Israel-Hamas war: TV, movie offerings to take your mind off reality

If you are looking for something light to take your mind off reality, there are many options that hit the sweet spot of being intelligent enough to keep you occupied, but not so stupid that you can’t get into them.

The Yes Movie Store features a number of choices, including Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, a movie that, inexplicably, was never released in Israel. It’s an excellent adaptation of the Judy Blume classic novel, a coming-of-age story aimed at tween girls. Mothers and daughters will enjoy watching this together. 

Another gentle, coming-of-age story, James Gray’s Armageddon Time, about a Jewish boy growing up in New York in the 1980s, would also be nice to see now. Anthony Hopkins plays the boy’s grandfather. The movie is showing on Yes Movies Drama at 9 p.m. on October 27 and also becomes available on Yes VOD on that date. 

People may not realize how many good series and movies are included on Amazon Prime Video, which is available to anyone who pays for Amazon Prime. If you haven’t seen it, or even if you have, I would recommend Mad Men, the series about an advertising agency in the 1960s. It’s so intelligently made and will transport you to another place and time. 

For instance, unlike so many other great series made during our current golden age of television, it is primarily a workplace drama. Most of the other highly praised series of this era – including The Wire, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and The Americans – are terrific but very violent, as they deal with crime and espionage. It’s nice to see a beautifully written and executed show that is set in an office, which is something that most of us can identify with, although you’ve probably never had a three-Martini lunch and then tried to get work done afterward.

If you want a really light series, try Call My Agent! on Netflix, the story of a Parisian talent agency. The comedy comes from a great ensemble cast who play the agents trying to please the temperamental stars they represent, and in each episode, France’s top actors play themselves, including Isabelle Huppert and Juliette Binoche. 

It can be nice to see Israel on-screen during better times, and I came across a forgotten gem, Blazing Sand, on the Israel Film Archive website jfc.org.il/en/movie/46449-2/ for free. This first Israeli-German co-production is a caper movie from 1960 in English about a gang of Israeli criminals who go to great lengths to obtain Dead Sea-like scrolls from a desert location, obviously based on Petra, that they plan to sell. The gang is led by Dina, an amoral Holocaust survivor and kibbutz dropout played by Israeli actress, Dahliah Lavi. 

Lavi had a brief but sparkling career as an international starlet, in the mode of Brigitte Bardot or Claudia Cardinale, and appeared in such Hollywood films as Two Weeks in Another Town. The rest of the cast is a mix of German and Israeli actors. 

A very young Uri Zohar plays a straight-arrow guy who dumps out a friend’s whisky and makes him fill the bottle with water before they head off into the desert. Oded Kotler also has a big role, as does Gila Almagor, who plays a good kibbutz girl who worries about her cows. Singers Abi Ofarim and Esther Ofarim appear and perform at a nightclub. There are scenes that show 1960 Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, but there is also a lot of schlepping around sand dunes on camels. It’s a must-see for Israeli film lovers. 

Serious offerings to occupy your brain amid war

SOMETIMES the way to get through a tough time like this is not with light fare, but with something serious enough that it occupies your brain, but allows you to think about something other than the war for a brief but welcome period.

One series I would recommend is The Dropout, on Disney+ (also available through Yes), which is a dramatization of the Elizabeth Holmes story. Holmes, you will recall, is currently serving a prison sentence for fraud involving her company, Theranos. This company supposedly created a machine that could run multiple blood tests on a single drop of blood, a really great idea but there was only one problem – it didn’t work and all the test results were fake.

Amanda Seyfried gives a compelling performance as the eccentric Holmes, who was able to dazzle and confuse investors until her company was valued at $9 billion. Naveen Andrews plays her similarly ethically challenged partner, while Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, who broke the story of her fraud, is portrayed by Ebon Moss-Bachrach, who plays a lovable screwup in The Bear, and it’s fun to see him as a successful journalist here. 

Bodies, the new Netflix time-travel mystery series starring Israeli actress Shira Haas, who is best known for Unorthodox and Shtisel, was just released and while it’s very well done, this may not be the right time for many Israelis to watch this show. 

It tells the story of a body found with graphically depicted wounds on a London street in several distinct time periods: the 1890s, 1940s, the present day, and 2053. In each time period, it follows the police investigation into the death. 

Haas gives an intense performance as a detective who has a sort of bionic spine in the future section. To make the series’ arrival in Israel even more ill-timed, the future section is set 30 years after a huge attack on England in the summer of 2023, which brought a totalitarian government with a creepy worship for its leader (which reminded me of Woody Allen’s Sleeper) into power.

Haas’s performance in this twisty series deserves to be seen, and she does very well with a British accent. But it could be hard to get swept up into this often-violent story when there is so much real-life violence today to cope with, and if the news of the past few weeks had a title like a dramatic series, it might well have been called Bodies. 

Haas is getting rave reviews around the world for her performance, and deservedly so, but tellingly, on social media she has not posted them yet – very unusual for an actress. Instead, she has been using these platforms to call for the release of the Israeli hostages. I feel for Haas, having a career triumph at such a tough time, and she is handling it with grace.