RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/movie-review-les-miserables-superb-french-crime-drama/

An African-French first-time director has made a superb police drama.

I f I favorably compare a movie to Fort Apache, The Bronx, you ought to pay attention, because I don’t do it very often. That 1981 Paul Newman drama was a chaotic swirl of wrongdoing in and around a besieged Bronx police precinct that made earlier police dramas look like Disney movies. A first-time filmmaker named Ladj Ly — born in Mali, raised in Paris — has devised a devastating successor set among the graffiti-scarred housing projects in Montfermeil, outside Paris. Audaciously, ambitiously, and a bit waspishly, Ly has entitled his film Les Misérables: A scene from Victor Hugo’s novel is set there, and a school in town is named for Hugo. In its narrative power, in its appreciation of detail, and in its moral complexity, Les Misérables is clearly superior to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, to which it bears a resemblance. Yet it’d be unfair to Ly to characterize the film as simply a serious dramatization of social issues; it’s also fast-paced entertainment, with a plot that has so many crazy twists it reminded me of the 2017 Queens odyssey Good Time, one of the finest crime dramas of recent years.

French-language cinema these days has become clouded with miserabilism (the films of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in particular, scintillatingly evoke the experience of watching fungus grow). Despite its title, Les Misérables isn’t like that; it’s a punchy and exciting day-on-the-beat story of a newbie cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who joins two other plainclothes officers as they drive around the projects, known as “Les Bosquets,” which are filled with African immigrants and their children, many of them Muslim. As Stéphane rides in the back of an unmarked car, the driver is Gwada (Djebril Zonga), a black man who we will learn is himself a Muslim and a son of at least one African immigrant. In the passenger seat is Chris (Alexis Manenti), one of those seen-it-all white cops, who takes a dim view of humanity in general and relentlessly goads his new partner Stéphane in a tone that’s meant to be jokey but is really just nasty.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/05/golden-globes-2020-ricky-gervais-hits-hollywood-stars-exactly-where-it-hurts/

How Hollywood sees itself: dedicated craftsmen, important artists, world thought leaders. How Ricky Gervais (and everyone else) sees them: criminals, perverts and dopes — a gang of pretentious jerkwads who dropped out of high school when people noticed they were pretty, then mistakenly started to think their insights on world affairs matter. Hired to host the Golden Globes for the fifth and last time, Gervais saw it as his duty to tell Hollywood to eff off, and that’s exactly what he did. All those comics who think they’re “bold,” they “bite the hand that feeds them,” they “speak truth to power” — this is how it’s done.

“Let’s have a laugh — at your expense,” Ricky the G warned the roomful of celebrities, machers and blowhards in the only awards show that’s worth watching anymore because it’s the only one that would think of hiring someone like Gervais to host it. Thank you, thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and yes, you have my permission to print this column in the Bulgarian scandal sheets and Azerbaijani websites you work for.

Gervais (slugging what looked like a pint of beer but probably wasn’t) told the swells that if the Academy Awards could fire Kevin Hart for having made offensive tweets in the past, the Globes should have taken the hint. “Hello?’ Gervais said. ”Lucky for me the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English.” He mentioned arriving in a limo and said, “Felicity Huffman made the license plate.” Ouch. Half the people in that room worked with Felicity Huffman and probably a lot more than half pulled strings to get their kids into college. Gervais was as welcome as a guy who breaks wind in an elevator. Tom Hanks looked like he’d just had a bowl of arsenic bisque. He looked almost as bad as I did when I watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/eastwoods_jewel.html

Not many things get better with age. Clint Eastwood might be the exception.

At age 89, Eastwood still manages to redeem a film industry that usually panders to liberal tropes or adolescent morons. His latest offering is a biopic about Richard Jewell and the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Albeit 25 years in the making, Richard Jewell, in 2020, is a pitch perfect and timely film treatment of dirty cops and fake news in America. Jewell, once a security guard at the ’96 Olympics, discovered a pipe bomb, alerted authorities, and was subsequently falsely implicated with incendiary headlines and televised slander by the FBI and the press for a crime he did not commit.A dirty cop, probably an FBI agent, leaked Jewell’s name as “a person of interest” to an Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter, Kathy Scruggs.

That leak, and the media blitz that followed, tortured Jewell and his mother for nearly a decade. The real bomber, Eric Rudolph, was eventually caught, but only after two more bombings.

Rudolph was convicted and jailed eight years hence with little press fanfare by the FBI or media.

The Eastwood film, coming as it does midst the fake news campaign against Donald Trump, serves to remind us that corruption at the FBI and in the media are still with us.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

One of the main handicaps in watching the latest incarnation of this classic novel is the difficulty in recognizing that any of these “girls” is meant to be truly young. Amy, the youngest sister, looks as developed and fully grown as Beth, Jo and Meg. Because of this, the audience has no way of contextualizing her behavior as that of the little girl who is frequently excluded from some activities because of her tender age. It’s impossible to understand her unforgivable and un-fixable act without recognizing that it’s driven by the uncontrollable impulse of a child, not yet a teenager. Serendipitously, the viewer has a chance to see what I mean by watching the 1994 version of Little Women which will be on Showtime Showcase at 7 pm tonite – Friday, Jan 3rd. Record it.

I saw this before I went to see Greta Gerwig’s version and cannot recommend the former highly enough. It’s a spirited version in which you see the girls put on plays written by Jo and costumed by her – a reminder of how young people entertained themselves before their heads were buried in phones and virtual everything. That cast is brilliant – Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Trini Alvarado as the older March sisters and a young, adorable Kirsten Dunst as Amy. In Gerwig’s version, the role of Laurie (Theodore Laurence) is played by Timothee Chalamet, an effete actor who looks younger than the girls and as gay as he was in Call Me By My Name. By contrast, in the 1994 rendition, his role is played by a handsome and very masculine Christian Bale with another important male part given to Gabriel Byrne The private dance that is done by Jo and Laurie is a romantic connection in the earlier film whereas in the update, Saiorse Ronan and Timothee merely let loose without any emotional imprint on the audience.

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/01/netflix-releases-documentary-series-on-murder-of-argentine-amia-bombing-prosecutor-alberto-nisman/

Netflix 6 part series to be released 202: https://www.netflix.com/title/80197991  

Five years after the murder Alberto Nisman — the Argentine federal prosecutor who was investigating the worst terror outrage in the history of Latin America — streaming giant Netflix unveiled its new documentary series “The Prosecutor, the President and the Spy” in its latest offerings for 2020.

Nisman spent more than a decade probing the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in the Argentine capital, and then later exposed the role of former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner and her colleagues in a cover-up of Iran’s responsibility for the atrocity.

Hours before he was due to unveil a complaint against the Kirchner government over its alleged collusion with Iran on Jan. 19, 2015, Nisman’s lifeless body was discovered in his Buenos Aires apartment.

The Kirchner government falsely maintained that Nisman’s assassination was a suicide until an independent police investigation in May 2017 established beyond doubt that he had been murdered.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/28/clint-eastwood-portrays-th

Something really interesting is happening at Malpaso Productions, Clint Eastwood’s movie production company. Eastwood’s films, especially in recent years, portray the best in the American character through real stories of ordinary Americans called by events to stand up and shine. In his latest, “Richard Jewell,” Eastwood continues exploring a theme I’ve called “American Greatness in the Shadow of 9/11.” The result is a body of work that is awe-inspiring and unlike anything we have seen before in American cinema.

His subject is the American hero in the still unfamiliar new world that emerged after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Eastwood’s theme is made quite clear in “Sully.” The film tells the story of “the Miracle on the Hudson.” On January 15, 2009, Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger (Tom Hanks) and co-pilot Jeff Skiles managed to do the impossible. U.S. Airways Flight 1549 from New York’s La Guardia Airport slammed into a flock of geese right after takeoff, causing both engines to fail. The successful water landing on the river next to Manhattan saved the lives of all 155 people on board—and averted another disaster for the city similar to the one on 9/11.

The 9/11 attacks are evoked subtly throughout the film, and the very first moments brilliantly establish the connection between 1/15/09 and 9/11/01.

“Sully” tells the story of a miracle, and is itself a kind of cinematic miracle. This is filmmaking at its best. Like Sully Sullenberger managing to do the impossible, Clint Eastwood manages to do what most directors won’t even attempt because it is simply too difficult. He tells a story we all know, tells it as it actually happened, and succeeds in making a great film. He even makes a film in Hollywood that celebrates America!

http://politicalmavens.com/

Memo to writer, director and producer: Kadish the Hebrew prayer for the dead, is not pronounced like radish; it is pronounced like Kahdish or Coddish. Though this may seem picayune, it’s a word that comes up often in a movie about the Holocaust, and particularly one that deals with showing respect for murdered Jews, it’s inexcusable to hear it constantly mispronounced by the Jewish protagonist as well as others. Imagine a movie about French people who call their capital Parees – could we take it seriously?

The Song of Names deals with a Jewish violin prodigy who is brought from Poland to London by his father in an attempt to save his son from the mounting threat of Hitler’s war. The young boy called Dovid’l lives with a non-Jewish family who have a son his age, Martin, who both admires and resents him for being his own father’s favorite. The story is told with a series of flash-forwards and back until it becomes clear that the prodigy has disappeared from London without leaving a trace, presumably leading to the foster father’s stroke and death and the resulting search by the foster brother to find him.

Dovid’l skips out on a prominent concert prior to his departure, a plot point that becomes significant later. More than 30 years elapse during Martin’s search, revealing many heart-breaking scenes that one can imagine dealing with the slaughter of six million Jews seen through the lens of one gifted “genius.” This, along with the hauntingly beautiful violin music, including Bruch’s sonata, make the movie worthwhile. Second memo to writer: the movie’s final revelation is unmoored to anything else that the viewer has seen, leaving the audience confused and uncomprehending. It’s an unnecessary tag-on that should be cut before this goes to Netflix or Amazon. It cheapens the ending and trivializes far more important points that have been made. The cast, headed by Tim Roth and Clive Owen is solid as expected.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/

I left the theater saddened after watching Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial work, “Richard Jewell,” a film about the falsely accused Atlanta Olympic Park bomber and the media’s rush to judgment.

I was disheartened because Jewell, now deceased, represents every American and especially the Trump “ deplorables.” Any of us can be falsely accused of a crime, and our ability to defend ourselves often depends on resources and knowledge that many of us lack.

We live in a society where trials-by-media are commonplace, and due process and the presumption of innocence are fading away, part of a bygone era. In the U.S. judicial system, due process is supposed to mean that every citizen is accorded legal rights and protection from governmental overreach.

We find protection in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and it applies to the states via the 14th Amendment.
Due process is accompanied by the presumption of innocence, unless proven guilty in a court of law. So much for that: Witness the recent cases marked by a total breakdown in due process and the presumption of innocence for both Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Roy Moore in their media trials. They represent current examples of a trend that started more than two decades ago.

In the Jewell story, we see a flawed and man-eating media, as well as an FBI that apparently either forgot or ignored its own mission statement to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution.
Here we are today, more than 20 years after the Atlanta bombing, and once again the FBI—or at least elements and former elements of the FBI—has been brought into question concerning not only the current impeachment proceedings but also that the FBI might have spied on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. For real. Protect whom, uphold what?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/movie-review-1917-contrived-technique-director-sam-mendes/

Sam Mendes is the real star of Sam Mendes’s new World War I drama.

The list of great films about World War I in Europe is surprisingly short: After the acknowledged masterpieces All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957), there aren’t many more worth discussing. 1917 is a splashy attempt to join the list that is well worth seeing yet suffers from comparison to the far better film covering the same ground that was released just eleven months ago.

That movie, the Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, was meticulously, devastatingly real. 1917, by contrast, starts out convincing but comes to seem unforgivably contrived around the halfway mark, and by the end it asks us to suspend disbelief to such a degree that the effect is nearly absurd. I was reminded of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, whose protagonist developed into a kind of Buster Keaton figure who miraculously bumbled his way through a storm of violence so focused that it seemed as if the Wehrmacht’s sole purpose was to kill this random citizen.

1917 is defined also by its surface contrivance: Sam Mendes has designed the film as a single take (followed, after a brief blackout in the second half, by another single take). Like Birdman, though, as well as the fantastically complicated opening scene of Mendes’s own James Bond film Spectre, 1917 is actually composed of many shots ingeniously woven together using digital wizardry to look like a single take. I dislike the gimmick, at least at this length; staying on a single take creates a sense of hanging in midair as we wonder when we’ll finally hit the ground, and it works beautifully for a single scene like the opening of Spectre or Touch of Evil (1958), the Orson Welles film that inspired all subsequent one-take sorcery. Keeping a take going for an entire movie, though, is a mistake. It redirects the attention from the story to the technique. To be slightly rude about it, it makes Sam Mendes, not his characters, the star of the movie.