KAN, Israel’s public broadcaster, has been having a huge celebration for its 90th anniversary this week. While much of this programming has focused on KAN’s previous eras, there are many great series available right now on the KAN website at kan.org.il
The obvious KAN series to watch these days is Tehran (which can be seen with English subtitles on Apple TV+), but there are many other series to watch. The two most recent are Ambivalence and All Moms Lie, which can be streamed now. Ambivalence is about haredim who have left the fold but keep pretending to believe, and All Moms Lie is a dramedy about a depressed single mother who turns her life around by joining a sports team.
All the seasons of Checkout, the supermarket comedy, are there, as well as Dismissed, which is about an overly earnest female commanding officer. If you’d prefer drama, you can watch The Stronghold, which is an excellent series about the Yom Kippur War.
Euphoria is back with a new season
The first episode of season three of Euphoria has just been released on HBO Max, and if you hoped that the intense, relentlessly dark story of troubled California teens was going to be more upbeat in this new season, it isn’t.
However, the inventiveness of the writing and the quality of the acting is undimmed, and the new season, which picks up again a few years after the characters finished high school, is especially cinematic.
The series was developed from an Israeli series of the same name. Several Israelis, Ron Leshem, Daphna Levin, Tmira Yardeni, and Hadas Mozes Lichtenshtein, are among the executive producers and writers on the American series, which was created by Sam Levinson.
Since the characters are so young and suffer so much at the hands of neglectful or predatory adults, this show makes Breaking Bad or The Sopranos look like Disney movies.
The central character, Rue (Zendaya, who starred in the Dune movies and in Challengers), is a girl who learned to treat her mental-health issues after the death of her father with every kind of drug she could get her hands on. She doesn’t really want to get clean, and rehab never worked on her.
In the opening of the third season, she admits that since finishing high school, she’s been up to “nothing good.” She drives through the Mexican desert, feeling momentarily exhilarated, to Christopher Cross’s “Ride Like the Wind,” but her jeep gets caught on a barrier, and so she climbs down in a harrowing and beautifully filmed sequence.
It turns out that she is being forced to pay off a massive debt to a scarily deadpan drug dealer, Laurie, with whom she became entangled in the previous season, by working as a drug mule. The mechanics of how she and the other mules get fentanyl into the US are shown in all its disgusting detail.
Rue keeps in touch with her high school friends. Lexi (Maude Apatow) works for the director (Sharon Stone) of a soap opera, which is seen as a cynical choice rather than a path to a great career.
Nate (Jacob Elordi, who starred in the recent Frankenstein movie) lives in a suburb where he is using his father’s construction business to build a shady-sounding retirement community. “A boomer dies every 15 seconds,” he notes.
He is engaged to Cassie (Sydney Sweeney, now in the movie The Housemaid), who wants to earn money for a lavish wedding by posting porn videos online. This doesn’t sit well with her fiancé, and clips of Sweeney in her sexy getups have been going viral.
Rue contemplates becoming a religious Christian after a Texas family helps her out when she is stranded in the desert, but she seems to put that idea aside when she meets Alamo (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). He’s a pimp who may hire her for a job at his strip club, but this new opportunity seems as if it will work out just about as well as everything else has for her so far.
The series is as compelling as ever, but if you’re looking for some light at the end of the tunnel for Euphoria’s characters, it seems you will leave this season disappointed.
If your mind has turned to mush from too many hours of watching news commentators making the same ambiguous pronouncements hour after hour, you might want to try watching a genre with the power to divert your brain: shark movies.
Thrash, new on Netflix
Netflix has a new one, Thrash, about sharks infesting a North Carolina town that floods during a hurricane. It’s quite a bit better than their sharks-in-the-Seine movie, Under Paris.
Thrash, which basically has an all-star cast for this kind of film, features Phoebe Dynevor of Bridgerton as Lisa, a pregnant woman, who has just been abandoned by her husband after she relocates to a new town for him. There, she is an administrator in a meat-packing plant, which becomes the source of much trouble once the levees break and the town floods.
Blood from the factory seeps into the water, attracting both bull sharks and great whites that are drawn to the smell from the ocean. Like all the main characters, Lisa does not evacuate when she is first advised to, and she ends up stuck in a car that is getting flooded as she goes into labor.
Other characters include Dakota (Whitney Peak of Gossip Girl), a teen suffering from agoraphobia after her mother’s death, who plans to sit out the storm at home, ignoring warnings from her marine biologist uncle (Djimon Hounsou, who starred in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad) until it is much too late. Fortunately, she has learned a lot about shark behavior from her uncle.
There are also three teens who are trapped with their mean redneck foster parents. If you can’t guess who the sharks find tastier, you haven’t seen that many movies. The title Thrash is quite apt, and if this is a hit – and I’m inclined to think it will be – expect sequels with titles like Writhe and Squirm.
HBO Max has the two biggest shark movies of the last few years about giant sharks, The Meg and Meg 2: The Trench. Action movie heartthrob Jason Statham plays a naval captain in the first film who must rescue his ex-wife and others trapped in a submersible at the bottom of the sea, where they are menaced by a giant prehistoric shark.
In the sequel, he basically does the same thing all over again, but this time, he must save the crew of a research team. Watching the trailers for each of these is about as good as sitting through the entire movie.
If you want to see a good shark movie, Apple TV+ has the greatest of all – Jaws, plus several of its lame sequels. Apple TV+ also offers The Shallows, a very tense film about a gorgeous female surfer (Blake Lively) trapped on a rock on a remote Mexican beach while a shark circles her; and Open Water, which is about a couple who go scuba diving and are stranded in the ocean when their tour boat leaves them behind. It is one of the scariest movies I’ve ever seen because of how realistic it is.
One new series that doesn’t feel particularly real, but which has won a loyal following in the US despite this, is The Miniature Wife. It is available on Yes VOD and Yes Binge.
As the title makes clear, this could be a sequel to Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and it tells the story of an agricultural bio-tech scientist, Les (Matthew Macfadyen), who is working on a breakthrough technology that shrinks down vegetables. His wife, Lindy (Elizabeth Banks), accidentally uses it on herself.
All the tensions in their very troubled marriage are magnified, so to speak, when she becomes smaller than a chocolate bar,and must depend on his largesse to survive. Both of them are in suspense about whether the shrinking process can be reversed in humans.
The Miniature Wife has a patina of feminism: Lindy, a Pulitzer Prize winning, bestselling novelist, hasn’t written a successful book in years, and so she moved with Les to St. Louis for his business. She feels he spends too much time on work and is the cause of all her problems.
Her being downsized by a product he created can be read as a metaphor for all their relationship problems, like the fact that he is making her feel small. The special effects are cool, but nothing in the story interested me. It’s a waste of the comic talents of Banks, who was so good as a right-wing newscaster on 30 Rock, and Macfadyen, who played Mr. Darcy in the 2006 Pride and Prejudice.
The 2016 Alexander Payne movie Downsizing, in which Matt Damon played a man who has himself shrunk to a couple of inches tall, as part of a new trend so people without savings can afford to retire, was much more inventive and interesting.
Source:
www.jpost.com
