Classic movies, new TV shows for Israelis to watch in wartime

The big television story of the week is the release of the first four episodes of the final season of The Crown on Netflix on Friday. The streaming service declined to make these episodes available for Israeli critics ahead of time, so the review will have to wait till next week. The second half of the show is set to be released in mid-December.

 If you’re looking for a movie to watch, or re-watch, one of the best right now is Inglourious Basterds, directed by Ramat Aviv Gimmel dad Quentin Tarantino. The film, which is available on Netflix, tells the story of two plots to execute Adolf Hitler during World War II, one by French Jewish cinema owner Shosanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent) and one by a group of American Jewish soldiers, played by, among others, Eli Roth, with Brad Pitt as their commander.

This is the movie that is credited with sparking the mustache trend among IDF soldiers during this war, and while waiting for the ground invasion to start, some soldiers made a video that recreates a scene from the movie. 

The movie’s producer, Lawrence Bender, was one of the brave souls who attended the screening of a film of the Hamas atrocities, in Hollywood last week, where brawls broke out outside the theater. Christoph Waltz, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of the sadistic SS officer in this film, was once married to a Jewish psychiatrist, and has a son who is a rabbi in Israel, as well as a daughter who had her wedding in Jerusalem. 

One more good thing about the movie: When Tarantino was doing publicity for the film in Israel, he met Daniella Pick, a singer/model whose father was Israeli musician Zvika Pick, and they began dating, which led to him becoming the first Hollywood heavyweight to settle here.

Those with access to Apple TV+ have a great selection of classic movies to choose from and they are real classics, not like movies from four years ago that somehow can be characterized as classics on other streaming services. One film that is worth watching again, and might engage today’s teen audiences as well, is American Graffiti (1973). 

Before he made movies about the fantasy space world of Star Wars, George Lucas released this film about teens who have just graduated from high school and who are immersed in the car culture of a small Northern California town in the early 1960s. It stars an amazing cast of unknowns, many of whom, like Lucas, went straight to the top of the entertainment industry. Richard Dreyfuss (who later won a Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl) plays Curt, a brainy guy who is having second thoughts about leaving town, while Ron Howard, now a leading Hollywood director, is romantically involved with Laurie (Cindy Williams, who went on to star in Laverne & Shirley).

Among the film’s other stars are Mackenzie Phillips, the daughter of John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, who went on to appear in One Day at a Time, and Candy Clark, the comic standout, who was the only cast member to be nominated for an Oscar. Harrison Ford and Suzanne Sommers also had small roles.

For a while after the war started, I found it hard to watch any movie or series about murder, since there was and is so much violence on the news, but here are two series that are about solving murders that do not focus on blood and gore. Only Murders in the Building (available on Disney+ and through Yes) released its third season this summer and its fans will be pleased to hear that it will be returning for a fourth.

This often absurd, enjoyable, and darkly comic series about a trio of unlikely friends in a beautiful old New York building – Charles (Steve Martin), a former TV star; Oliver (Martin Short), a Broadway producer who hasn’t had a hit in years; and Mabel (Selena Gomez), a depressed young artist – who solve murders as they collaborate on a true-crime podcast, can be described as Seinfeld with murder, and the third season did not disappoint. Its quirky, New York sensibility was front and center as Oliver finally got a Broadway show off the ground, with Charles as one of the leads, of course. 

But the formula was invigorated by the addition of two guest stars, Paul Rudd, who plays Ben Gilroy, a teen action TV star, who was also the star of Oliver’s new show, and Meryl Streep as Loretta, an actress who has never caught a break who gets cast in the show. Rudd is predictably funny as the egotistical Ben, and Streep is especially entertaining as a version of what she might have been had she not gotten her big break: a gifted actress who wows everyone with her accents, but manages to mess things up whenever she gets a chance. It’s the most purely enjoyable performance Streep has given in years.

Another new series that is entertaining and twisty is Payback, which plays a little like Ozark in Scotland. It just became available on Yes VOD (and StingTV), Hot VOD, and CellcomTV. It stars Morvern Christie (The A Word) as Lexie, a frazzled working mom who runs an accounting firm with her husband. When he is murdered suddenly, seemingly by strangers, she learns that he was involved in working as an accountant for a shadowy crime syndicate run by a boss played by Peter Mullan, who acted in and directed The Magdalene Sisters. A forensic accountant (Prasanna Puwanarajah, who played the very winning bumbling agent on Ten Percent) working for the police figures out what was going on and gets Lexie to help them.

Jewface debate, Italians, and The Bear

Remember back about 20 years ago when many Jews were upset about Bradley Cooper’s prosthetic nose in the Leonard Bernstein biopic, Maestro, and the fact that Cooper wasn’t Jewish, which led to a debate about so-called “Jewface”? Wait – was it really only six weeks ago that those were questions that occupied our thoughts? I thought about them again as I re-watched the second season of The Bear on Disney+, also available through Yes, which I strongly recommend. 

It’s about Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a young Italian man from Chicago who escaped his dysfunctional family to become an extremely successful chef in Europe. After his brother’s suicide, he returns home to take over his family’s sandwich joint. The family is very clearly referenced as Italian in many scenes, often using Italian words and mentioning Italian traditions, such as the “Seven Fishes” dish for Christmas that Carmy’s mother, Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis), is so pressured about getting it right that she has a nervous breakdown in the “Fishes” episode, which is the highlight of the second season.

As I was watching it this time, I reflected on the fact that White and Curtis (whose father was Tony Curtis, né Bernard Schwartz) are Jewish, as is Jon Bernthal (you may remember him as Shane on The Walking Dead), who appears as Michael, Carmy’s brother, in a few flashbacks. 

Their sister, Natalie, is played by Abby Elliott, the daughter of actor Chris Elliott of Schitt’s Creek and the granddaughter of the late radio great Bob Elliott of the comic duo Bob and Ray. 

There does not seem to be a drop of Italian blood in any of these actors’ veins. Yet no Italians have raised the howls of protest that went up over the casting of Cooper in Maestro or the proposed casting of Kathryn Hahn, who happens not to be Jewish – although I, like many people, always thought she was – as Joan Rivers, in an upcoming biopic. The Bear has actually drawn praise from many Italian Americans, who say they see themselves and their families in the characters.

If you want to give the show a try now, you really need to start in the first season, because so many things won’t make sense if you don’t, but the second season is far more interesting. For those who grew up with alcoholic or mentally-ill parents, it will play like a documentary, especially the “Fishes” episode, which is a showcase for Curtis, and the series also has the best therapy group scene since season five of The Wire. For whatever reason, this is the show I have found most absorbing since the war started. It was recently announced that there will be a third season.