RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/review-the-way-i-see-it-obama-dream-worshipful-documentaries/?utm_source=recirc-

Two new worshipful documentaries tie in to #44’s propagandizing memoir.

‘How can we miss you when you won’t go away?” political podcaster Yvette Carnell joked two years ago when Barack Obama began his comeback tour by making sideline pronouncements about the state of the nation after his brief retirement. Now the comeback is official, with two new Kool-Aid-drinker Obama hagiographies to prove it.

Obama Dream and The Way I See It are released in theaters and on streaming like promotional tie-ins to accompany the publication of Obama’s latest literary memoir, The Promised Land. Both films provide audiovisual aid to the 800-plus-page book. Reliance on pictorial persuasion in these docs brings to mind how friendly the media coverage of Obama has always been, in contrast to the media hostility aimed at George W. Bush and Donald Trump. It’s the B.O. and A.O. media — journalism Before Obama and After Obama.

Almost four years since the Obama administration walked from the White House to its Kalorama bunker near the White House, these documentaries remind us of what that media thrall from 2008 to 2016 was like. (Full disclosure: I had to devote a large section of my book Make Spielberg Great Again to Obama’s debilitating artistic influence.)

Obama Dream was made by Italian filmmaker Francesco Pavarati, who followed the 2008 campaign stops, traveling 20,000 miles from Denver through 14 states to Election Night, giving the perspective of an infatuated outsider. Pavarati is astounded by the candidate and aghast at America itself. He offers fever-dream imagery of a nation as bewitched and enraptured as he was and apparently still is.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/11/british_royalty_and_why_you_shouldnt_trust_tv.html

At a moment when Britain is disquieted by scandal about Prince Andrew, disgraced for his friendship with the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein; the ongoing drama of Megxit, the withdrawal of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle from royal duties; and the rift between the two royal brothers, William and Harry, the British TV soap opera, ten episodes of The Crown, season 4, has appeared to provide alleged entertainment of the doings of the British Royal Family.

Because it is lavishly produced, well written, carefully acted, and cleverly invented, it is easy to accept The Crown as an accurate representation of a twenty-year period in British history.  However, no one should be confused.  It is not a documentary of the life and behavior of Queen Elizabeth II, members of the Royal Family and associates, in the stately homes of Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Balmoral, and the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.  Rather, it is a psychodrama written with what can generously be termed artistic license about the actions and motivations of the leading figures.

Some of the invented incidents in The Crown can be noted.  Discussions concerning Lord Mountbatten and Prince Charles, or the supposed political dialogue between Queen Elizabeth II and Michael Fagan, who infiltrated Buckingham Palace and spoke to the queen in her bedroom, or the tension with Margaret Thatcher because of personal concerns about the safety of her son and public concerns over the Falklands war, are not accurate representations of history.  In particular, all of the remarks of Elizabeth, who bestrides the series as a colossus, are invented.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/11/hillbilly-elegy-ron-howards-inverted-mayberry/

Americana for our age: Booze, opioids, and ignorance. But Glenn Close, at least, sails past the white-trash clichés.

Amy Adams stars in Hillbilly Elegy (Lacey Terrell/Netflix) Americana for our age: Booze, opioids, and ignorance. But Glenn Close, at least, sails past the white-trash clichés.

Hollywood knows two registers when it comes to the white working class (WWC): sentimentalizing and condescending. WWCs are either cute, neighborly, and folksy, or they constitute a tawdry, alien life form. There are 130 million WWCs in our country, and yet nobody in Hollywood has the slightest grasp of them. With the plucky rural folk, it’s always about hearts overflowing with kindness or sinks overflowing with dirty dishes. Their veins surge with either the American dream or opioids.

Ron Howard’s career got rolling in one WWC cliché — Mayberry, on The Andy Griffith Show — and now he’s traveled a great distance to indulge another, the Middletown, Ohio, recalled so memorably and with such wounded pride by J. D. Vance in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy.

Howard’s movie adaptation for Netflix recounts the events of Vance’s book but lacks the feel, the personality. So much of its power was in its authorial voice, as was the case with Frank McCourt’s 1996 memoir Angela’s Ashes, which was poorly adapted by Alan Parker in a 1999 film. Hillbilly Elegy the movie has much in common with Parker’s film: It’s an Appalachian Angela’s Ashes. If Vance’s book was a page-turner with a message, Howard’s film is just one damn thing after another: fights, screaming matches, drug sprees, shoplifting episodes, police interactions. It gets to be unintentionally comic at times.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/hillbilly_elegy_effectively_addresses_the_crisis_of_modernity_as_one_of_a_deficit_of_values.html

The movie Hillbilly Elegy is an outstanding portrayal of what life is like for many in the white working class.

I was a little apprehensive since I read the book by J.D. Vance and really enjoyed it, but all of the three reviews I read for the movie based on the book, were negative.

And one thing they tended to say was that the movie is a cartoonish portrayal of what many call “white trash” and the performances of Amy Adams and Glenn Close weren’t worthy of the topic.

But after seeing it, I would strongly disagree. I would go so far as to say that both deserve Academy Awards for such unbelievably great performances. Although Adams got top billing as J.D. Vance’s mother Bev, Glenn Close may have stolen the show with her portrayal of J.D. Vance’s grandmother whom he calls “Mamaw.”

J.D. Vance himself appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show Monday night, where they briefly discussed the movie and book based on his life towards the end of the interview.

Tucker asked him why the reviews have been so negative when Vance put his finger right on answer when he said it was, and I’m paraphrasing, the bigotry of the elitist journalist class that don’t like and would prefer not to see any movies about the struggles of the white working class in America, especially as it relates to those on the lower end who are living on the razor’s edge of surviving and falling into poverty. The only movies they prefer are those such as The Blind Side and others tell that tell the ‘heart-warming’ stories of how people of color who are living in poverty but end up succeeding in life out of the charity of white Americans that are sure to make viewers warm and fuzzy all over as they walk out of the theaters. Carlson ended the discussion with a comment about how elitists just hope middle- and lower-class whites just die and go away, which is exactly what’s been happening due to globalism.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/11/obamagate-movie-mark-tapson/

As the Democrat Party moves from one duplicitous, often illegal anti-Trump operation to another without pause (such as presidential impeachment and massive, nationwide voter fraud), their earlier scandals – even recent ones – get pushed into the background of our memory. As an example: the Deep State sabotage of the 2016 Trump campaign and presidency known as “ObamaGate,” which President Trump described as “the biggest political crime in American history, by far.” Charles Lipson at Real Clear Politics wrote that ObamaGate’s abuses of power “represent some of the gravest violations of constitutional norms and legal protections in American history… The entrenched elites behind these scandals are the Swamp at its most sulfurous. They spied illegally on Americans and used powerful tools of government to damage the party-out-of-power, its outsider candidate, and then his new presidency.”

This would be great fodder for a gripping Hollywood drama – except that Hollywood doesn’t dramatize Democrat abuses of power. So it fell to conservative filmmakers, award-winning journalists, and bestselling authors Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer to capture the essence of the scandal on film for posterity.

Co-produced by the Unreported Story Society and Tom Fitton’s Judicial Watch, ObamaGate: The Movie, available to watch for free here on YouTube, exposes the Deep State plot to subvert the Trump candidacy and presidency, and lays bare the lies behind the Russian collusion hoax relentlessly perpetuated by the Democrats and their abettors in the mainstream news media. Filmed in Los Angeles on the Comedy Central stage at the Hudson Theater, it stars openly-conservative actor Dean Cain, best-known as TV’s Superman, and Kristy Swanson, formerly TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as “FBI lovebird” agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. It also features familiar face John James from the Dynasty TV series as Obama administration FBI Director James Comey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/mbc-tv-drama-series-umm-haroun-rocking-arab-world-joseph-puder/

For over a century, ever since the Zionist project began, Jews have been vilified in the Arab press as usurpers of Palestine. There were also the religious aspects in the condemnation of Jews as evildoers and enemies of the prophet Mohammad. Even after the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the Egyptian media viciously portrayed Jews using such old medieval calumnies as accusations that Jews kill children to use their blood on Passover matzos. Israel’s peace with Jordan in 1994 did not do much to improve how the Jordanian people saw Israel and Jews. In short, the governments of both Egypt and Jordan failed to prepare their people for peaceful people to people relationships.

The recent Abrahamic peace treaties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain signed in the White House, with the President Donald Trump serving as the facilitator, has brought on a refreshing air of amity and positivity. It is a more real peace that is not just between governments, but rather has the people on sides involved, as well as in business relations, and two-way tourism. The Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC), an Emirati-Saudi media conglomerate based in Dubai has presented a drama series called “Umm Haroun,” aired during month of the Ramadan fast, a major TV audience occasion, especially with the coronavirus keeping many people at home, thus increasing the watching audience. The series explores the Jewish roots in the Gulf, and the historic ties Jewish people have to the Arab Gulf region.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/what-killed-michael-brown-mark-tapson/

In the wake of the violent worldwide protests that followed the death in police custody of black Minneapolis resident George Floyd, it is easy to forget that what created the conditions for all that racial chaos was the 2014 shooting of black Michael Brown by white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri. Yes, the Black Lives Matter movement began before that, after George Zimmerman’s acquittal for the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. But BLM didn’t pick up steam and acquire national recognition until after Brown. And Zimmerman wasn’t a cop; it was Michael Brown’s death that really galvanized what author Heather Mac Donald called “the war on cops” and created the mythic slogan, “Hands up, don’t shoot,” which the leftist news media promoted in spite of an absence of evidence or witnesses that Brown ever said it.

The brilliant scholar Shelby Steele has now revisited that complex tragedy in a new documentary called What Killed Michael Brown?, written and narrated by Steele, and beautifully directed and filmed by his award-winning filmmaker son Eli. Steele père, you will remember, is the black conservative author of The Content of Our Character and White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. His film seeks to answer what Steele calls “a daring question, one that a group like Black Lives Matter would forbid: is Michael Brown in any way responsible for his own death?”

What Killed Michael Brown? is grounded by Steele’s calm, thoughtful presence and his almost poetic narration, delivered in a measured, mellifluent voice and backed by a moody, jazz trumpet soundtrack. The film features him strolling down the streets of Ferguson, in his childhood home in Chicago, and in neighborhoods of the black underclass in both cities as he muses about the nature of race, power, and character in America. This is woven in with footage of riots and press conferences, and interviews with white Ferguson residents, local black leaders, and even race hustler Al Sharpton, whom Steele depicts as a self-aggrandizing agitator exploiting black anger.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-cancels-shelby-steele-11602715834?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

As a documentary, “What Killed Michael Brown?” has everything going for it. Its subject is timely, about the pre-George Floyd killing of Michael Brown by a police officer that set off riots in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

It’s written and narrated by Shelby Steele, the prominent African-American scholar at the Hoover Institution, and directed by his filmmaker son, Eli Steele. Its subject—race relations—is a major fault line in this year’s presidential election, one reason the Steeles scheduled their film for release on Oct. 16. Our columnist Jason Rileywrote about the film on Wednesday.

One problem: “What Killed Michael Brown?” doesn’t fit the dominant narrative of white police officers killing young black men because of systemic racism. As a result, says the younger Mr. Steele, Amazon rejected it for its streaming service. “We were canceled, plain and simple.”

In an email, Amazon informed the Steeles that their film is “not eligible for publishing” because it “doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations.” Amazon went on to say it “will not be accepting resubmission of this title and this decision may not be appealed.”

On their website—whatkilledmichaelbrown.com—the Steeles offer other options for people looking to watch their documentary. But it’s sadly telling about elite political conformity that an intelligent film that gives voice to a variety of people, almost all black, who would otherwise not be heard is somehow deemed unfit for polite company. As Eli Steele puts it, “When Amazon rejected us they also silenced these voices and that is the great sin of a company that professes to be diverse and inclusive.”