The Israel Film Archive (https://jfc.org.il/en/), a website with much free content, is a great site to check out in between missile attacks.
It has a wealth of clips going back over a century, including home movies, footage of weddings, nature scenes, inventions, fashion shows, folk dances, and movies, etc. Most of the feature films are available to rent for NIS 15 and have English subtitles.
They call Tel Aviv the city that never sleeps, but lately it has been kept awake not to party but just to survive. The Israel Film Archive features two movies about the first Gulf War that show how Tel Aviv residents have coped.
Films to watch
Eytan Fox’s The Song of the Siren (1994) was the acclaimed director’s feature-film debut and is an adaptation of the popular novel of the same name by Irit Linur, a romcom during wartime about a young woman, Talila (Dalit Kahan), who works at a Tel Aviv advertising agency and is torn between two men. One is a square food engineer (Boaz Gur-Lavi) who is named Noah Ne’eman, which translates into English as “Comfortable Loyal.”
But their budding relationship is complicated by the return of her “mythological ex” (this novel coined that term, which is now widely used in Israel), a wealthy bad boy, Ofer, who is played by none other than former Israeli prime minister and current opposition leader Yair Lapid.
Lapid was excellent and could have had a real acting career had he wanted. The gimmick here is that nearly every romantic moment is interrupted by missile sirens, at a time when people feared that these missiles contained chemical weapons, and when there were no alerts like those we receive today.
ANOTHER MOVIE about the first Gulf War, Yana’s Friends (1999) by Arik Kaplun, features three stories about Russian immigrants in Israel and is set in and around a Tel Aviv building during the war.
There is some gently humorous but critical commentary about how Russians had to struggle for acceptance in that era, but the story that people tend to remember best is about Yana (Evelyn Kaplun, the director’s wife). She is a young Russian woman who is abandoned in Tel Aviv by her husband, who fails to return from a trip home and leaves her stranded, broke, and pregnant.
As she tries to figure out what to do, she becomes close to her neighbor, a womanizing wedding photographer (Nir Levy, who went on to star in the Stoplight series). You can guess where it goes from there, but you might not remember that it includes a famous love scene where both protagonists are wearing gas masks.
A NEW British series, The Other Bennet Sister, has just become available on Hot and Yes’s VOD channels and will be shown on Hot 3 on March 22. If you guessed that it is about Mary Bennet (Ella Bruccoleri), the plain sister surrounded by a quartet of beauties in Pride and Prejudice, you would be right.
Judging from the reviews it has received, many Jane Austen fans have warmed to the series, which makes Mary – always anxious to show off her intellectual and musical accomplishments, at the risk of being a bore in the novel – into a beacon of misunderstood and underestimated virtue.
There are no laughs at her expense here, as there were in the book, and few laughs anywhere else, except for the curmudgeonly pronouncements of the Bennet patriarch, played here very well by Richard E. Grant. In the first episode, an optician (Aaron Gill) who sells Mary the glasses her mother wishes she didn’t need, strikes up an innocent flirtation with her at a ball, a flirtation that is shut down quickly by her mother.
The reason for her disapproval is that the optician is a tradesman, and the fact that the character, and several others, are played by actors of South Asian descent is not a factor in this color-blind, ethnicity-blind society. Diverse casting is a trend now, following the success of Bridgerton, but it is distracting in an Austen adaptation.
The whole setup of Pride and Prejudice is that the family is under extreme pressure to get their daughters married off well because none of the five girls are allowed to inherit the family estate under England’s rigid laws in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
That such a sexist society would be completely accepting of immigrants is so bizarrely revisionist that it’s mind boggling. It made me want to revisit a very good movie, Bride and Prejudice, a story set in modern-day India that focuses on a family with several daughters, and which made perfect sense.
AS THE third week of this war draws closer, it is safe to assume that most of us are getting a little stir-crazy, so I looked for a few escapist options you can watch when most of your brain cells have been numbed by missile alerts.
One series that fits the bill is The 100 Foot Wave on HBO Max, a portrait of Garrett McNamara, a big-wave surfer, as he chases giant rollers around the world with his family and fellow surfers. It’s incredible to see McNamara and the others surfing waves the height of a 10-story building, and it’s also interesting to get to know the kind of person who would do this.
Surfers I’ve seen interviewed in the past often seem smiley and upbeat in a way that does not explain why they are so competitive and driven.
But McNamara has turned to surfing to banish some darkness in his past and speaks candidly about growing up with an unstable mother who schlepped him and his siblings around the country as she joined various cults. Whether or not you’re interested in McNamara, there’s something hypnotic and soothing about seeing those impossibly huge waves, and you can always turn the sound off and just watch.
WHILE TALKING about the great outdoors, you might want to watch a new Netflix documentary series, The Dinosaurs, narrated by Morgan Freeman.
When dinosaurs show up on screen, it’s usually in an action movie, like Jurassic Park and the Jurassic World series, or a documentary about digging for fossils.
But The Dinosaurs, made with great CGI technology, is a nature series about the lives and behavior of dinosaurs, which starts 235 million years ago, in the Triassic period; almost every moment looks absolutely real.
IF YOU’D rather see fictional dinosaurs, you can watch the latest in the Jurassic World franchise, Jurassic World: Rebirth, which stars Scarlett Johansson and is now on Apple TV+. It’s not all that good, and there is a lot of scolding about corporate greed, which I don’t disagree with, but which doesn’t make for great drama.
I’d recommend skipping it and watching the original and best of all the Jurassic films, Jurassic Park, which is on Amazon Prime, along with several of the Jurassic World movies. Nothing in any of the later films compares to the ingenuity and suspense of many scenes in Jurassic Park, especially the kitchen scene towards the end. All of the Jurassic franchise is also available on Apple TV+.
IT’S VERY soothing to see proof that the super-rich are miserable, and that is the most enjoyable aspect of the new docu-series on Netflix, Dynasty: The Murdochs, about the infighting among media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s family.
Their fighting over money and media seems to have been the inspiration for the series, Succession. According to several extensively researched articles by New York Times writers who are interviewed extensively in this series, they were actually influenced by Succession. For my money, the Murdochs are more interesting than their fictional counterparts.
The real jockeying for power in the family has been among the three children from Rupert’s second marriage: Elisabeth, the eldest and seemingly the most independent and talented, but not seriously considered as a successor to her father because of his sexism; Lachlan, currently the heir apparent, who inherited his father’s conservative worldview but not his vision; and James, the more liberal son, seen as the most tech-savvy of the three, who was pressed to take the immense fall for the UK phone-hacking scandal.
A trust specifying that these children, plus a daughter Rupert had with his first wife, would control the company equally after his death or resignation was challenged in a lengthy court battle by Lachlan and Rupert a couple of years ago, and that provides the core of the series.
In some ways, the Murdochs are like any family fighting over an inheritance, although here, they are paying each other billions to get their way, rather than bickering over who gets the car and who gets the golf clubs.
But the main takeaway from this series, and the whole Murdoch saga, is how joyless this clan seems to be. I think that’s the point: we’re used to being jealous of the one percent, but no one could envy this sorry quartet, no matter how many private jets they own.