The series revolves around McNamara and how he popularized surfing the up-to-100-foot waves in Nazare, Portugal, which, thanks to underground formations in the harbor, has what may be the highest waves in the world.
He accomplished the feat of surfing a 100-footer there in 2013 and attracted a group of surfers from all over the world to this site.
The images of him on these giant waves are scary and beautiful. As you watch, it’s hard not to wonder what goes on inside the head of this man, now in his mid-50s, who still dreams of getting on another huge wave, even after he sustained a debilitating injury while surfing.
If you’ve seen other surfing documentaries, you know that surfers tend to spout positive-thinking platitudes that don’t really account for how driven and competitive they are, but McNamara goes a bit deeper here.
He talks about his childhood, during which his unstable mother dragged him and his brother from cult to cult all over the US and Central America. The boys suffered physical abuse at the hands of some of her violent boyfriends.
While you might think that would drive them to seek out the calmest lives, sometimes people who are raised with violence and instability get addicted to thrills, but in this case they found a positive way to experience them (McNamara’s brother was also a competitive surfer for decades).
In any case, the series was filmed in gorgeous locations, including Hawaii and Alaska (McNamara has also ridden waves from calving glaciers), as well as Nazare, so you can travel vicariously.
THE BIG new Israeli series coming out is Embezzlement, which starts on Yes Action on July 29 at 10 p.m. and on YesVOD and StingTV.
It is the second recent series about the Eti Alon case, in which a clerk at the now-defunct Trade Bank was able to steal over NIS 250 million, mainly to pay off her brother’s gambling debts. The first, on Keshet, was released last year. Embezzlement has a higher-profile cast, with three-time Ophir Award winner Dana Ivgy as Eti, megastar Yehuda Levi (Yossi & Jagger, Very Important Person) as her brother, Ofer, and Hanan Savyon (Maktub, Forgiveness) as her husband. Ivgy gives one of the best performances of her already distinguished career as Alon, a woman who committed crimes – there is no doubt about that – but who was manipulated and emotionally abused to the point that it is hard to condemn her.
I can see why this tragic story has been dramatized twice – it’s incredible that anyone could steal so much for so long, and it makes you wonder what all those bank executives actually do with themselves. No matter how you feel about Alon and her crimes, watching Embezzlement will have an effect on you: It will make you check your bank balance every day, maybe twice a day, just to be sure.
Netflix’s Chernobyl 1986 is slow and soapy, a Russian-language movie that combines a love story with the disaster at the nuclear reactor 35 years ago.
Just before the disaster strikes, a firefighter (Danila Kozlovskiy, who plays Oleg on Vikings and also appeared in the film Dovlatov) meets a hairdresser (Oksana Akinshina, who starred in Lilya 4-Ever and The Bourne Supremacy) with whom he had a romance years before. As they reconnect, the disaster looms and, well, you know it’s not going to go well for a firefighter at Chernobyl.
The leads are attractive, but the movie seems to be designed more for the Russian market than for international Netflix viewers. The multicharacter miniseries Chernobyl from 2019, with Stellan Skarsgård and Jared Harris, told a far more compelling story about this disaster.
Also on Netflix, The Movies That Made Us features two seasons of episodes, each of which focuses on a single movie, from the 1980s and 1990s. The first season spotlights Dirty Dancing, Home Alone, Ghostbusters and Die Hard, while the second looks at Back to the Future, Pretty Woman, Jurassic Park and Forrest Gump. The more you like the movie, obviously, the more you will enjoy the episode.
There are a lot of behind-the-scenes stories about squabbles between the directors and the bean counters at the studios (a fixture of all movies, it seems, unless they are made by Steven Spielberg), casting choices, technical problems and the creativity and collaboration among the cast and crew.
What you won’t find here are interviews with the big stars, who by and large do not participate, or are shown only in brief clips from interviews filmed when the movies were released.
Perhaps the most noteworthy part of the entire series is the section in the Jurassic Park episode that details how some fairly low-level technicians devised the computer animation that worked better than the bulkier models of dinosaurs and changed the film industry irrevocably.
A number of acclaimed new series are coming up in August. Those of you who are missing The Crown will want to try Atlantic Crossing, which starts on August 5 on HOT HBO at 10 p.m. and HOT VOD and NextTV. The series tells the story of Norwegian Crown Princess Märtha’s journey to safety in the US during the Nazi occupation, and her relationship with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which was reportedly very complex.
Martha is played by Sofia Helin, who portrayed Saga on the original series The Bridge so memorably, while FDR is played by Kyle MacLachlan of Twin Peaks.