I forgot to mention in my substack comment that my biggest source of confusion over this movie when I saw it on HBO was the meaning of the title. I guess they wanted to avoid the quasi-blasphemy of using the word "Holy" so they went with a homophone: "Wholly". But "Wholly Moses" with or without an exclamation point makes no damn sense. Herschel isn't wholly Moses -- he's not even partly Moses. He barely qualifies as Moses-adjacent. Other "comedy" films had titles that were puns, but this wasn't even that. Columbia Pictures, a major Hollywood Studio, signed off on this title and paid a lot of money to promote and distribute it in theaters, TV and eventually home video. At no point did anyone at this studio take a step back and say, "Maybe this title is awful and makes no sense. Sure the movie is the same way, but at least we could put in a little effort and come up with a good title to sucker people in."?
I forgot to mention in my substack comment that my biggest source of confusion over this movie when I saw it on HBO was the meaning of the title. I guess they wanted to avoid the quasi-blasphemy of using the word "Holy" so they went with a homophone: "Wholly". But "Wholly Moses" with or without an exclamation point makes no damn sense. Herschel isn't wholly Moses -- he's not even partly Moses. He barely qualifies as Moses-adjacent. Other "comedy" films had titles that were puns, but this wasn't even that. Columbia Pictures, a major Hollywood Studio, signed off on this title and paid a lot of money to promote and distribute it in theaters, TV and eventually home video. At no point did anyone at this studio take a step back and say, "Maybe this title is awful and makes no sense. Sure the movie is the same way, but at least we could put in a little effort and come up with a good title to sucker people in."?