The big news in the Israeli television and streaming scene is that HBO Max, the global streaming service of Warner Bros. Discovery, will launch as a stand-alone service in Israel on January 13, and will also be available via Yes.
HBO Max offers several subscription plans starting at NIS 49.90 per month. Yes subscribers will receive six months of HBO Max for free, after which they can continue the service through Yes for NIS 49.90 per month.
Details about HBO Max are available at hbomax.com, and information about subscribing through Yes can be found at yes.co.il. Yes announced the HBO Max launch in a festive event this week, which included an appearance by pop diva Noa Kirel, who is the subject of a new Yes documentary and who sang for the assembled guests.
HBO, which later became HBO Max, helped launch the current golden age of television in the late 20th century with
The Sopranos. It went on to create iconic series such as The Wire, Sex and the City, Game of Thrones, Euphoria (a remake of an Israeli series), True Blood, Six Feet Under, and True Detective, earning its famous slogan, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO,” as its series often proved more influential than big-screen films.
In recent years, the service has added series such as The White Lotus, House of the Dragon, and The Last of Us.
Until now, HBO Max series were available in Israel only sporadically, often long after their US premieres, sometimes years later, across various platforms and channels. With this launch, HBO Max in Israel, either directly or through Yes, will combine the best of HBO, Warner Bros. Pictures, Warner Bros. Television, DC, and Max Originals. The service will include all of the recent HBO Max series mentioned above.
Upcoming series include A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, a Game of Thrones prequel, and the Emmy-winning medical drama The Pitt, starring Noah Wyle, from Max Originals. Recent blockbuster films such as Superman, A Minecraft Movie, and Sinners will also be included. The catalog will feature The Batman, Dune, and Harry Potter films, as well as Friends, The Big Bang Theory, Rick and Morty, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and a wide range of documentaries and unscripted programming. Israeli viewers will also have full access to HBO’s classic library, including The Wire. The arrival of HBO Max is poised to be a game-changer for home entertainment in Israel.
‘One Battle After Another’
With so many good movies out there, it can feel unnecessary to dwell on a bad one. But when that lousy movie is winning awards and is widely seen as a frontrunner in the Oscar race, it warrants attention. The film in question is Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which has just become available to rent on Apple TV+ in Israel.
If you missed it during its theatrical run, you might be eager to catch up at home. I found the film not only predictable and boring, but also infuriating, because it celebrates the worst excesses and narcissism of armchair American leftists, doing so at the expense of believable characters and credible situations.
Anderson was once a director whose films I looked forward to, particularly early movies such as Magnolia and Boogie Nights. In One Battle After Another, however, the problems are with the opening scenes of the movie. The film is a very loose adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, and its opening scenes are set around 2010, depicting a left-wing cell blowing up an immigrant detention center on the southern US border.
But Barack Obama was president then and the large-scale raids on migrants that the movie depicts resemble the Trump administration’s policies, not Obama’s. So, what’s the point here? No one who loves the movie seems to have an answer to this conundrum. The early scenes focus on Perfidia (Teyana Taylor), a gorgeous young Black woman who is handy with a shotgun, and her boyfriend, Bob (a constantly befuddled-looking Leonardo DiCaprio), who is a nerdy demolitions expert.
During the attack, Perfidia encounters Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn), an openly racist military officer. She teases him sexually, and the two eventually have sex. The implication is that despite his racism, Lockjaw is aroused by Black women, particularly by a woman like Perfidia, who dominates him (irony alert).
Perfidia is destined for revolutionary greatness, and the most iconic shot in the movie shows her firing a rifle dressed in a crop top that shows off the pregnancy resulting from her encounter with Lockjaw. After she gives birth, it’s the docile Bob who raises the little girl, while Perfidia takes off to fight the good fight, gets arrested, turns in all her former comrades to Lockjaw, and goes into witness protection.
Fast forward about 17 years, and the baby, Willa (Chase Infiniti), has grown into a beautiful high-school student who is a martial-arts expert, living underground with Bob, now a substance-abusing nebbish.
Meanwhile, Lockjaw yearns to join a secret society of wealthy, racist baddies who control everything, and uses another immigration raid as a pretext for tracking down Willa, whom he wants to kill to destroy the evidence of his affair with a Black woman. This last plot device makes no sense at all, since as the movie depicts it, Willa and Bob have new identities and are living off the grid. How would the white supremacists ever find out Perfidia and Lockjaw had a baby?
But the plot holes are the least of it. What has made the movie such a critical hit is that the characters act out armchair leftists’ fantasy of “resistance.” Never mind that in reality, the #NoKings movement manages to mobilize Americans to protest just a handful of times a year, and that there is no real armed resistance to Trump, who was not installed by an evil cabal like the one depicted in the movie but came to power because he was elected.
The campus pro-Hamas crowd and other keyboard warriors may celebrate when gunmen shoot people to death at the Jewish Museum in Washington or kill a CEO in New York, but that’s likely as close as America will ever get to any kind of left-wing revolutionary activity.
There is certainly a movie to be made mocking the American Left, as Jean-Luc Godard poked fun at the self-importance and incompetence of middle-class French revolutionaries in movies such as La Chinoise.
But while Anderson makes light of the cranky, stoned Bob in a genial way, there is only one scene that clearly ridicules the revolutionaries themselves, when Bob cannot remember his cell’s password and is scolded by an officious older white man on the phone.
All of the Black, mixed-race, and Latino revolutionaries are portrayed as noble and luminous, with the sole exception of Perfidia, whose flaw lies in her sexual relationship with Lockjaw.
There is one effective action sequence toward the end of the film, much of which recalls the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Beyond that, there is little to recommend in this muddled and self-indulgent movie.