There are a lot of characters – and a lot of questions – introduced in the early parts of the new series The 11th Body from Keshet 12, the first episode of which premiered on Monday after the news and the second aired on Wednesday. But if you concentrate on Maggie Azerzer’s lead performance as Iris, a troubled police detective, you can enjoy her work and trust that eventually you’ll absorb all the details of what’s going on.
Iris is a divorced mother in Haifa. Her ex is having her investigated for faulty parenting, her father (Gavri Banai) is senile and is about to be kicked out of his assisted living facility because he requires too much assistance, and her sometime lover (Hisham Suliman) can’t commit to her for reasons she understands but isn’t happy about. She doesn’t have too many friends at the police station where she works, because she raised complaints about other cops’ excessive violence. Crime families of various ethnicities are hovering in the background of her professional life – and sometimes the foreground.
One morning, she has to investigate a strange call from the medical faculty at the Technion: The anatomy class has found an extra body, and no one knows where it came from. While her colleagues try to dismiss the deceased John Doe, her investigator’s skill kicks into gear and she vows to get to the bottom of it. Azerzer is so tough as the put-upon Iris that while she isn’t easy to like, you admire her and root for her.
One footnote to the show is that, as far as I know, this is the first drama to show how wild boars have overrun parts of Haifa – and as they pass by, a character quips: “New neighbors?”
IF YOU’D rather watch a detective story in English, try The Long Goodbye on Amazon’s Prime Video and Apple TV+, which brought together three great talents who created one of the best, most offbeat detective films of all time: Raymond Chandler, whose novel of the same name is the basis for the movie; Robert Altman, who adapted and directed the film; and Elliott Gould, who starred in it.
Altman figured out that Chandler was made to be updated for the post-Vietnam era (the book was published in 1953), and that Gould was born to play the cynical but romantic detective-fiction hero, Philip Marlowe. The movie has a sprawling plot that mixes the glaring daylight of Los Angeles with its dark shadows, and it involves Marlowe trying to help his friend Terry (Jim Bouton), who has been accused of killing his wife, and then veers off into a story about an Ernest Hemingway-type writer (Sterling Hayden), who has disappeared, and his distressed wife (Nina van Pallandt), who is trying to find him.
The cast features a number of people who were known and/or notorious off screen, notably Bouton, an ex-baseball player who wrote a tell-all book, and van Pallandt, who became famous as the mistress of the Howard Hughes biography hoaxer Clifford Irving.
Mark Rydell is best known as a director, and he plays a mobster mixed up in all of this, who is rather creepily portrayed as an observant Jew, and who commits the movie’s most shocking act of violence and gets to utter the most memorable line afterwards.
But you don’t have to know any of this backstory to enjoy Gould’s awkward charm and wisecracks. The movie’s opening features one of the funniest scenes ever filmed involving a cat – and it reveals a lot about Marlowe’s character, too. After those first few minutes, you know him better than you know most movie heroes after an hour.
Netflix's 'Mother of the Bride'
NETFLIX’S Mother of the Bride, which stars Brooke Shields, is a (very) watered-down version of Mamma Mia! – with all the elements that made that movie so successful, because it plays into a child’s fantasy of their estranged parents getting back together.
Like Mamma Mia!, Ticket to Paradise, and so many other movies, it features a young couple holding a hastily arranged destination wedding – in this case, it’s in Thailand – that throws two exes among the couple’s parents together. You could set your watch by the predictable plot developments, but you’ll likely watch it to the end if you start it, because it’s an efficiently constructed entertainment machine, like a pop tune you can’t get out of your head even if it annoys you.Mother of the Bride stars a lot of actors who, like Shields, were A-listers a while ago and haven’t been on screen that much lately. There is an air of palpable gratitude among the cast at finding themselves back on camera.
Shields, who, it turned out, had a flair for comedy that she demonstrated in the Suddenly Susan series over 20 year ago, plays “world-renowned geneticist” Lana, a widowed control freak workaholic whose daughter, Emma (Miranda Cosgrove, best known for the series iCarly), decides to marry at a beach resort after her boyfriend, RJ (Sean Teale), suddenly proposes.
It turns out that RJ’s father, Will (Benjamin Bratt, who played one of the police detectives on the early iterations of Law & Order), was the great love of Lana’s life and he dumped her after college without a word. Did you guess that he is now a billionaire venture capitalist?
So, by now, you have likely either started streaming the movie or stopped reading this, but if you need to know more, Michael McDonald plays Lana’s wisecracking gay best friend, Rachael Harris is her wisecracking straight best friend, and Chad Michael Murray plays the instantly smitten doctor who briefly challenges Will for Lana’s affections. Murray was memorable in the role of Jake, the teen dream in Freaky Friday who falls for Jamie Lee Curtis when her daughter takes over her body (you can stream that movie on Disney+ or Apple TV+).
The tiny amount of new content in this old story is about Emma surrendering control of her wedding to a mean wedding planner in order to win “likes” on Instagram – and I won’t be spoiling anything to reveal that Emma eventually learns the value of spending time with family and trusting her own taste.
There is a scene where a couple falls into a pool and everyone jumps in after them, another where the exes get stranded in a picturesque location, and a credits sequence where the cast performs a dance to a pop tune. If Shields wasn’t so likable, it wouldn’t work, but somehow it does.