Maybe someone who had never seen an Indiana Jones movie could enjoy Fountain of Youth, a new Natalie Portman film that’s now streaming on Apple TV+, but the rest of us will just feel nostalgic for the charm and thrills of that action franchise.
Conveniently, the old Indiana Jones movies are all available on Apple TV+, so maybe Fountain of Youth will function like an ad for them, although it’s a rather pricy ad, with a reported budget of about $180 million.
The idea of Portman starring in a movie about finding the mythical fountain of youth is a good one, since she looks about 20 years younger than her real age, which is 43. But everything delicate and interesting about the actress is wasted here, along with the goofy likability of John Krasinski, her co-star.
Krasinski plays Luke, who flits around the world finding treasures and selling them, while Portman is his sister Charlotte, who lives in England where she works in a museum and is in the midst of an acrimonious divorce. Luke tries to convince her to join him on an adventure to find the titular fountain so that a dying tycoon (Domhnall Gleeson) can live long and prosper. Her brother reminds her that their late, Indiana Jones-like dad taught them that “the journey is more important than the prize.”
Unfortunately, in this derivative muddle directed by Guy Ritchie, known for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and other British crime films (and who was married to Madonna for a few years), neither the journey nor the prize are important.
It starts out with Krasinski pursued by thugs through Bangkok in one of those chases through a market that we’ve seen dozens of times before, and there are sequences in London, Vienna, and Cairo. It’s similar to Netflix movies starring Gal Gadot like Heart of Stone and Red Notice, where there is a lot of action and some snark, and none of it makes much of an impression.
It’s hard to understand what drew Oscar-winning, Jerusalem-born Portman to the project – except for the paycheck, obviously. There must be people who enjoy movies like this, because they keep making them, but if only the scripts were treated with the same care as the special effects.
Fireflies – Next TV, Hot VOD, Hot 3, Paramount+
The new Hot original series Fireflies (in Hebrew, it’s called Gachliliot) will premiere on Next TV and Hot VOD on June 3, and will begin running on Hot 3 on June 5 at 10 p.m.
It’s been a while since there has been an Israeli series that flirts with supernatural phenomena – the last I can think of is The Malevolent Bride –and while I’m not yet allowed to write a full review of this eight-episode series, I’m enjoying it much more than I would have imagined, given that I tend not to like anything paranormal. The supernatural stuff here is really secondary to the atmospheric story about people struggling to make a good life in a neglected town.
Fireflies has a lot going for it, mainly its all-star cast, headed by multiple Ophir Award-winner Dana Ivgy (Zero Motivation, The Other Widow) and pop star Ninet Tayeb, as well as its atmosphere of depression and dread, something that many of us can relate to right now.
Ivgy plays Dikla, a pregnant policewoman (who brought to mind Frances McDormand as the pregnant cop heroine of the Coen brothers’ Fargo), who is called into action after a flood strikes the Dead Sea community where she works. The floods have dislodged buried land mines and left them all over the area, so she needs to keep the crowds away. Tayeb plays Mimi, a bomb disposal expert, who is Dikla’s childhood frenemy.
As if the dislodged mines didn’t create enough drama, strange things start happening in the area. As Dikla investigates, she finds herself spending time with Mimi, which dredges up all kinds of trauma and secrets. Ivgy is one of Israel’s leading actresses, and she always comes across as a real person. I have a neighbor who reminds me of her, and you probably do, too.
Tayeb, who was in the series When Heroes Fly and Zaguri, gave a great performance in a 2009 movie that not enough people saw – The Assassin Next Door, in which she played an abused wife who helped a prostitute fleeing her pimp – and I’m happy to see her back in a demanding role.
The rest of the cast is also very good, with Amir Khoury (Image of Victory) and Lia Elalouf (who won an Ophir Best Actress Award for her movie debut in Come Closer) in key roles. The series was created by Shahar Magen (Sirens) and Tawfik Abu Wael (Our Boys), with Abu Wael directing it.
The whole thing plays much like a season of True Detective, especially the last one with Jodie Foster, and I’m looking forward to the next episode. It will air later this year on Paramount+ around the world, and it was created by Hot with Ananey Studios Paramount.
Save the Date – Netflix
When I saw that the 2024 Keshet rom-com series Save the Date was now available on Netflix in Israel, I tuned in just to check that it has English subtitles, which it does. And then, without planning to, I found myself starting to watch it again. It’s one of those rom-coms filled with suspense about which guy the heroine will end up with, and even though I knew, I re-watched an episode. There’s really no higher praise.
It plays like a cross between the Jennifer Lopez movie The Wedding Planner and Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, as it tells the story of Hadas “Dassy” Toledano (Adi Havshush, one of Israel’s most appealing actresses), a wedding planner waiting for her guy (Tamir Bar), an arrogant performance artist, to pop the question.
After a divine intervention by her grandmothers, suddenly it’s raining men in her direction. Her boyfriend is suddenly dying to commit, a European prince (Rony Herman) courts her, and she reconnects with both her high-school best friend (Tomer Capone), now a hi-tech entrepreneur about to marry her teen nemesis (Shira Naor), and her high-school crush, Hen (Oshri Cohen), who has gone back to nature, keeps horses, and wears sexy lumberjack shirts. Do you need to know more?
There isn’t an English remake of this series yet, and although I’m sure there will be, now that you can see it with English titles, why wait?
Freud. Outsider – Kan 11
Yair Qedar’s brilliant, entertaining Freud documentary, Freud. Outsider, will be shown on Kan 11 on June 7 after the news. The film uses dreamlike animations, combined with excerpts from the famous psychoanalyst’s letters, rare film clips, and interviews with experts to bring to life this genius’s ideas, which have revolutionized the daily lives of people all around the world for over a century.
