If the Knesset satire Sweetie’s Party (Motek Bool B’Emtza in Hebrew) weren’t so funny, it would be really sad.
The second season will begin on August 10 on Kan 11, airing from Sunday through Wednesday, following the reality series Four Weddings. It goes a long way toward showing why so many important problems don’t get addressed in Israel, and why so much nonsense goes on in the political sector.
But even more than that, it explains why the lawmakers who were elected to uphold our rights seem so damn complacent – it’s because they are so well-paid, with such cushy conditions and benefits, that they are insulated from the issues that the rest of us have to deal with.
The series follows Motek Mordechai (Gily Itskovitch), a telegenic former reality-show contestant with a huge online following, whose family is debt-ridden. Through a not-so-improbable series of coincidences, she becomes a Knesset member for a party that calls its position “the extreme center.”
Created by Shmuel Hasfari, it plays like an updated version of his beloved comedy show, Polishuk, from 2009, in which Sasson Gabai played a hapless politician who became the minister of social advancement, a nonsense position much like the ones that were created to accommodate the unprecedented numbers of ministers in the recent government.
Sweetie’s Party pokes fun at politics in the digital age, especially the heightened awareness of political correctness and identity politics, and the way that social media and the 24-hour news cycle have changed the game.
It’s much like an Israeli version of Veep, and a running joke throughout the first episode of the new season has to do with Motek’s centrist party having to replace its leader, with one of the party members going on and on about how a wet rag, any piece of garbage, etc. could do a better job than the former party chief, Egoz (Kobi Maimon).
He is replaced by Hana Hanina Hanan (Ofira Rahamim), a Mizrahi woman in a wheelchair. She offers Motek the chance to be the economy minister, which is funny because Motek was dead broke until she joined the Knesset.
That’s one subplot this season. Another is about Alex (Avi Kushnir), the powerful lobbyist who sexually assaulted Motek last season, thinking she wouldn’t dare to accuse him publicly. But she did, which resulted in his arrest. Now he’s out on bail and plotting his revenge against her and his comeback.
One of the funnier scenes in the new episode is when he has a meeting with his advisers on the beach, and they outline how he can delay the case for five years, mentioning that it worked for the current prime minister. They also convince him that, rather than avoiding the issue, he must face it head-on, shedding tears of fake remorse over his behavior.
Itskovitch is a good deadpan comedian, and the series features some of Israel’s finest comic actors, including Kushnir, Rahamim, Yaniv Biton, Yigal Adika, Lital Schwartz, Anna Dubrovitzky, Anat Waxman, and many others, all of whom have a great time playing outrageous characters. If you think Sweetie’s Party is so exaggerated it’s unbelievable, I suggest you follow the Knesset news closely. You’ll see that at times, it’s practically a documentary.
The Son of Sam Tapes – Netflix
Does anyone really feel there’s a need for another series about the Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz? Of course not, but they keep making them, and there’s a new one on Netflix, part of their Conversations with a Killer series, The Son of Sam Tapes.
This week, it will be 48 years since the case of the serial killer terrorizing New York City in 1976 and 1977 was cracked. No matter how many times the story is told, I find myself drawn back into that strange drama, in which a lone gunman shot young people, mostly women, in a killing spree that took the lives of six people and wounded 11 others, some of them seriously.
He wrote taunting letters to columnist Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News, and then would kill again. It was a dramatic time for New York, a summer when the city was suffering a fiscal crisis (the famous Daily News headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” is shown in the series) and a blackout turned into a night of looting and public disturbances.
But nothing grabbed headlines as much as the killer. Young women with long brown hair, who looked like Berkowitz’s early victims, were advised to cover their locks if they dared to go out at night.
This new three-part documentary brings out the usual suspects for commentary: police, journalists (including my former colleague, Dick Belsky, who was the metro editor of the New York Post and now writes mysteries), and the surviving victims.
But it adds interviews with Berkowitz that were done from prison around 1980 with Rochester Democrat and Chronicle journalist Jack Jones, as well as a new interview with the documentary series director, Joe Berlinger.
Not surprisingly, Berkowitz emerges as a malignant and misogynistic narcissist who hungered for fame. The series suggests he may have trumped up the psychosis angle – that he believed his neighbor’s dog was sending him commands to kill – to cover up how cool and calculated he was. It debunks the absurd satanic cult theory that Berkowitz claimed in later years, in another pathetic attempt to grab headlines.
One interesting addition is that the filmmakers uncover a shooting he may have committed prior to his acknowledged spree. For true-crime devotees, the series will be worthwhile viewing.
The Amateur – Disney+ and Apple TV+
Based on the trailer, I had high hopes for the movie The Amateur, now on Disney+ and Apple TV+, about a nerdy CIA cyber expert (Rami Malek) who goes on a revenge quest after his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed. It seemed that it could be similar to a Jason Bourne movie, but with a geek rather than a trained killer at its center.
Unfortunately, the spectacular scenes are all in the trailer – especially the one set in a glass outdoor pool between two tall buildings, obviously a terrible place to swim. The rest is kind of meh, even with Laurence Fishburne (best known as Morpheus in The Matrix movies), teaching the computer scientist how to become an assassin.
Jon Bernthal, who plays Mikey on The Bear, portrays a character with predictably shady morals who, bizarrely, is called The Bear, but he’s not on screen enough to make it fun.