, that young and that awful, you don’t really heal. You just patch yourself up the best you can and move on.”