• culture

• TV

• Dance TV

A Journey of Survival, Cross-Border Love and Superhero Clichés: A Review of New Series

A gang trying to survive in a world of a new and unknown plague, an epic tale of love and status in the young Indian state, and superheroes trying to stop horrors that threaten to excite humanity.

This is what we thought of "To The Lake", "Matching" and "Halstrom"

Tags

• Rescue (To the Lake)

• A Suitable Boy

• Halstrom

• Netflix

• bbc

• Hollow

• Marvel

• TV review

Ido Yeshayahu and Ilan Kaprov

Friday, October 23, 2020, 12:00 p.m.

• Share on Facebook

• Share on WhatsApp

• Share on general

• Share on general

• Share on Twitter

• Share on Email

0 comments

• A look at the digitization project of the Jerusalem Cinematheque Box ...

• Netflix's "Grand Army" series

• Shlomi Shabbat

• Thousands demonstrate against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and throughout ...

• Queen Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy

• My octopus teacher

• Mirit Harari farewell video

• Michael Kovner Ein Harod Museum

• The Hebron mission

• Danny Kushmero meets a whale - screenshot

• A delicate song

Trailer for the series "A Suitable Boy" (BBC, Netflix)

Rescue (To the Lake)

The Russian science-fiction series, which rose to acclaim and awards in her homeland in 2019 but only recently reached Netflix, joins a growing list of series created before the Corona but aired at just the right time to reflect it.

"Rescue" (a Hebrew name that is also different from the Russian original, "the eruption", and also from the English name - "to the lake") describes a story about a deadly plague that threatens to destroy humanity, and a small group manages to escape it.

The brutal struggle for survival forces them to risk their lives, everything that has happened to them - and their humanity.

As required by this synopsis, this is a familiar story on the cradle of the apocalypse, like a series of zombies only without the zombies.

The only difference is that this time it just takes place in Russia and speaks its language.

To the credit of "Rescue" it will be said that she is not really ashamed of the genre.

She looks and is superbly photographed, the game is good most of the time, and even though she likes to create idle suspense through editing manipulations (oh no, the bad guys are approaching them! Oh no, they are somewhere else at all).

Mostly, the way she treats it is wise: an intimate preoccupation with characters who have to deal with the new and dangerous situation - both for fear of infection and because a person becomes a wolf - and less preoccupation with the larger story.

More on Walla!

NEWS

You’ve already seen series like “Queen Gambit,” but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth watching

To the full article

Could be better.

"Rescue" (Photo: PR)

We do not really know about the great consequences of the plague, the actions of the government and the military, and certainly not what is happening outside Russia's borders.

Only bit by bit we get this information as the episodes progress, but for the most part, the story is gathered into the ten characters who make their way to the place of safety - the lake.

Their and ours lack of knowledge of what is really going on makes the events that come their way arbitrary and unpredictable, giving them real horror, which is especially evident in the horrific exploits of soldiers.

To be honest, it sometimes gets to the extreme that makes "Rescue" look like a Holocaust movie, and one of the episodes that deals with the villagers responding to war looks like a cool partisan movie.

Precisely this side story, which is summed up in only one episode, illustrates how bad a "rescue" can be.

Although the series is run with restraint and relative sensitivity, the soap lies in it from the beginning: the protagonist sets out on a journey with his ex-wife and current wife, whose affair began when he was still married, and this tension produces a rather tedious triangle.

While he is the extreme marker of the relationships in the series, and at no point does he really cross the line into a soap opera, he nonetheless represents a bigger problem of "rescue": a tendency to clichés.

As a series that puts the characters at the center, and despite some beautiful moments they yield, they just aren’t interesting enough to hold the “rescue” throughout the eight episodes.

Maybe you can just ask that the second season, which is scheduled to air in Russia in the spring of 2021, return to the partisans?

More on Walla!

NEWS

Wasted youth: "Grand Army" tries to do something unique and not really successful

To the full article

A Suitable Boy

Today (Friday) Netflix airs the new BBC series directed by Mira Nair ("Salam Bombay", "Monsoon Wedding") and a screenplay by Andrew Davis ("The Original House of Cards", "The Pottery House"), based on the huge book " A proper matchmaking "by Vikram Seth from 1993, published in Israel by Kinneret Zmora Bitan.

Throughout its six episodes, the series follows two and a half years in the lives of four families in India shortly after it gained its independence.

The families are linked by a friendship and marriage, against the backdrop of the turbulent early 1950s after liberation from the yoke of British rule.

At the center of the story is the young latte (Tanya Manictale), whose mother is looking for a "suitable match" for her, while she struggles between three suitors, each of whom promises a different kind of love and connection and represents a different social and economic status.

The great advantage of "proper matchmaking" is that it opens an interesting historical and cultural window to the India of yesteryear, for Western eyes.

Not exactly something you come across every day.

The costumes, the traditions, the music, the religious tension and so on: the anthropological experience alone is supposed to magnetize us to the series.

It's just that this novelty exhausts itself by the middle of the first episode, fails to cover up the banality of the story and the shortcomings of the series.

Although, and perhaps because, it follows the experiences of affluent families, the sets do not look as lush as they should be, and everything is painted in an artificial hue.

More on Walla!

NEWS

This is not a particularly good series, but I had to know if its protagonists would lie

To the full article

Very conquering but it's not enough.

Tanya Manictale, "Appropriate Matching" (Photo: Sufria Kantak)

Above all, "proper matchmaking" suffers from a horribly flawed rhythm that takes out any wind that might be in its sails.

Manictalee occupies very slowly in the role of latte, but she also fails to save the general slackness.

The conduct is as heavy and slow as an elephant, the dialogues so rigid, full of pauses and air that it is hard not to wish that the editor would cut them and the conversations would sound like something happening in reality and not on a theater stage.

“Appropriate Matchmaking” is a marvelous illustration of how heavenly can be a story of impossible loves, corrupt politicians, fat-headed rulers, and police firing on protesters on the street for their beliefs.

This too is an impressive achievement, if you will.

More on Walla!

NEWS

Humanity begins anew, flies to Mars and returns to Earth: a review of new series

To the full article

Helstrom

In one of the first scenes of "Halstrom," one of its two protagonists, Damon Hellstrom (Tom Austen, "The Burgess," "The Royals"), sets out to deal with a case in which the son of an unfortunate couple acts as if he is possessed.

After Halstrom exposes him as just a Kaka child, he delivers a speech on sticks and formulas (Tropes) that have made the practice of exorcism disgusting and clichéd, because of the obsessive television preoccupation with it.

Seemingly this is the point where "Halstrom" is the most Marvel one could ask for: aware of itself, the genre and expectations of it, and winking at viewers with confidence that it will not disappoint.

The problem is that from that moment on she becomes exactly the cliché she is proud of.

It is worth noting that "Halstrom" (based on a comic book of the same name, and currently not available in Israel) is one of the last dowries left behind by Jeff Loeb, the rather failed TV director of Marvel, who was fired after Kevin Paige took responsibility for the screen last year. The little one.

This detail is important because "Halstrom" looks and feels like falls of the kind of "Iron Fist", "Inhuman" and others for which Loeb was responsible.

On the face of it, it was not meant to be, mostly based on the intriguing source material: the story of an estranged brother and sister, Damon and Anna Halstrom (Sydney Lemon), the descendants of a cruel serial killer, who use their special powers to stop horrors threatening humanity.

More on Walla!

NEWS

On the throne: This is how Netflix conquered Hollywood and became unchallenged control

To the full article

Without emotion or empathy.

"Halstrom" (Photo: Hollow)

The elements on which "Halstrom" is built are a combination of superpower, family story and horror drama.

The family story is amplified by the fact that the mother of the two, Victoria (Elizabeth Marvel, "The House of Cards"), is also linked to the family tragedy of death, madness and the supernatural.

But Halstrom systematically manages to dismantle each of these components from its strengths.

The family drama is built on poor acting abilities of the sibling duo, poor writing that repeats things we already knew, and exhausting passive-aggressive conduct that becomes oppressive as the series progresses.

Nothing in this family cell manages to evoke emotion or empathy, and the series seems almost determined to take care of that.

Even in the superpower segment, the series manages to turn something that could have been interesting into technical and ordinary.

The brothers wave their hands, move their heads, things fly, crash and explode.

"Halstrom" does not invest even a little of its time to track how they received their power, the price that comes from it or the full set of capabilities (which in each episode includes additional details that for some reason were not used in previous episodes).

Finally, the horror drama that is supposed to be the original part here, is boring and smeared.

Not only is she not scary, at times she seems to have forgotten at all that she should be.

The slow pace, the unnecessary scenes, the appallingly long episodes and the puzzling side characters (like a wide-eyed nun whose removal from the series would not change anything from the storyline) overthrow any buds of suspense or mystery.

On the face of it, Marvel has already done the right thing in saying goodbye to Loeb.

It's not clear why she did not do the same with this striped piece.

Nonetheless, it hurts to have her stuck in the refreshing hollow, which will have to bear this stain in her library.

More on Walla!

NEWS

"Utopia": This is how you will take a masterpiece and make it banal and ordinary

To the full article

• Share on Facebook

• Share on WhatsApp

• Share on general

• Share on general

• Share on Twitter

• Share on Email

0 comments