Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah has long been acclaimed as the definitive documentary about the Holocaust, but although it has been widely screened and won countless awards in the more than 40 years since its release, Lanzmann had to struggle to get it made.
That’s the subject of the documentary All I Had Was Nothingness by Guillaume Ribot, which is showing on Hot VOD, Next TV, and Hot 8, and on Yes VOD and Yes Docu.
It’s an essential companion piece to Shoah, and Ribot uses Lanzmann’s own words from his audio recordings and his journals (which are read by Ribot himself) to chronicle Shoah’s 12-year journey to the screen. He has also found key outtakes from the film, which he includes.
This documentary is a kind of road movie that follows Lanzmann along many different roads in Germany, Poland, Israel, and the US.
“Making Shoah was a long and difficult battle,” Lanzmann said. “I wanted to film, but all I had was nothingness. The subject of Shoah is death itself... On some evenings, it seemed like senseless suffering, and I was ready to give up. But during those 12 years of work, I always forced myself to stare relentlessly into the black sun of the Shoah.”
Lanzmann noted that, “Not one American dollar funded Shoah,” because it focused so relentlessly on death, with no upbeat messages about righteous gentiles or narrow escapes.
“I was a lousy fundraiser,” he admitted.
For those who were moved by Shoah, this documentary about how the classic film came together will be riveting.
The Bear
The Bear, the series available on Disney+ that got people all over the world saying, “Yes, chef!” has released its fifth and final season. It is filled with the disasters and delights that its fans have come to expect.
The Bear tells the story of Carmy Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White, who played the Boss in the movie Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere), a neurotic, withdrawn master chef who has cooked at the best restaurants all over the world, including in Copenhagen and New York.
The first season opens when he returns to Chicago, where his family owns a sandwich shop that was managed by his charismatic brother, Mikey (Jon Bernthal), who struggled with drug addiction and who has just committed suicide in a particularly awful way (not shown).
Carmy takes over the sandwich joint, which is poorly run and on the verge of bankruptcy, and ends up turning it into The Bear, a top-end restaurant.
If you tried to watch the first season and could not get through it, I can understand. The sandwich place is a mess and mirrors Carmy’s dysfunctional family life and the childhood trauma he has tried to deal with by striving for perfection in the kitchen.
But what this means in practice is that, as his backstory unfolds slowly, there are many scenes with multiple characters yelling at each other angrily.
I’ve known many people who quit the show before they could figure out who everyone was and why they were so upset. I was tempted to give up on it myself, but there was a core likeability about Carmy, and I persevered.
I usually loathe it when people tell me, “You won’t like this show at first, but if you stick with the first [fill in the blank] episodes, you will love it.”
In general, the only show I say that about is The Wire, but The Bear is another rare exception. If you stick with it, the second season is sublime, 10 of the most compelling and beautifully acted episodes that have been released in years.
The series continued in its uneven track after that, and the third season was short and a bit flat, with a couple of good episodes but others that were more about the food than the characters. It picked up again in the fourth season, and I was wary about whether it would stick the landing, so to speak, in the fifth, and the good news is that it does.
There will be a few spoilers here, so people who haven’t been watching may want to skip this next part.
Season four ended with Carmy telling the gifted young chef, Sydney (Ayo Edebiri), who is a kindred spirit in her pursuit of culinary excellence, that she will be taking over because he is leaving the restaurant he worked so hard to build.
His brother’s best friend, Richie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), who has always called himself their cousin and who now manages the restaurant’s hospitality service, is similarly shocked, but assures Sydney she can manage without Carmy.
The fifth season picks up the next morning, and the first seven episodes are all set on an especially disaster-packed day and night at The Bear.
A rainstorm brings a flood of almost biblical proportions on a night when the staff learns that the man who doles out Michelin stars is coming for dinner, and a glitch in the reservations system means that three times as many diners are booked for that night than there should be.
In addition, Carmy’s self-destructive decision earlier in the show that the restaurant could never serve the same dish twice, meaning that they must buy all-new ingredients daily, has driven The Bear to the brink of bankruptcy.
Carmy eventually understood the error of his ways, but that couldn’t change the fact that they hardly have any ingredients on hand. And their backer, Carmy’s Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt), just announced that he is pulling the plug – no more money.
The show is all about how the staff comes together to form a kind of family that rises to the challenge.
When the going gets tough, the staff at The Bear gets going, and there are many funny and touching moments and suspense that will have fans on the edge of their seats. There have been enough setbacks so that it’s plausible that The Bear may truly be on its last legs.
After the seven episodes about the catastrophes that befall the restaurant on that one night, there is an extremely satisfying episode after a time jump that raises the possibility that Carmy may stay at The Bear after all.
It also brings back the full cast, including Jamie Lee Curtis, who has given a superb performance as Carmy’s alcoholic, unstable mother throughout the series, for which she won an Emmy, one of the show’s 21 Emmy Awards.
If you have grown up with a mentally ill parent, instead of trying to explain what it was like to new friends and significant others, you can now simply suggest that they watch episode five of season two of The Bear, which is called “Fishes” and stars Curtis.
Some of us will always be grateful to Christopher Storer, who created the series, for this public service.
One cast member who couldn’t come back, sadly, was Rob Reiner, who played Albert Schnurr, a business guru. Reiner was murdered by his son in December, before the fifth season of The Bear was filmed.
Albert was helping Ebraheim (Edwin Lee Gibson, who became one of the series’ best-loved characters), a Somali refugee and war veteran who works at the Original Beef sandwich window, which continues to operate even as The Bear becomes a fine-dining establishment, to create a plan to franchise the successful sandwich joint.
Ebraheim speaks to him on the phone in the fifth season, getting his advice, and answers Albert with the words, “As you wish,” the catchphrase from Reiner’s classic film, The Princess Bride.
Betrayal
Betrayal, currently available on Hot VOD and Yes VOD (and which will be shown later on Hot 3 and Yes Action), is particularly relevant right now, because it looks at a shadowy network of spies for the Iranian government in Britain.
It stars Shaun Evans as an MI5 agent who stumbles into a tip about an Iranian who has some information, and he gets a tip about a terrorist attack.
As he struggles with superiors who think he is too reckless and independent, he also fights to keep his rocky marriage going. The title refers to both espionage and infidelity.
The series must have been in the works before the most recent war with Iran, but much of it feels as if it could have been written yesterday.