Many people can sing along to Red Hot Chili Peppers hits such as “Californication,” “Under the Bridge,” “Can’t Stop,” “Give It Away,” and so many others, but fewer know that the driving force behind the band in its early days was a guitarist born in Israel, Hillel Slovak.
A new Netflix documentary, The Rise of the Red Hot Chili Peppers: Our Brother, Hillel, focuses on Slovak’s contributions to the band’s evolution.
He was born in Haifa. His parents, Holocaust survivors, moved with him to the United States when he was a child, a background similar to that of Gene Simmons of the band Kiss. There, Slovak met and became close friends with his future bandmates, Michael “Flea” Balzary and Anthony Kiedis.
The friendship was life-changing for all three of them, but Slovak was an especially inspiring figure to the other two. He was already an accomplished guitarist, interested in punk and influenced by funk and other musical genres.
“Hillel changed everything about my life and gave me the life that I have today. I never would have played bass without him. Chili Peppers would never have started without him. Everything about the Red Hot Chili Peppers was all Hillel’s vision,” Kiedis said in homage.
Slovak steered Flea to playing bass, while Kiedis became the group’s lead vocalist. “He believed in me … he saw me. It really touched my heart,” Flea said.
The documentary is meant as a tribute to Slovak, who died at 26 of a drug overdose, in 1988, and this is a sadly familiar story of a talented musician being drawn to drugs to help regulate his emotions and paying the price.
Under Slovak’s leadership, they requested funk innovator George Clinton to produce one of their albums. He recalled their spirit: “It seemed like it was the three of them against the world.
As good as they were, they didn’t want to come off that good. They wanted to be playing like they were at a live show. If Slovak played a guitar solo that was too polished, he wanted it removed from the recording, Clinton said.
With success came more time and money to spend on drugs, and while both Kiedis and Slovak struggled with serious substance abuse, the latter hid his problem better and withdrew from his friends and bandmates. It’s a sad story but a moving one, because the affection they still feel for Slovak is palpable.
There are so many different deals and packages offered by streaming services and networks in Israel that it’s hard to keep track of them all.
But during this particularly difficult time, when so many people are stuck at home, especially families with children, I’m passing along all the information about content available for free or at reduced rates.
Right now, until April 7, Disney+ is offering the first three months at a discount for new and returning subscribers alike. Instead of NIS 49.90, the fee for this period will be NIS 34.90. Disney+ is also a very attractive option for those with kids, since it offers the entire Disney, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and National Geographic catalogs.
Disney+ just released Zootropolis 2, aka Zootopia 2 (the title was changed worldwide due to copyright issues), a story of snarky animal detectives cracking another case that will appeal to tweens and some of their parents.
The streaming service also features Hulu content from the US, such as Grey’s Anatomy, The Simpsons, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere, and the jewel in the crown of Disney+’s adult programming, The Bear.
FOR MANY, this is not the moment when we really want to see something dark and challenging, so if you’re looking for a silly comedy where you can just turn off your brain and laugh, look no further than Top Secret! on Netflix. It was written and directed by the team behind Airplane! – Jim Abrahams, Jerry Zucker, and David Zucker, who served as an on-set advisor on the Israeli comedy Mossad) – which is available here on Apple TV+.
Some of you may have seen Airplane! so many times that you need a break, but I hadn’t seen Top Secret! for years and had forgotten how good it is. It’s a spoof of old-fashioned spy movies, Casablanca, and Elvis flicks, and that combination shouldn’t really work, but somehow it does.
It stars Val Kilmer in his first major role, playing Nick Rivers, a pop star whose big hit is about skeet shooting while surfing, who gets a gig in East Germany in 1984. Kilmer, who seems to be alternately very dumb and in on the joke in the movie, went on to roles in many serious films, such as the Top Gun movies and The Doors, but he was born to play comic roles like this.
He also sang his own songs, including one that could have been the theme song called “How Silly Can You Get?” He died last April at the age of 65.
He was recently in the news because his family has given its blessing for an AI-generated version of him to be created to appear in an upcoming movie, As Deep as the Grave, in which Kilmer was cast but could not perform because he was too ill.
The jokes in Top Secret! are often, but not always, at his expense, and many are so dumb you just can’t help laughing at them.
They include a raunchy ballet sequence, a priest using every Latin phrase you’ve ever heard, a Blue Lagoon parody, spies who disguise themselves as a cow, some rather muscular female East German athletes, and various misadventures suffered by a spy helping the resistance, improbably played by Egyptian megastar Omar Sharif.
My favorite, though, is when an imprisoned scientist (Michael Gough), tells Rivers that he is being blackmailed into creating a nuclear weapon that will be used to attack on the NATO submarine fleet on Sunday, pointing to a calendar that shows September. Aghast, Rivers says, “But that’s Simchas Torah!” and for the rest of the movie, everyone who hears that has the same response.
Israeli-inspired sensation Euphoria returns for third season
THE HBO series Euphoria was originally an adaptation of an Israeli series produced by Ron Leshem and others, and Leshem later wrote episodes and executive-produced the US version, which Sam Levinson created.
Becoming a sensation, the US series attracted more viewers than any other US series over the last decade except for Game of Thrones, and it introduced a cast of newcomers who have gone on to become huge stars, among them Zendaya, Sydney Sweeney, Hunter Schafer, and Jacob Elordi. The third season, which will be the final one, is set to premiere on HBO Max in the US on April 12 and in Israel on April 13.
All the episodes of the first two seasons are available on HBO Max, and if you’ve never seen it or don’t remember it that well, you might want to catch up now. It’s a disturbing series, about teens from a middle-class milieu who deal with sex, drugs, violence, and mental health issues, in a cruel world where the adults tend to range from clueless to predatory.
Almost all US reviewers praised Euphoria’s realism, and the thought that teens are living like this under their parents’ noses is scary.
That may explain the series’s success. It won nine Emmys. The third season picks up after they leave high school as they try to make their way in the world but are still enmeshed in the drug world – and now in influencer culture as well.
Source:
www.jpost.com
