Purim is coming up, and you might want to celebrate with the staff and customers of a small-town supermarket, Shefa Issachar, in Checkout (aka Kupa Rashit), the popular Israeli sitcom which you can watch on the KAN website at kan.org.il or on Netflix.
The 10th episode of season two is about Purim, and everyone dresses up in ways that showcase their quirks.
The relentlessly cheerful manager, Shira (Noa Koler), whose usual style icon is Steve Jobs, is a bit put out when she wears a costume based on a pun that no one understands.
Kochava (Keren Mor), the wildly self-centered cashier, dresses like an angel and refuses to give a holiday gift basket that management has promised everyone who comes in wearing a costume to Amnon (Dov Navon), the store’s most annoying customer.
She says he isn’t dressed up, but he retorts that she always says he looks like he’s homeless, and he’s not, so it is a costume.
Kochava’s main focus is getting her 15-year-old daughter, Sitel (Lior Edri), dressed in a family heirloom costume of a sexy black cat.
When the girl feels embarrassed by the costume, Shira encourages her to dress in a way that expresses her true self, which turns out to be the Statue of Liberty, and Kochava is outraged. Naturally, Ramzi (Amir Shurush), the only character who is as upbeat as Shira, goes as Superman.
IF YOU miss the comedy 30 Rock, you can tune into the new series, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, which is available on Yes VOD.
It was created by two of Tina Fey’s collaborators on 30 Rock, Robert Carlock and Sam Means, and stars Tracy Morgan, who played the egomaniac but intermittently charming Tracy Jordan on that show.
Here, he portrays the title character, a former NFL star who was disgraced in a gambling scandal. In order to make a comeback as a pitchman, he hires a documentary-series filmmaker, Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe), to make a movie about his life.
Tobin, it turns out, is dealing with a different kind of career disgrace and needs to burnish his reputation as much as Reggie does. It’s a fun parody of reality TV and worshipful sports movies.
It’s also a reminder that some of the best 30 Rock episodes featured a mock reality series about Tracy Jordan’s life and Tina Fey’s timely line, “If reality TV has taught us anything, it’s that you can’t keep people with no shame down.”
Morgan and Radcliffe turn out to be perfect foils to bring out the best and worst in each other. Radcliffe has always had a gift for comedy, and it’s nice that he gets a chance to show it off here.
Comedy vibes for Purim
IF YOU want to keep the comedy vibe going for Purim, Disney+ features two movies starring a young Tom Hanks, both of which bring out the playfulness that is such a key part of his on-screen persona.
In Big (1988), he plays a boy who has suddenly been turned physically into a man, but whose mind is still that of a kid. He gets a job working for a toy company and inspires the adults around him to get in touch with the children they once were.
One of the funniest moments is when he receives his first paycheck and can’t believe that he has earned over a $100. There are a couple of scenes with a co-worker who falls in love with him that haven’t aged well, but other than that, the movie is as fresh as it was nearly 40 years ago.
Splash (1984) is one of the great 1980s rom-coms, and it stars Hanks as a guy who has dreamed of mermaids since he saw one when he fell into the water off Cape Cod as a child.
Unable to commit to anyone as an adult, he is the guy responsible for running a wholesale fruit business in New York with his impulsive brother, played by John Candy, when a mermaid in the shape of Daryl Hannah grows legs and walks into his life.
It was one of Ron Howard’s first big movies as a director, and it’s still one of his best.
NOW THAT HBO Max is available in Israel (on Yes, Hot, and independently), I’ve been rewatching some of their classic series, and I decided to take a new look at True Blood.
The series, which premiered in 2008, was one of the shows that made it very clear that premium cable was different from regular TV, because it was darker, more irreverent, and much sexier.
If True Blood had been a movie, it would have been R-rated, maybe even X-rated. I was expecting it to be dated, but it drew me right back in with its clever premise, and it seems more relevant than ever, given the current culture wars in the US.
Taken from a series of novels by Charlaine Harris, it features a clever conceit: Japanese inventors have perfected synthetic blood, and now there is no reason for vampires to kill to survive, so many of them “come out of the coffin” and begin living mainstream lives.
In the opening sequence, a TV is tuned to Bill Maher’s show, and he is interviewing a vampire rights activist who challenges him to provide documentation that vampires have killed untold numbers of people for centuries.
That wittiness is at the heart of the show, which is often funny, and mixes gore, sex, soap-opera romance, satire, every kind of paranormal creature you have heard of (and some you haven’t), and more sex.
It shows how fine the line is between people who believe in Jesus and Satan, and those who are convinced of the existence of other supernatural creatures.
TRUE BLOOD tells the story of Sookie (Anna Paquin, one of the youngest Oscar winners in history for her role in The Piano), a waitress in a sleepy Louisiana town called Bon Temps, who can hear people’s thoughts, although she’d rather not.
When she meets Bill (Stephen Moyer), a vampire who was turned during the Civil War and is now “mainstreaming,” she is instantly smitten when she can’t tune in to his thoughts. One fun fact about these two actors is that they started dating during the first season of the show and have been married for 15 years – so some of that on-screen chemistry must have been real.
Another conceit about the vampires is that they stay whatever they were when they were turned, and the local vamp leader is a 1,000-year-old Scandinavian named Eric (Alexander Skarsgard) who is very vain and likes to have his hair highlighted.
There’s also a 17-year-old girl, Jessica (Deborah Ann Woll), who has just become a vampire and is ecstatic that she is free from her Jesus-freak parents. True Blood has one of the greatest ever opening-credit sequences, set to Jace Everett’s “Bad Things,” and if you enjoy that, you’ll probably like the series.