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It’s like they put out Christmas movies earlier and earlier every year.

The release of “The Night Before” marks the start of 2015′s Christmas Movie Season. It is perhaps one of my favorite Christmas-themed movies in a long time. Maybe after a few more viewings, I will be able to put it alongside “Trading Places.”

In “The Night Before,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Ethan. When he was a child, his parents were both killed in a car accident one Christmas. After that, his best friends Isaac (Seth Rogen) and Chris (Anthony Mackie) form a makeshift family with him and vow to spend every Christmas together. However, the older they get, the more difficult this becomes. While Isaac and Chris have career and family obligations, Ethan is the only one of them who can’t seem to grow up.

Like with “White Christmas” and many other Christmas classics in popular culture, “The Night Before” was put together by a lot of Jews. In fact, “The Night Before” is populated with more Jews than any other Christmas movie I can remember. Ilana Glazer (“Broad City”) and Nathan Fielder (“Nathan for You”) appear alongside Rogen and Gordon-Levitt.

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In the past, Jews have had to hide themselves in plain sight in Hollywood, throwing away Hanukkah traditions and buying into this whole Christmas thing. That changed around the time Adam Sandler came out with his first version of the Hanukkah song (for the record: I have heard the upcoming fourth version and it is great) and “Rugrats” put out a Hanukkah special. With this in mind, “The Night Before” might feel like a step back. Don’t get me wrong, it is a holiday classic in the making, complete with a stoned guardian angel played by Michael Shannon. However, I am still waiting for my Hanukkah classic, and “Eight Crazy Nights” doesn’t quite cut it.

However, in terms of Jews getting their beloved (but not that important) December holiday on the big screen, “The Night Before” comes very close. For this, we can thank Seth Rogen and his Star of David sweatshirt.

In the movie, Rogen is something of the token Jew in a movie that is filled with Jews playing non-Jews. Rogen is not the movie’s main character, and his story arc is less about being Jewish and more about his fear of fatherhood. But hey, the man spends the entire movie wearing a Star of David so we’re going to talk about it.

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Rogen’s Isaac is first introduced at a Christmas party. He has married a non-Jew (Jillian Bell). He is asked by two very creepy identical twins what a Jew is. Yes, I have been asked many variations of this question in the past. This movie tackles the fear of being alone on Christmas. Really, “The Night Before,” directed by Jonathan Levine, is Christmas through the Jewish perspective. Ethan wants a family to celebrate the holiday with. Anyone who lights a menorah for an eight night stretch of the year knows the lonely feeling of being the only one without a Christmas tree to decorate.

Jews will do anything to make it feel like they are celebrating their own holiday on Christmas, given that Hanukkah and Christmas rarely overlap. Some people go to the movies and eat Chinese food (the latter is part of Ethan, Isaac, and Chris’s Christmas tradition). Others might go to a Jewish dating event where a mixed drink costs $18 (I have done this and that price is real). None of these exactly feel right but they are comforting in their own weird ways. They are means of connecting on the one day of the year where you roll out of bed feeling like a misfit.

To say that Jews are an underrepresented minority in film and television would be wrong, given that Hollywood actually was founded by a bunch of Jews and there are minorities that deal with real representation problems every day (watch “Master of None”). However, it still feels like the Jewish experience can be hidden in plain sight, even when Jewish people are both in front of and behind the camera.

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Luckily, we have Seth Rogen. For him, it is just impossible to hide his Jewish nature. In “Knocked Up,” when asked what product he uses in his hair, he simply responds, “it’s called Jew.” While Gordon-Levitt is a chameleon, Rogen just has to be Jewish. It’s the elephant in the room.

The Jewish nature of “The Night Before” goes well beyond a reference or joke or two. Sure, it’s not “A Serious Man.” However, it is a step towards showing that not everybody connects with the biggest holiday of the year, and that maybe we will finally get the Hanukkah movie that we deserve.

But really, “The Night Before” is less about the true meaning of Christmas and more about the importance of being around friends, family, and people you love. You don’t have to celebrate this one holiday just to fit in.

A man and a woman as partners? In a movie? Do you think there’ll be sexual tension between them? Image via Business Insider

The differences between Captain America: The First Avenger and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the latest Captain America installment, shows how much the Marvel Universe has changed and expanded in just three years.

The Winter Solider happens to combine both the worlds of Captain America and The Avengers: half of it is a promotion for a bunch of Marvel stories that I have little interest in, and the other half is a Captain America movie. Leave it to Disney to replace traditional product placement with promotion of their own products.

The latest Captain America has the honor of being the sequel to two different movies: The First Avenger and The Avengers. My head hurts. Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (Chris Evans) is now a full-time agent for the government agency S.H.I.E.L.D., working with Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) to bring down all existential threats. Trouble is afoot in the nation’s capital, and nobody is to be trusted. I know this because Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) says “don’t trust anybody” multiple times (I tried to count), in case you forgot that this is a movie and bad things are supposed to happen in movies.

While the first Captain America was a send-up killin-Nazi World War II films, The Winter Soldier takes place mostly in the present day, and is more in line with paranoid, post-911 political thrillers. I really liked the first Captain America even though others did not. It had a Raiders of the Lost Ark vibe to it: very inspired by the past, and very much into taking itself seriously while also acknowledging its own silliness. Winter Soldier only seems committed to doing that sometimes. With its undertones about N.S.A. surveillance, The Winter Soldier fancies itself as an allegorical comic book movie of Dark Knight proportions. Hey, at least it tries.

However, there are some more interesting aspects of the Captain America mythology that transcend current events, such as Captain America serving as a symbol of hope to uplift an entire frightened army, and also to sell a lot of war bonds. However, the two films have made this idea into something of an afterthought. It will get to that as soon as it finishes telling you how this one scene totally relates to Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

The Winter Soldier is essentially two different films, with one half being better than the other. Besides one great car chase, the first half is bogged down by exposition. Every time somebody is about to do something, they have to take a break from what they are doing to explain why they are doing it. The more it tries to elevate its plot, the more The Winter Soldier becomes a great, big muddle.

But then, after a few plot twists in a row, The Winter Soldier does something that the normal blockbuster usually fails to do: it surprises you. It settles the difference between two separate timelines and mixes them with a tinge of Cold War paranoia. First and foremost, this is an action movie, and once everybody stops explaining things, The Winter Soldier delivers. This was one of the few times where I actually regretted not shelling out a few extra bucks for IMAX 3D. The Russo Brothers, perhaps known best for their work on TV comedies such as Arrested Development and Community, were an odd yet fun choice to helm The Winter Soldier.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is just part of the movie that I wanted to see. There are high stakes and tension, as well as an awesome performance by Robert Redford. However, to get to all of that, you have to slog through a muddle that is completely unsure of itself. Winter Soldier is a mess that only works sometimes. For the future, I hope Marvel works on separating its individual heroes from the universe somewhat. While I love world-building and characters who step out of their respective films and into another, it would be great if Marvel’s films could hold back a little bit and let the characters grow just as much as the mythology.

Brain Farts From The Edge

• In the beginning, Captain America shows he has a list of all of the things he missed when he traveled forward in time. Here are the ones I caught: “Berlin Wall, Nirvana (Band), Steve Jobs (Apple)”
• There’s a very small Pulp Fiction reference. Look closely. It’s brilliant.
• No, I don’t know why Garry Shandling is in this either.
• There is a part where Captain America and Black Widow have to hide out at Sam Wilson’s (Anthony Mackie) house. They say that they aren’t safe outside. He says it’s cool. It is almost exactly like a scene from Zoolander.
• I really wish they could have brought Loki into this. Speaking of which, I should probably watch the Thor movies now.
• With all of these crossovers, I have been trying to imagine if there were Disney-Marvel crossovers, given that Disney owns Marvel. So far, I have two: Elsa from Frozen is asked to join The Avengers; The Daily Bugle goes digital so they hire Dog With A Blog to be their new web editor.
• So much of this movie looks like it was shot on Google Maps. with a heavy use of Google Street View.
• Superheroes could probably defeat villains much faster if they didn’t spend so much time uploading stuff to hard drives.
• Now, how much longer until Guardians of the Galaxy comes out?