Diane Keaton, who just passed away, was a delightful actress who took her work seriously, but not herself. She was not afraid to play broad comedy and look ditzy or silly, and she also portrayed characters who were cold, WASPy, and uptight. However she was cast, she shined in each role, and she was a true movie star: When she was on screen, you didn’t look at anyone else. Her breakout role was as Michael Corleone’s girlfriend and later wife in The Godfather and its sequels.
Around that time, she began to cut loose in Woody Allen’s comedies. When she starred in his movie Annie Hall, a semi-autobiographical story based on their real-life opposites-attract romance, she won a Best Actress Oscar for one of the most endearing performances in movie history.
She continued to work with Allen and also made a name for herself as a dramatic actress in such films as Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Reds. In later years, she made many popular comedies about older women enjoying their third act.
If you’re looking to revisit her work, the bulk of her movies that can be streamed in Israel are on Apple TV+. The essential Keaton movie is Annie Hall, which holds up remarkably well even though it’s almost 50 years old. Her chemistry with Allen was also front and center in their first movie together, Play It Again, Sam, in which he played an insecure guy whose fantasy mentor is Humphrey Bogart, and who falls in love with his friend’s neglected wife, played by Keaton. Apple TV+ offers several other Allen-Keaton movies, including Love and Death, in which they played lovers in a parody of Russian novels, Manhattan, and Manhattan Murder Mystery.
Also on Apple, you can see two later comedies in which Keaton also had real chemistry with her costars: Baby Boom, in which she played a workaholic executive who moves to Vermont after she adopts a baby and falls for the local veterinarian, played by Sam Shepard, and Something’s Gotta Give, in which she portrays a playwright caught in a love triangle with a younger doctor (Keanu Reeves) and an irascible man her own age played by Jack Nicholson.
Netflix features the full Godfather trilogy, and Keaton appears in all three parts. Disney+ offers the two Father of the Bride movies, and The Family Stone, in which she was more straitlaced. Perhaps some of the channels available in Israel will show more of Keaton’s films soon to pay tribute. In a rare move, two of her movies, Annie Hall and Something’s Gotta Give, are being re-released in theaters in the AMC chain in the US.
Nelly Tagar's 'Zero Motivation' just became available on Netflix
NELLY TAGAR, who stars in the Israeli classic comedy Zero Motivation, which just became available on Netflix, has a lot of Diane Keaton’s flair for playing ditzy characters and getting the audience to laugh with them, not at them. In this 2014 comedy by Talya Lavie, she plays Dafi, a soldier who is miserable at her desk job in a Negev outpost, making coffee for male officers and doing meaningless paperwork. Dafi enlists her best friend, Zohar (Dana Ivgy), to help her in her quest to get transferred to IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv, which seems to her like heaven on earth. The two get bored and disobey their commanding officer (Shani Klein), Zohar has a misadventure with a male soldier on their base, whom she mistakenly thinks is a nice guy, and Dafi continues on her epic quest for a transfer.
That’s the basic plot, but Zero Motivation is a movie that is so much more than the sum of its parts, and Lavie made a comic masterpiece out of this story. The movie won the Best Narrative Feature Award at the Tribeca Festival and also took home quite a few Ophir Awards. It’s rare for a first-time director, as Lavie was then, to make such a sure-footed debut, and now you can watch the film with English subtitles.
THEY SAY truth is stranger than fiction, and it’s often much more interesting, which is proven once again by the series Families Project, the second season of which is currently running on KAN 11 and Kan Box and available at kan.org.il
It’s inspired by 7 Up, the iconic British documentary series that chronicles the lives of children from age seven to adulthood, revisiting them every seven years. The Israeli series doesn’t stick exactly to that format but it captures the spirit of the British series as it looks at a diverse group of 10 Israeli families, including haredim (ultra-Orthodox), Arab-Israelis, Orthodox Jews living on a West Bank outpost, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, kibbutzniks from the North, Bedouin living in unlicensed housing, an upper-middle class family from Kfar Saba, second-generation Moroccan immigrants and Iranians from development towns, and the LGBT family of the series’ creator, David Deri-Barkai, who lives in Tel Aviv.
This series was filmed during very dramatic times. The first season was shot during the COVID pandemic, and this season was made during the turbulent times of the war. Many aspects of the war are explored, particularly its influence on the children, from their confusion and fear on October 7 and its immediate aftermath, to their difficulty getting used to having fathers away for months of reserve duty, to their worries over the hostages. The families face the personal dramas that are common in all families, but also cope with the crisis of war, as well as religious and social issues, such as the Bedouin family, which dreads its house being dismantled.
But as with the 7 Up series, what is most fascinating is the children, who were six in 2020, when the first season was filmed, and are now around 11. Seeing how they express themselves so clearly and uninhibitedly at six and watching their gradual, tentative transition toward maturity is like looking at one of those stop-motion photos of a flower blooming, and just as beautiful.
Like its British counterpart, this series is compulsively watchable and paints a compelling portrait of Israeli society, with all its pressures, burdens, and conflicts, but also with its diversity and energy. Most of all, it is a portrait of a charming group of very bright children. Now that I’ve watched it all, I’m looking forward anxiously to seeing them in their teenage years when the show returns for a third season.
IF YOU’RE in the mood for a legal drama, Yes is offering a new version of the John Grisham thriller The Rainmaker, which will start streaming on Yes VOD on October 18. It’s competently made, with newcomer Milo Callaghan as an idealistic law-school grad who gets fired on his first day at a high-powered but ethically challenged firm and ends up facing them in court when he starts working for legal aid.
The fancy firm is run by a ruthless attorney played by John Slattery, who was Roger on Mad Men. But the new Rainmaker is bland, more reminiscent of Suits than the 1997 movie adaptation, which was a straightforward, gripping drama that was directed by Francis Ford Coppola when he needed to pay some bills, and which starred Matt Damon, Danny DeVito, Jon Voight, and Claire Danes.