RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Blessed by serendipitous synchronicity, Clint Eastwood’s movie, eponymously titled “Richard Jewell,” concerns the FBI mishandling of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing and opened two days after the release of the Horowitz Report found 17 omissions or incorrect commissions in the Carter/Page application submitted by the FBI to the FISA Court. It is startling to see the same malfeasance brought to public attention in 1996, including a sexual relationship with an officer of the FBI, as well as other unlawful behavior in the bureau’s interrogations and investigations. Beyond that unusual coincidence, the movie is noteworthy for its restraint, particularly considering that its producer and director was Dirty Harry at the beginning of his career.

Compared with too many over-the top violent films (The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Richard Jewell deals with a 30-something security officer who lives with his mom (an excellent Kathy Bates), and tries his best to be helpful to others and live according to an out of fashion code of behavior. He is out of shape and out of style and lives a lonely life of social ostracism. After he discovers a fully loaded backpack left under a bench at the Olympic stadium, he succeeds in warning the police and negotiating a significant evacuation before the bombs explode, killing two people and injuring at least a hundred others. He is first hailed as a hero, and then considered a suspect according to the profile of a perpetrator who commits a crime in order to become a savior. Richard is played by Paul Walter Hauser in a tour de force of typecasting as well as acting.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/hollywood-socialism/

Hollywood is now obsessing about increasing ethnic and gender diversity. Good. There’s been nasty racial and gender discrimination in the movie business.

Unfortunately, Hollywood has no interest in one type of diversity: diversity of thought.

In most every movie, capitalism is evil.

Greedy miners want to kill nature-loving aliens in “Avatar.” Director James Cameron says: “The mining company boss will be the villain again in several sequels… Same guy. Same mother—-er through all four movies.”

One reviewer calls a scene in the recent “Star Wars” movie “a beautiful critique of unregulated capitalism.”

“Unregulated capitalism” is such a stupid cliche. Markets are regulated by customers, who have choices; we routinely abandon suppliers who don’t serve us well.

In the movie “In Time,” rich people live forever by buying more time, which they hoard while arranging for higher prices so poor people die.

I guess rich movie people feel guilty about being rich.

In the new Amazon series “Jack Ryan,” the hero asks a good question about Venezuela: “Why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history?”

Because socialism ruined the country’s economy! But no, that’s not the answer Jack Ryan gives.

“Nationalist pride,” not socialism, is named as the culprit — and the politician who will fix things is an activist running “on a social justice platform.”

The producers reversed reality, portraying leftists as Venezuela’s saviors rather than as the people who destroyed it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/09/jojo-rabbit-and-the-pitfalls-of-nazi-humor/

One small but reliable way to amaze someone steeped in our own culture of problematics with a dispatch from the not-so-distant past: Tell them that in the late 1960s, one of the most successful sitcoms in America was a broad farce set in a Nazi prison camp. If you want to compound the amazement, you might add that the actor playing the Nazi commandant was Werner Klemperer, a first cousin of Victor Klemperer, he of the famous Nazi-era diaries. Also, the actor who played the camp’s French POW, Corporal LeBeau, was not only Jewish but a survivor of Buchenwald, where as a twelve-year-old deportee he had escaped death by doing a song-and-dance act for SS men.

The Klemperer and Buchenwald connections, I will admit, were unknown to me until I set out to refresh my memory about the epic strangeness of Hogan’s Heroes — a refreshment inspired by watching Jojo Rabbit, a peculiar and polarizing movie that won a big audience award at the Toronto Film Festival and is being marketed as a love-trumps-hate dark horse to Academy Award voters looking for a passion project. If you want to understand the challenge of that marketing campaign, the memory of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz is a useful place to start, since making a slapstick farce about a Hitler-worshiping ten-year-old surrounded by idiotic Nazis in the waning days of World War II is at least as strange as giving Nazi prison guards the sitcom treatment — and quite possibly a bit stranger.

The director of this odd entertainment is the part-Maori, part-Jewish Taika Waititi, whose name has come up a lot recently in cinephile debates because he made the candy-colored treat Thor: Ragnarok, which is by general consensus the movie that you’re supposed to reference if you’re defending the virtues of the Marvel Universe against that snob Martin Scorsese. “Okay, Goodfellas dude, but what about Thor: Ragnarok? Wasn’t that art?” Well, it wasn’t, really, but it was entertaining and deservedly successful, and riding that success, Waititi has seized his opportunity not only to make the Nazi comedy of his dreams, but to cast himself — as one does — as Adolf Hitler.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari-makes-race-car-movies-great-again/

An unusual Hollywood exception to the derision of American exceptionalism

There’s a MAGA moment in Ford v Ferrari when the British-immigrant auto mechanic and race-car driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) stops being a loner and decides to be a team player. He slows down on the track to let the other American drivers on his team join him so they can cruise across the finish line together. This “bringing them in” scene turns out to be Miles’s undoing, relegating him to forgotten history, but it’s one of the few scenes in Ford v Ferrari that audiences unapologetically enjoy; they respond to it as part of their natural, national, car-culture heritage.

Conservatives should pay attention to any element in a Hollywood film that supports their political and moral beliefs. Ford v Ferrari provides that sustenance. Director James Mangold dramatizes the 1964 competition in the 24-hour race at Le Mans, distilled to a three-man alliance of Miles; his mentor, the veteran driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who had previously raced Le Mans in 1957; and entrepreneur Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). They bring the Ford Racing Team up to the level of its faster, sleekly engineered European contenders.

The America First implications of Ford v Ferrari can’t be ignored. After the big-screen spectacle and vibrant sound design of revved-up motors and cheering crowds, Mangold swerves into quasi-political points about character. His best scenes show the way ambitious men commit themselves. It’s not about “toxic masculinity,” as producer Jane Rosenthal described Scorsese’s The Irishman (to make it seem progressive). Instead, he revels in high-speed, high-pressure contexts where egotism, expertise, and privilege vie for domination.

The real measure of a clever script in a suspense film is the aha moment at the end when the viewer realizes that there were clues scattered throughout the film which were either missed or more likely misinterpreted. In other words, the writer or director’s talent was in pulling you in the direction he orchestrated and doing that so well that you failed to connect the dots that were there all along. Hitchcock spoke about providing the audience with a suggestion and sufficient information to figure out the rest. This is a challenge in film since the audience only sees what the director allows us to see but frequently, on second view, you will realize that a line of dialogue, or something in the background, on the night table or hanging on the coat rack might have helped to solve the puzzle.

The Good Liar is the opposite of this – it belongs in the tradition of the entire plot turning out to have been a dream. Its success is solely a tribute to STAR POWER, the ability of two senior actors who are so comfortable in front of the camera that we could watch them having dinner in real time without getting bored. The plot is so farfetched that neither the action in the present, nor the flashback to the past makes any sense. The denouement is so unrealistic that we are left with just a one word comment: whatever. Since it’s impossible to prove this to you without giving away all the connivances, I can only say that it’s not unpleasant to spend some time with Helen Mirren and Ian Mckellen, even at the expense of being had.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/emno_safe_spacesem_what_happens_when_common_sense_and_values_disappear.html

The new documentary No Safe Spaces, starring conservative thinker, radio host, and writer Dennis Prager and liberal, comedian, and podcast host Adam Carolla, is a must-see for anyone concerned with the long-term viability of the First Amendment’s free speech protections.  While primarily focusing on the hostility to free speech laying siege to America’s college campuses, vividly illustrated with compelling clips of violent protests and civil unrest by students from Berkeley to Yale, No Safe Spaces powerfully illustrates how the movement to limit speech has moved into mainstream arenas as well.

Prager and Carolla recognize that “common sense and values” are disappearing for the first time since our country’s founding.  There are appearances by figures on both sides of the ideological spectrum including liberals Barack Obama, Van Jones, Cornell West, Dave Rubin, and Alan Dershowitz, all of whom recognize the dangers to the country when progressive notions of microaggressions and safe spaces become the new normal.

Prager appreciates how unique free speech is on the world stage.  Across Asia, Europe, and even Canada, First Amendment rights are either nonexistent or limited, yet the highly educated elites have decided that our historically exceptional freedoms are now dangerous.  Prager observed:

What’s happening now in the United States, you are not to be heard on a college campus, or at your place of work. This is brand new. This is one of the few things one could say we have no precedent for in the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-harriet-woke-entertainment/

It’s the Jaws of slavery movies — woke entertainment as a joke.

As Harriet Tubman — played by British musical actress Cynthia Erivo in the new historical film Harriet — inspires more and more Southern black slaves to desperately join her run for freedom in the North, a newly converted collaborator confides, “We’re gonna need a bigger cart!”

What kind of anachronistic nonsense is this? Both the history and the legend of the Underground Railroad, and the courageous woman who led herself and others out of bondage, are now jokes of woke entertainment. That the film grossed $12 million (a small yet surprising sum) on its opening weekend suggests some moviegoers seem as ready to enjoy this travesty as slaves were ready for liberation. In terms of calculated crowd-pleasing, Harriet is the Jaws of slavery movies.

Set in 1849 Maryland, full of danger, rescues, superstition, frivolous gunplay, and pop-politics, Harriet demonstrates the current exploitation of African-American history, through historical revision, simply to sell tickets while aggravating political identity, tribal separation, and perpetual grievance — the same way that politicians manipulate voters.

Ever since Harvey Weinstein confirmed Hollywood’s Obama Effect, film culture has sought various ways of appeasing racial anxiety through movies about black victimization and white guilt. It’s the new diversity, as one of Harriet’s progressives summarizes: “Civil war is our only hope.”