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Highway 65 (2024)
Suspense in an Israeli Pinterland
The original Hebrew title of the movie 'Highway 65" is "The Yardstick Road," which refers to a particular Israeli road that runs quite flat and straight. Why is it the name of the movie? Maybe in a spirit of irony, because the movie takes us through twists and turns. Why "Highway 65: in English? I can't think why. That's the same road's official name,, but who among us English-speakers cares?
The story isn't about the highway. It's about a woman police officer who bends the rules and is disrespected by her colleagues but is smarter than any of them. So that the audience can easily identify with her despite her brilliance, she has her failings at the personal level. She does not seem to own a cat, despite what the IMDB "Storyline" says, but she has a foible or two that can endear her to the audience while providing a little light-heartedness before the movie settles down to concentrate on suspense.
I grumbled not many days ago, in connection with the Israeli TV series "The Truth," about the overfamiliarity of this type of police officer. But in "Highway 65" I didn't mind at all seeing the stock character revived again with another crime to solve. The movie is full of Pinteresque dialogue. A question is asked, and the response is not the answer, or there is no response at all, or the scene stops short. The photography is nice, and it includes some carefully focused close-ups which the actors carry off well.
The story is set in and around the unremarkable city of Afula (near Highway 65). Although there's not much to root it in that specific area, there is a familiar aspect that roots it in Israel: The antecedent action includes an all-too-common trauma-- the loss of a young son and brother. That could happen anywhere, but in war-torn Israel it reverberates among more of the audience than in some other places.
The Truth (2024)
Lots of characters, including parents, and lots of plot twists
Here's my spoiler: It's a story about parents and children. It's not written as a courtroom drama at all, it's written as a detective story. Whoever wrote the note on IMDB calling "The Truth" a courtroom drama didn't watch past the beginning.
The focus in the (briefly seen) courtroom is on a convict played by Benny Avni. Avni the actor was rather angelic in the Israeli movie "Saving Neta" but here he is a fictional variant on real-life suspect Roman Zadarov, who was convicted and then acquitted of murdering a schoolgirl. He looks suitably bitter, powerful, and clever. His young son is loyal to him. I have to give the movie a demerit for capitalizing on the real-life case without providing any redeeming insight to justify the insensitivity. (The actual suspect and his family are still alive and just want to be left alone.) The script is not a "true story" despite what another contributor here apparently thinks.
As part of the fiction, the scene of the crime is moved from Katzrin in the far north to Rosh HaAyin at the old eastern border, but we aren't visually given much of a sense of place and the most famous aspect of Rosh HaAyin-- its large veteran population of Yemenite Jews-- isn't in evidence.
As written, the protagonist is almost a cliche character in Israel by now. (I don't know about the rest of the world.) She's an unorthodox police inspector who is underrated by the men she works with but is smarter than any of them, and-- just so she will be relatable rather than unrealistically perfect-- she has problems in her personal life. But as I was saying, this is about parents and children; she has a father and a mother who both love her but both disappoint her.
The plot revolves around a murder investigation and we see quite an array of suspects, quite a web of relationships involving some of them and some of the investigators, and quite a succession of twists as the plot unfolds. A little confusing to keep up with, but never boring. And the script and casting keep the right characters front and center at every moment without depending too much on your memory of all the others.
There are no gun battles or rooftop chases, but if you like the idea of one or two dramatic peripeties per episode, mostly revealed in dialogue, this is a good series for you. I wouldn't be at all surprised if foreign production companies decided to remake it.
Come Closer (2024)
Spinning away from an autobiographical premise
A highly visible elephant in the room here is the accidental death of writer/director Tom Nesher's teenage brother, who was the son of one of Israel's most prominent moviemakers. At a preview screening, Tom Nesher noted that one incident the movie reproduces from real life is that after the fatal accident, the dead boy's sister looks through his belongings in hopes of finding some surprise. In real life, she didn't fine one, but in the movie she does. It turns out he had a serious girlfriend. (If you saw "The Cakemaker," you may guess what's coming.)
The character who, as the sister, is Tom Nesher's counterpart (yes, Tom Nesher is a woman) is, does not, we may be thankful, represent an idealized version of Nesher herself. In fact, she is not very likeable, and since she is the protagonist, the movie is a bit the harder to enjoy until we become reconciled to her. Although she's said to have been very close to her brother, there's not much material to demonstrate their closeness and thus win the audience's sympathy before the accident occurs.
As the movie progresses, the sister and the previously unknown girlfriend attempt to help one another, or exploit one another, in the attempt to retain the boy somehow as part of their lives. Nesher says she spent a lot of time preparing the actresses, and she incorporated contributions from them-- partly because as a former newsperson she believes in the importance of background. And the effort paid off with rewards at Tribeca and in Jerusalem.
Gojira -1.0 (2023)
Godzilla is just the McGuffin, but that's fine
Godzilla brings his bulk and his danger to what is more importantly a story of personal maturation and self-redemption, heavy with the post-WW2 gloom, grief, and questioning out of which the Godzilla franchise was originally, if a bit less blatantly, born. It's a simple story, with not many characters, but the problems that it dramatizes are presented more intelligently than you'd expect from what's ostensibly a monster movie.
Visually, this movie's incarnation of the Godzilla character was, in my opinion, overdone. The dorsal spines are wildly overgrown and although it's nice that the movie doesn't need to rely on a man in a rubber suit, something is lost when Godzilla's proportions and lineaments no longer suggest something of a human character inside. But maybe my nostalgia is misplaced, because this time, although Godzilla is a force that seems to have something to do with collective human karma, Godzilla's behavior doesn't rise about the level of a dumb animals. The human characters are what make the movie.
Tatami (2023)
Constantly on message
Long moments at the start of the movie are spent showing a bus ride. I think the idea is to set the bar low where thrills are concerned. The photography is in black and white, the aspect ratio is not wide, and for most of the movie everything is in shadows. Very dark, at least as screened at my local theater.
And there are only two major characters. One is a serious athlete out to follow her dream at all costs, even if her family life suffers somewhat. The motif is familiar from any number of biopics, but here it's overlaid by another priority that the athlete defies: She's Iranian and she dares to disobey her government. Her courage is a big element of the movie, so there's a second character, her trainer, who embodies the conflict, wondering what the right thing to do really is.
The sport involved is judo, and the heroine is being asked to take a fall in order not to have to compete against an Israeli. Something like that actually happened, but this isn't a retelling of the actual story. It might have more impact if it were, because as is the movie is incessantly telling us how evil an authoritarian government is from the writer's point of view, rather than letting us figure it out from true-life facts.
A judo match, however you photograph it, is unfortunately not easy to follow. The movie provides a sports commentator on the scene, whose voice-over helps us out somewhat. A mystery I never did solve is the timing of the dreaded match against the Israeli. The Iranians pressure their contestant as if it's coming up right away, but it turns out not to be the next match. How are these things decided? If you never know when your opponent is going to be an Israeli, why did the Iranians send her to the competition in the first place?
Before you can think too much about that, though, the movie sweeps you along-- as relentless as its heroine. And if there are no blue skies or comic relief or rooftop chases, you don't miss them.
Himmo Melech Yerushalaim (1987)
A well-don downer
It's been some years since I saw this movie, but now (2024), in connection with a new documentary about the director, I heard "Himmo" was a discouraging flop that he felt ruined his chances of leaving the niche of gay cinema and entering the mainstream. I was surprised, because the film is well put together. And I was also surprised because it by no means breaks away entirely from gayness. But if I had to guess what tha problem was, I'd guess it was the bleakness of the whole thing. After the Six Day War, and even more so after the Yom Kippur War, there was a fear in Israel that even if we win our battles, they're taking too much out of us. "Himmo," which is set in a ward for wounded soldiers, unsparingly puts the price of war front and center. It's believably scripted and acted. Confined as it is, for the most part, to a single room, maybe it's a more natural property for the stage.
Kissufim (2023)
Sketchy script, fine photography
In 2023, between this movie's shoot and its release, the October 7 massacre hit Kibbutz Kissufim. The movie, already rather elegiac (being set in 1977), automatically becomes all the more so.
The movie shows us that Kibbutz Kissufim houses not only its own members but also a contingent of overseas volunteers, some soldiers, and a Nahal group. Nahal is a program combining kibbutz work with military service, and the movie focuses on the young people in that program-- played, as often happens, by actors overage for their roles.
An audience can follow only so many characters, so the problem with movies set in an environment like this is that either interactions are reduced to an artificially small number of people or the audience may lose track of who's who. The Kissufim movie tends to unfold as if most of the kibbutz doesn't exist; and although the characters are assumed to be hard at work most of the day, the movie is almost entirely about their free time.
There are knowing glimpses of the political situation and of the confusing search for love and/or casual sex, but there is no strong narrative arc to carry the movie along and (with all due respect to some fine actors) the characters are not scripted in much detail. If I'd recommend the movie for any reason, it's the photography. It's almost as if at the moment when the movie's title appears on screen, the movie says "Let's talk about width." The camera is in love with the lateral dimension of the screen and takes many opportunities to emphasize it with intriguing repetitive elements or strongly horizontal backgrounds (such as the desert horizon itself). It's when our attention is turned to talking heads that the movie becomes less interesting.
Air War (2024)
War without alienation - unusual in Israeli cinema
In the publicity for this movie, the filmmakers take great pride in the reconstruction of war planes from the 1960s. And they've chosen to start the movie off by showing fighter planes in action. There's a mistake that artists make -- assuming that where they invested the most effort is where the audience will feel the most appreciation. We (by which of course I mean I) don't care much about those airborne toys until the ground-level plot has got underway and we understand that there are identifiable human beings involved.
As the movie progresses, pilots are introduced as characters so that by the next time around we care more about what happens to those planes. Another reason we care is that there's a war to be fought and it's very important that our country win. In that way, this movie contrasts with a long line of famous Israeli movies, such as Waltz with Bashir, Foxtrot, and Lebanon, that portray soldiers as pawns of little meaning in a senseless, unnecessary conflict. As if addressing the peaceniks of the world, one of the characters adds an important word to a common saying: "Peace is made with defeated enemies," he remarks.
Coincidentally or not, by taking us back to a decade when the country wholeheartedly supported the war effort, the movie takes us back to a time when female soldiers were supposed to be seen and not heard. The movie pointedly shows that their voices are ignored, an observation that seems prophetic considering that the script comes from a year or two before the female lookouts warned in vain of the coming October 7 attack on Israel.
This movie has been called Israel's "Top Gun," and although I haven't seen the non-Israeli one, I read a summary and I can see similarities. This movie focuses on two pilots, one of whom needs to learn to assert himself a little more whereas the other needs to learn to take other people into consideration. It's good that the scriptwriters realized you can't base a movie entirely on planes zooming past one another.
Hila (2023)
Obsession as an escape from uncertainty?
I wasn't fully expecting another film by Michal Bat-Adam. Her previous one, The Road To Where, seemed to sum up her vision of the past, the present, and the unknown in a way that left nothing unsaid. At a preview showing of Hila, Bar-Adam said it contained references to her previous films. I didn't catch them, but-- although Hila is kind of a nouvelle-vague mosaic, with not everything solidly glued into the main plot-- I found this film easier to follow than some of her others. Hila, whose name is seldom mentioned, is a woman neurotically obsessed with the man who, after fathering her child (whom he doesn't know about), turned his back on her. Psychologists say that a neurosis, although hard to cope with, is itself a way of coping with something else. And it may be that Hila is coping with that great unanswerable question of The Road To Where, because the same issue of why we're here and where we're going does come up.
Michal Bat-Adam has always stood a little outside the Israeli mainstream. This movie is set in Tel Aviv, but if not for a scene at a recognizable Dizengoff Circle, we wouldn't know it. The music is a little unusual (atypically, percussive for a love scene) and it's by a fellow named Daniel Mizrahi. An in-law? He's scored several other films by Bat-Adam and her late husband Moshe Mizrahi. Because her presence as writer/dircctor is so strong, it's a little surprising to realize that she isn't acting in her own movies any more.
Be'Emtsa Hachayim (2023)
A fast-paced melodrama
I don't know how long a book this film was based on, but the filmmakers certainly hurried through a great deal of material. Things happen quickly and minimal time, or less than minimal, is spent dwelling on how the characters' relationships and mutual attitudes develop. But before we have time to think much about that, the plot speeds onward. It involves the great Israeli issue of the strictly religious lifestyle versus the permissive liberal lifestyle, and that issue-- as such-- is among the matters it doesn't spend time explaining. But while following the melodramatic story of love and feuding and abandonment and adultery and so on, the audience (at least the Israeli audience) may be held in suspense over which side of the religious-versus-permissive divide the film will ultimately tilt to.
Bubblegum Memory (2024)
An affecting documentary, albeit a little too artsy
Making a fly-on-the-wall documentary must be tough. On the one hand, you don't want to intrude between the viewer and the material, because the documentary isn't about you. You want the viewer to feel directly involved with the material. On the other hand, if people are there on screen taking direction from you and the audience isn't aware that they're taking direction, you're not being completely honest. So we do find Dalia Friedland, the subject of this film, speaking to "Avi" now and then (and it's up to the audience to infer that Avi is the guy behind the camera). And at one point, there's even a discussion of what lines should be spoken. But beyond the frank implication of his presence, the director also intrudes a bit with artsy editing. Most notably, there is a shot of a building being demolished and, unless I wasn't paying attention, it's never explained. Obviously it symbolizes the end of Dalia herself, but is it literally the building she lives in? Or just a metaphor.
What's demolishing Dalia is some kind of dementia. You can't help sympathizing with her, as she tries to keep her spirits up while aware that she's on a one-way downhill ride. And although in her prime she was an award-winning actress, she was largely typecast as a children's performer and she feels she only partially fulfilled her potential.
The film does a very good job, in my opinion, of ushering us from the particular to the universal. The first part of the film is more about Dalia's youth and her working years, and she's had an interesting life. Once the audience has developed an attachment to her (if they didn't have one before), the film takes us into the issue of old age and infirmity and we realize that the same troubles beset not only the award-winning actors and actresses but also the butchers and bakers and candlestick makers.
Ha-Tov, HaRa, VeHaLo-Nora (1986)
Of historic interest only, if that
Moshe Ish-Kassit was a big, mild-looking man who inherited a Tel Aviv cafe where many cultural and entertainment figures hung out. They liked him and would occasionally cast him in a movie.
Yosef Shiloach was an Iranian-born actor with roles in dozens of movies, mostly Israeli but some American. He could (and did) successfully play serious historical figures, but he was bitter at having to accept many stereotyped roles as a bumbling, doltish Persian.
In this movie, Ish-Kassit in fact comes off better than Shiloach. Shiloach goes through his ridiculous schtick while Ish-Kassit with his limited abilities believably underplays what, for once in his career, is a leading role. Strangely, Shiloach is credited on screen as a co-writer although he professed to hating the kind of low comedy he performs here.
Assi Dayan the director (and writer, and third lead as actor here) was on the verge of giving up comedies, ten years after his classic crowd-pleaser Halfon Hill Doesn't Answer. Obviously he should have given them up sooner, because nothing in this movie is likely to put a smile on your face if you're over ten years old.
The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)
Sorry, I couldn't swallow it
Am I allowed to mention the race thing? I supposed, to begin with, that 19th-century England was being re-imagined as a place where although a system of social classes was very much in place, it had nothing to do with race and, for example, a school for grooming young English gentlemen could accommodate several black students and no one would blink. Okay, I thought, I'll use my imagination. Then it turned out that Steerforth, one of the students, is white but his mother is black and nobody blinks at that either, so I had to readjust my imagination: This must be a movie where we are supposed to ignore any racial incongruity and accept the actors as actors, the way we easily accept a black Brunhilda on the opera stage.
The trouble is that in order for that to work, the actors need to be anchored to a reliable version of the story. And the old-fashioned long title of the movie seems to promise such a version-- but it doesn't deliver. Even aside from cinematic gimmickry, the script imposes extreme tweaks on the plot and on the characters. So we're not being shown The Personal History of David Copperfield and we're not being told The Personal History of David Copperfield... and thus, I'm sorry to say, there's no point to watching the movie.
David Copperfield (1970)
Things have an effect
The script for this production was published in the USA in advance of the broadcast. A college student at the time, I snapped it up and read it eagerly. I remember two things. One was the recurring motif of a rocking chair, which was wisely minimized in the broadcast version. The other was that we see Copperfield's eventful Dickensian life has had an effect on him. He hasn't impassively come through it all like Buster Keaton emerging without a scratch from a collapsing house. I was bowled over; I loved the idea. All the half-ridiculous characters and incidents of Dickens gained a touch of serious significance and a sense of connection from the evidence of their effect on the un-ridiculous Copperfield. I'm sorry to read that this production isn't now available for viewing at good quality; I admired it.
Ha'Mishlahat (2023)
Pulled in both directions
In Israel, a school trip to Poland was a rite of passage for many high-schoolers, intended to give them a feeling for what the Jewish people went through under the Nazis. Unfortunately, kids old enough for the trip are also just at the age when they'd rather be carousing-- and carouse they will, although the Holocaust does shock and move them. The movie conveys the dual experience; indeed, it seems to be pulled in both directions itself.
There's another pull at work too, by the way. The Polish establishment these days is insistent that Poles had no part in the Holocaust, and since this movie was made with Polish cooperation, it includes no implication of Polish guilt or Polish anti-Semitism. It does show the kids being warned not to reveal that they're Jewish or Israeli, but when they ignore the warning, they find the Poles friendly without exception.
The kids amount to a big busload, and although the movie concentrates on four of them who have a complex relationship with one another, even that small cast of major characters isn't always easy to follow in terms of their motivations and mutual attitudes.
Two of Israel's best adult actors. Ezra Dagan and Alma Dishi, are on hand in supporting roles and add a little gravitas. Interestingly, both their characters fail to carry out their work with the kids to their own satisfaction; their failure goes well with the realization that the whole project of passing a proper awareness of the Holocaust down from generation to generation is on the one hand necessary but on the other hand not perfectly achievable.
Hemda (2024)
Love in various forms tumbles through a kaleidoscopic story
Shemi Zarhin is not only a filmmaker but also a novelist, and he doesn't mind using a large cast of characters in situations not always closely related. In this movie, it takes a while for the central dynamic of the plot to come to the fore while at the same time we figure out the family relationships of some of the characters. Early on, we understand that the male and female lead are in a healthy relationship but beset by challenges. The man loves his wife and at seventy-three he is still desirous of her; he uses the Hebrew word (echoed in the movie's title) that is translated as "covet" in the tenth commandment. And that kind of desire is contrasted, not too strongly, against the insatiable hormones of youth; and there's also the bond between parents and children thrown into the mix, and love out of bounds, and even the lust for money. It makes for a long movie, but it's anchored by two of Israel's most respected actors in the lead roles. There's more than twenty years' difference in their ages, but they deliver the goods.
Soda (2024)
A scarred generation sympathetically remembered
The word "Soda" in Hebrew means "her secret," but it also means soda water. The title here works both ways. The setting is a little Israeli community that is largely supported by a soda bottling plant, back in the early 1950s. The characters are Holocaust survivors, and their leader is the same man who led them in the anti-Nazi resistance, back in Europe. He's an imperfect man, and like many of the others he's by no means left his past behind. We can sympathize with them all. The movie deserves credit for focusing on an almost forgotten time and environment, even though it does contain one obvious blunder. (Telephones were not taken for granted back then, guys!) And I admit that the last minute or so confused me, but throughout the movie the issues raised were significant and the characters embodied them believably.
The man who wanted to know everything (2024)
A good twist on the "amateur sleuth" motif
THe Man Who Wanted To Know Everything is based on one of a series of books (and it's not the first to be adapted) featuring police investigator Avraham Avraham. The script gives him the requisite attention even though his role in the plot is not very big; that throws the series a little off balance, but off balance isn't always bad in a suspense story. The title character (who is not Avraham) is someone determined to solve the mystery even though he's just a regular fellow. That puts him in a time-honored tradition, but the catch is that he bumbles. It's only natural, and it boosts our sympathy for him. There's a great deal of suspense, but almost nothing in-your-face about it. All I felt was missing is local color; the story is set in the city of Holon, but we feel "there's no there there"-- which some people say about Holon anyway. On the positive side, foreign filmmakers could easily shoot their own versions of the story; it could happen in any city,
Home (2023)
The wife is okay after all
I remember the news story on which this movie is based. A shopkeeper in Israel wanted to sell electronics to ultra-Orthodox Jews and although he adjusted the products to their way of life (most notably, no internet access), still he was badly harassed. When I saw the publicity implying that the movie emphasizes the man's marriage, I was pessimistic. What does his wife have to do with anything, other than broadening the audience demographic? But the character of the wife works very well in this version of the story. The wife is more conservative than the shopkeeper, and she seems to symbolize the affinity that he retains for Orthodox Judaism despite the fact that the rabbis in this movie are all (alas) portrayed as ogres. Although Roy Nik in the leading role and Dror Keren as his rabbinical nemesis both receive acting awards-- and everyone loves Dror Keren, but aside from wearing a beard, he didn't have to exert himself greatly in this role-- I would have nominated Yarden Toussia-Cohen's performance as the wife. She does a great deal to hold the movie together, across some bumpy transitions as the shop abruptly becomes more and more successful and the shopkeeper abruptly seems more savvy while becoming less and less conformist in his dress and behavior (as does she, without a whole lot of explanation, in his wake).
On cinematic grounds I can't but recommend the movie, but gee, in a scene with a whole committee of rabbis, couldn't the script have had one rabbi standing up for fair play in commerce and for and technological progress? Did they all have to be benighted Luddites?
June Zero (2022)
A strong coming-of-age story, and a history lesson
Early on in this movie, the State of Israel is facing the question of how to keep Adolf Eichmann's grave from becoming a neo-Nazi pilgrimage site. It's one of a number of issues that come up regarding shouldering the past versus getting rid of the past. The filmmaker weaves them into a strong coming-of-age story, with a somewhat unconventional boy protagonist and a somewhat unconventional mentor, but when not all the aspects of his message fit in, he doesn't hesitate to insert an entirely different story, with a lengthy monologue recalling a wartime experience, into the middle of the movie. Good for him.
Many Israelis will see the punch line of the monologue coming from a mile away, but the movie, although its in Hebrew, is American-made and there's history to be crammed in that Americans may not know. Sometimes the dialogue gets a little too expository, but not often.
Another flaw, at least to my inexpert eye, is that sometimes the camera expects us to understand something that's not very easy to discern. There's one series of close-ups, while Eichmann is sleeping, where I couldn't figure out what was being photographed at all. And the moment when the reason for the movie's title was revealed went by too fast visually. And there is a sequence during Eichmann's haircut that I think maybe I was supposed to understand as being imagined by one of the characters, but everything was too quick and I'm not sure.
As often happens when American moviemakers, with their deep pockets, put out a call for Israeli actors, big names show up to take even small parts. They all acquit themselves well, and Rotem Keinan, the red-headed actor who makes a career out of playing unsuccessful men, receives an extra credit at the end of the movie as acting coach for the juvenile lead. In that, he was obviously successful.
Lies I Told Myself (2023)
Twilight of a philandering poet
The director has decided that his father is an interesting man, and he's right. And the father has something of a story, although it's not thoroughly told. He writes good poetry, but was he known for it or was it just a hobby? When did he move from Russia to Israel, and why? We do know that he cheated on his wife, and he's not the only one in the family with a wandering eye. The movie is structured, a bit artificially, as a series of revelations that the family members must come to terms with, and certain tiny interludes set in nature are sandwiched in-- some as mysteries that turn out to be foreshadowing, others for reasons I can't confidently guess. We're never allowed for long to forget that the people in the movie are not necessarily behaving spontaneously, and the credits tell us a the end that one of the minor figures is even an inserted actress. So there's a self-consciousness projected that on the one hand earns the movie points for honesty but on the other hand keeps the audience at a distance. It's the father, already in his waning years, who's the most believable as himself--- hanging on to all the pride and independence he can while his infirmities, and his past, catch up with him.
Curb Your Enthusiasm: No Lessons Learned (2024)
Wait a minute. Let me look that up...
First of all, it was painful to watch Richard Lewis nearing the end of his life. Loved him in "Anything but Love" and in standup. Y'hi zikhro barukh (Blessed be his memory). That said...
Whereas the Seinfeld finale showed the gang punished for a crime that displayed their characteristic self-centeredness, Larry here gets punished for a rare act of altruism. That's a nice touch of irony. (Not that Seinfeld never did anything similar; for example, George's idea that the security guard deserves a chair didn't work out great in Seinfeld season 7 ep 3.) But the Curb Your Enthusiasm courtroom scene went head-to-head with its Seinfeld predecessor and kind of lost. Too much schtick that had too little to do with the suspenseful issue at hand.
Maybe a little more advance attention to the juror who causes the mistrial might have helped. A little more behavior showing he's the kind of person who flouts the rules. Because already the chance spotting of him outside his quarantine is a clumsy coincidence.
And then the mistrial itself. That sent me straight to the web to look up what happens after a mistrial. The answer seems to be that ordinarily the defendant isn't automatically let off, as this episode seems to imply. The defendant can be tried again for the same crime. So-- regarding the ending-- as Larry David might say, "Mmm... I don't think so."
HaZvi (2024)
A bit of history, a bit of genre-crossing
This miniseries is a period piece, and the protagonist is a good-looking, independent-minded young woman who's ahead of her time. (When was the last period piece with a different protagonist?) The buzz around it centered largely on the use of Eliezer Ben Yehuda as a character. He's the man who was dedicated to re-introducing the Hebrew language into everyday speech, and his role here is stern King of Siam to the protagonist's also determined but softer-hearted Anna. The script, however, spends a great deal of time on the protagonist's family (entirely fictitious, as far as I know) and on the soap opera of their lives, as well as on a case of abuse by an extreme religious sect against a suspected loose woman.-- to the point where if you came to see a story about the revival of the Hebrew language, you might feel insufficiently rewarded.
There are other departures from expectations as well. A couple of scenes veer into fantasy or surrealism, and someone decided that the anachronism of Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" would work well in the soundtrack.
At times it can be a tough mix to swallow, but the production puts it across as smoothly as possible. Playing the protagonist, Suzanna Papian reaffirms her standing as the country's sweetheart. Opposite her is Or Ben-Melech, who has his funny-looking face well covered by beard and can thus tackle the Ben-Yehuda role-- a more serious one than he usually plays. Vladimir Friedman, the Depardieu of Israel, is also on hand and is impressive as always, and a smaller role goes to Gala Kogan, who is very very welcome back on screen after a bout with brain cancer.
A great deal of plot is packed into the last episode of the series, as if at one point more had been planned, but although I was happy to follow each episode, I wasn't terribly sorry to see the story end and free all those talented people to move on to other things.
Daniel Auerbach (2023)
Maybe a little self-indulgent, but it makes its point
When a writer directs and stars in his own movie (even if the closing credits acknowledge others who helped with the script), the trap of self-indulgence is wide open. Even more so when it's the writer's long-awaited second feature film and it's about trying to write a long-awaited second feature film - which is how the plot of this one was publicized.
But it's about rather more than the struggling writer as struggling writer. It does have touches of self-indulgence - for example, some needlessly long takes, and a couple of stunning young women who fall for the protagonist without any strong reason - but it's more about the big question of how to participate in the world.
As the movie starts, the protagonist as a young student asks why God bothered to create and populate the world in the first place. As an adult, he goes on asking tough questions and you may start wondering (as I did) whether the script is just a way for the writer to put his collected aphorisms before the public. But it turns out that the protagonist's questioning is also a way of trawling for someone he can connect with, because his relationship with other individuals, with society, and with the passage of time is a problem for him. Aha, we of the third millennium can't help saying, he's on the spectrum.
The movie jumps back and forth in time somewhat, and I hope I'm not committing a spoiler if I say that the resolution involves an incident that helps the protagonist position himself on the timeline.
Shikun (2024)
Nicely surrealistic when it's not offensive
Amos Gitai the director, who has an affinity for architecture, opens the movie with an intriguing shot of a long corridor-- or balcony, actually, as it's open to the outside opposite its many doors. I guess it's what architects call a loggia. Anyway, in pleasantly surrealistic fashion, people come and speak and go. At one point, a man can be seen in the background playing a didgeridoo. A woman, who will turn out to be the main character, does a bit of pleasant dancing but feels troubled and uncertain, and the characters' random comings and goings and statements contribute to the feeling that nobody is really in control. The pacing and the sometimes aphoristic nature of the speeches keep the movie interesting even if nothing particular seems to be happening-- except that rhinoceroses may have been sighted and we know what that means. In Israel, Ionesco's famous play "Rhinoceros" left behind a verb that hasn't disappeared from the Hebrew language-- l'hitkarnef (that is, "to go rhino"), meaning to give up your better judgement and join a destructive political juggernaut.
Unless I'm off by a week or so, by the second week of its run at Cinema City, the major movie venue just north of Tel Aviv, this movie had been reduced to one showing a week. The third week too, there was only one showing, a matinee. I was the only viewer who turned up for it. And I rather liked the movie until I realized that the general surrealistic atmosphere of unpredictability and doubt was pierced by a virulent political message - that Israel is a country where foreigners arrived and mercilessly dispossessed the proper residents. In perhaps the most offensive sequence, apparently filmed at the Yiddish book depository in Tel Aviv's central bus station, actress Hana Laszlo plays a character who reads with loving nostalgia from a book about the terrible conditions of a concentration camp. In real life, Laszlo's own mother survived Auschwitz! Did Laszlo know what she was doing in this movie, implying that the Jews are happy to embrace the camps as part of their past in order to legitimize their sins against others? It turns out that the rhinos of this movie, the people who have given up trying to resist the evil of the prevailing politics, are those who believe in the legitimacy of how the State of Israel was founded. Considering that in Ionesco's original play, the rhinos were an obvious metaphor for Nazi sympathizers, Gitai has, in my opinion, crossed a line here.
In the best remembered American production of "Rhinoceros," it was Zero Mostel who could be seen beginning to go rhino before the eyes of the audience. In this movie, it's Irene Jacob, and she doesn't have a rubber face to work with like Mostel's but she has some flexibility in her body and if Zero Mostel is a ten, then Irene Jacob is maybe a respectable seven. It's a shame that the movie is poisoned by a one-sided, wrong-headed political slant, as if Gitai himself had gone rhino.