Corinne Allal, one of the most exciting and distinctive voices in Israeli music, passed away a year ago, and a new three-part series running on Yes Docu and Yes VOD, Corinne Allal: Farewell Tour, examines her life and legacy, focusing on her fight against cancer at the end of her life.
It’s difficult to put into words what made her music so unique. And her songs, some of which were released 40 years ago and others which were much more recent, still speak to a cross-section of Israelis. Her energetic music and her slightly husky voice instantly announced who she was and commanded your attention; there was no chance of mixing her up with anyone else, ever.
Her song “I Have No Other Land,” with lyrics by Ehud Manor, was popular both with Israelis protesting against the government and those from a very different background, such as ultra-Orthodox singer Lipa Schmeltzer, who recorded a Yiddish version of it, with Allal backing him on guitar.
Her song “Rare Breed” became an unofficial anthem for those trying to rebuild the kibbutzim and agriculture in the Gaza border area during the war. When war broke out, Allal was already struggling with the cancer that took her life, but she pushed herself to perform for the war’s victims.
The series details Allal’s unusual background: She was born in Tunisia, into a wealthy family, and her father was a Mossad agent. She grew up in a household marked by secrets and discord. Her family moved to Israel when she was a child, and, as a French-speaking immigrant, she struggled to fit in.
At first, she worked mainly as a guitarist until she found her voice and released her eponymous solo album in 1984. In 1989, she found mainstream success with the album Antarctica, the title tune of which is one of her most beloved hits.
In addition to her music, she was one of the first performers to come out of the closet, and she was open about her relationships with actress Orna Banai and Ruti Allal, her manager, whom she married and with whom she had two children.
The series, by Eti Aneta Segev and Ron Omer, features interviews with her family, friends, and musical collaborators, including Yehudit Ravitz, who produced some of her albums, and shows Allal talking candidly about her life and career during her last year. The series will be a joy for Israeli music fans.
Yes is featuring several other music documentaries this month, among them One to One: John and Yoko, a look at John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s creative and personal partnership in their early years together in New York in the early ’70s; Andrea Bocelli: Because I Believe, a portrait of the acclaimed tenor, who recently opened his Miami home to released hostage Segev Kalfon, where he gave the former captive a private concert.
If you loved True Blood, the series about modern-day, very sexy vampires in Louisiana, you’ll want to see the movie Sinners, which is now available on Apple TV+. It’s a stylish period film set in the African-American community in rural Mississippi in 1932, and it’s expected to receive multiple Oscar nominations.
It stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual role as twin wise guys who come back from Chicago to their small hometown, where they open a nightclub. They attract many customers, among them a vampire. It’s a must-see for all those who enjoy vampire stories, but the undead angle is only part of the plot. Sinners is a loving recreation of a time and place, and it’s filled with great blues music. The vampire plot can be seen as a metaphor for the discrimination faced by Blacks in America, just as the vampires in True Blood could be seen as a stand-in for the LGBTQ community.
Sinners is also a great star-turn for Jordan, a young actor so confident that he kept his own name early in his career, when he was asked to change it to avoid confusion with the basketball superstar. Fans of the series Parenthood will recognize him as Alex, a troubled but endearing young man who had a two-season arc on the show.
Netflix has a new documentary celebrating the 100th anniversary of the iconic magazine The New Yorker, called The New Yorker at 100. New Yorker readers will be fascinated to see how the magazine is put together with such great care. Most journalists can only dream about working for a publication that still employs 29 fact checkers.
Much of the film is devoted to following the magazine’s editor, David Remnick, as he works on the 100th anniversary issue. It also follows a number of the magazine’s contributors today, among them the inimitable cartoonist Roz Chast (if you’re on Instagram, you should follow her to see not only her cartoons, but also her embroidery, other artwork, and her meditations about life).
The series also goes back in time to show the history of the magazine, concentrating on some of its most important articles, notably John Hersey’s reporting from Hiroshima after the atomic bomb was dropped, and Rachel Carson’s essays about pollution due to pesticides, Silent Spring. Both of these articles were turned into influential books, like many articles first published in the magazine.
I would have liked to have seen more in the documentary about the fiction writers who got wide exposure in The New Yorker, such as J. D. Salinger, as well as the influential and extremely original movie critic Pauline Kael, whose reviews changed the face of movie criticism.
There is a section in the film about The New Yorker’s response to the 9/11 terror attack, and I was pleasantly surprised to see staffers discussing the trauma the city experienced, and to hear art director Francoise Mouly (the wife of Maus author Art Spiegelman, who created some of the magazine’s most talked about covers, who is seen in the background in a couple of scenes) describe how she chose the iconic cover image showing the twin towers in black.
The reason this section surprised me is that The New Yorker recently invited Twitch streamer Hasan Piker to take part in its annual festival. In addition to justifying the October 7 massacre and making many antisemitic remarks, Piker has said the US “deserved” the 9/11 attack. Now that The New Yorker is located at One World Trade Center, in the shadow of Ground Zero, it seemed darkly ironic, if not extraordinarily disheartening, that the magazine would invite him to take part in an important event it sponsors annually. Piker is not discussed in the film, and it was reassuring to know that the magazine’s editors do not share his glee at the murder of thousands of New Yorkers.