RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://politicalmavens.com/

To see the real Nureyev, a magnificent dancer see the utubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHD6Ly0oYpA rsk

A film about the greatest male dancer of his generation should convey at the very least the speed and perfection for which he was known. Unfortunately, The White Crow, a biopic of Rudolph Nureyev, is too often a static production with too little depiction of the dancer in an extended ballet sequence and too much mooning at his yearning or irritable face – the default expressions the director has chosen to emphasize . We see short scenes of the dancer’s talented leaps and twirls and too many scenes of his petulant tantrums which become increasingly annoying with each escalation.

The film leads up to and ends with his request for political asylum in Paris and we see little of his great international successes in America and Europe, nor does the script by David Hare take us up to his tragic death from AIDS.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/red-joan-joins-a-rogues-gallery-of-resisters/

Judi Dench in a guess-the-genre political sob story

Red Joan is a love story, a political thriller, a woman’s coming-of-age sexual memoir, and a history of British espionage just before and after World War II. It is also a crock. Based on real-life KGB spy Melita Norwood, Red Joan’s sentimental exoneration of one woman’s treason and sedition fits with how today’s media pay tribute to the kaffeeklatsch of political resisters.

Judi Dench plays title character Joan Stanley as a kindly widow suddenly exposed by the British government for her activities, 60 years earlier, relaying wartime bomb secrets to Russia. Crone Joan’s mummified on-trial look (Dench’s facial wattles, a padded, thick rump, and flabby legs with an ankle monitor) dissolves into flashbacks played by pouty Sophie Cookson, who beams a girlish complexion and period hairdos as a student at Cambridge University. Cookson never locates her character’s sexual-political tension, which was the key to every characterization in the film version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, because that complexity isn’t part of this film’s reverential concept.

Young Joan is seduced by a pair of sexy Jewish radicals, Sonya (Tereza Srbova), who teaches her espionage tricks, and firebrand Leo (Tom Hughes), who talks of religion when he has politics in mind. Their exoticism, flaunting past political persecution, is meant to excuse WASP Joan’s uncritical fascination.

Asked, “Who politicized you then?” Old Joan’s response, “That’s a strange way to put it,” epitomizes the disingenuousness of red-diaper-baby filmmaking that dodges political intent and refuses to admit its Communist sympathies. This is where Red Joan stops being entertainment and becomes romanticized indoctrination. Leftist attitudes are dramatized as the norm.

Joan defends her romantic intrigues and professional deceptions that include blackmailing her Cambridge colleagues. She prevaricates: “I have also been accused of deceiving my country. I am not a spy. I’m not a traitor. I wanted everyone to share the same knowledge. Because only that way could the horror of another world war be averted and I think if you look back at history, you’ll see I was right.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/foul_play_to_silence_patton.html

U.S. Army general George S. Patton, renowned for strategic military prowess and leadership, led World War II troops into Casablanca, Sicily, and France; relieved Allied forces at the Battle of the Bulge; and drove deep into Nazi Germany. Patton was equally renowned for his no-holds-barred opinions, colorful attire, profanity-laced speeches, and disregard for orders he thought ineffective, all of which did not sit well with the Allied high command.

The new “must see” film, Silence Patton, suggests that the general’s premature death in a mysterious auto accident may have been orchestrated to silence this oversized, historic personality. Written and directed by Robert Orlando, the film uses documentary footage, direct quotes, and interviews with historians to ask whether Patton’s forthrightness, outspoken judgments, and criticism of battlefield leadership may have led to assassination. Robert Wilcox, an investigative and military reporter, voiced the same theory in this 2008 book, Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton.

In Silence Patton, Orlando presents a non-lionized, realistic portrayal of a consummate yet flawed warrior, whose personal qualities often hindered him from obtaining the necessary orders to execute his desired military strategies. The film opens with a re-enactment of the accident in which an Army truck struck the car Patton was riding in, leaving him paralyzed and near death. The image of a dying Patton looms large throughout the film, which examines his impressive yet controversial military career and the suspicions surrounding his end.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/02/netflixs-the-boy-who-harnessed-the-wind-tells-a-young-inventors-inspirational-tale/

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That aphorism was particularly apt for William Kamkwamba, who at age 14 constructed a wind turbine and saved his family from starvation. Netflix commemorated his 2006 engineering feat in “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” screened at Sundance and released in early March. The movie is inspired by the eponymous autobiography coauthored by Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as William’s father Trywell Kamkwamba. Best known for his title role as Solomon Northup in “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013), “Wind” also marks Ejiofor’s directorial motion picture debut. Maxwell Simba plays William in the supporting role. The sharp outlines of cinematography by Dick Pope reiterate that this harrowing story isn’t a fairy tale.

Unlike other teen prodigy films, such as “October Sky” (1999) and “Spare Parts” (2014), “Wind” revolves not around an esoteric hobby or scholarship contests, but devotes its object to the avoidance of starvation in a sun-baked and dusty landscape. Imagine living in Malawi, a country that has the population of New York state across an area nearly the size of Pennsylvania with a gross domestic product equivalent to that of Guam. That’s where Kamkwamba’s story takes place.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/trans-ballet-dancer-nora-monsecour-girl-always-fascination-legs/

When Nora Monsecour was 15 and training as a transgender ballerina in Belgium, she decided to join the womens’ pointe class. But her school wouldn’t let her.

Monsecour was transitioning. Having taken puberty blockers at the age of 11, she was halfway through her female hormone replacements, with her sights set on gender reassignment surgery.

And yet, her school principal told Monsecour that she was “going through a phase”. Worse still, the principal blamed Monsecour’s mother, saying she was giving her daughter medication because she’d always wanted a daughter over a son.

Later that year, in 2009, Monsecour left the school. Her story made headlines, prompting aspiring Flemish film director Lukas Dhont, who was only 18, to send her a Facebook message. He wanted to make a documentary about Monsecour’s life. She said no.

A few years later, Dhont asked again, and this time Monsecour reconsidered. If the film was a fictionalised account of her life, rather than a documentary, she would do it. The result was Girl, out now in cinemas, starring 27-year-old breakout actor Victor Polster, a student at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, as 15-year-old transgender ballerina Lara.

http://politicalmavens.com/

This movie takes place in Hamburg in 1946, as Keira Knightley arrives from London to join her Colonel husband (Jason Clarke) who is in charge of dealing with the aftermath of a war that left the German city decimated. Though the Allies were permitted to take over the houses of wealthy Germans and evict them during their stay, the Colonel extends the gesture of allowing the father/daughter owner/residents to remain in the palatial mansion, occupying only the top floor while he and his wife live on the main floor. We learn that each family has suffered a tragic personal loss and we see the initial antipathy of the Colonel’s wife to all things German while her military husband insists that the war is over, the Allies have won and it is time for reconciliation.

As the film progresses, a relationship develops between the Colonel’s beautiful wife and the very handsome owner of the house (Alexander Skarsgard), one that is consummated on the dining room table in broad daylight – the most egregious of several unbelievable scenes. His teenage daughter is a surly character, angry at the loss of her mother and the takeover of her home by “the enemy.” She will turn into a pivotal character through her relationship with a young Nazi thug, intent on further terrorist activity. The tension between the love story and the reality of the hostile daughter’s aiding and abetting an imminent assassination becomes an insurmountable obstacle to the audience reaction What is intended as a surprise ending is one we have been rooting for from the get-go, so it seems more of an expectation than a surprise.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/cold-war-movie-anti-communist

Director Pawel Pawlikowski’s masterful film mounts a subtle, power-packed critique of the socialist phenomenon.

The best narrative art eschews didacticism in favor of subtlety and nuance and moral reflection. The Polish film Cold War, released last year and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is no exception. It tells the story, inspired by Pawlikowski’s parents, of Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and Zula Lichón (Joanna Kulig), whose amour fou burns against the backdrop of postwar Europe.

Wiktor’s passion for Zula consumes him. It haunts him for years after he flees Poland, and drives him to return despite the certainty of imprisonment. Zula herself is a beautiful, broken creature, the victim of abuse, talented but insecure, flirtatious, charming, impetuous, melancholy, who dulls her anxieties with alcohol. This passionate and doomed romance also has a political dimension. Which is why Cold War is not just melodrama. It’s a masterpiece.

The film is a subtle but devastating critique of the socialist phenomenon. Wiktor and Zula meet shortly after the end of World War II, when Wiktor is tasked with assembling a musical troupe that will perform folk music for the nomenklatura of the Soviet client government. With his partner, choreographer Irena Bielecka (Agata Kulesza), Wiktor tours the countryside, recording ancient melodies. They occupy what looks to be an old estate — a ruin of the ancien régime — where they hold auditions. Among the aspiring dancers and singers is Zula, to whom Wiktor is immediately drawn. Irena doesn’t share Wiktor’s enthusiasm, especially after Zula performs a song from a Soviet movie. But she relents. Zula joins the group.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/true-story-behind-keira-knightly-film-aftermath-british-family/

The European winter of 1946/7 was one of the coldest of the 20th century. The Allies had won the war, but severe and relentless snowfall compounded the hardship across the continent – not least in Germany, where a defeated population had to rebuild a flattened nation during what came to be known as the Hungerwinter.

Out of this environment came a remarkable tale of reconciliation and friendship, when Walter Brook, a British colonel installed by Allied powers as governor of Pinneberg, a county near Hamburg, rejected official advice and moved in with a German family. The occupying British forces had been given orders to requisitions homes and cars… anything they might need in order to govern, with German families being sent to camps or denuded of their possessions.

Rather than requisitioning the family home of local baker Wilhelm Ladige and his wife, Erika, a wealthy heiress, Walter decided it was big enough for both families. It helped that the Ladiges had been as “anti-Hitler as far as one dared” – especially as a family with three children. So in February 1947, Walter’s wife Anthea and their three children – Kim, eight, Sheila, 15, and Colin, 17 – moved into a grand mansion with the Wilhelm and Erika and their children: Holger, five, Heike, seven, and Theo, 12.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/oscars-2019-academy-awards-fakes-history-remakes-new/

When it comes to movies, the Oscars are one way of learning history. Students of film can peruse the annals to gather a sense of what movie culture was like in different periods, reading the list of winners (and nominations) as a guide to cultural standards and film-industry norms.

But journalists — those who cover the entertainment beat as well as the Beltway — abuse the historical function of the Oscars by routinely hijacking its significance. Specifically, when Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler won Academy Awards for, respectively, the costumes and art direction of Black Panther, many media wonks (professional and amateur alike) immediately proclaimed that they had “made history as the first African-American women to win” in those categories.

What kind of “history” is this really? When the reporting of news events carries such automatic estimation of cultural value, the term “first” is used as manipulation, a measuring rod of social progress.

This makes the political idea of “progress” more important than the subject being reported. Carter’s and Beachler’s work goes undescribed; their personal histories as people are delimited to the social-justice categories of race and gender. First-semester journalism classes used to teach that mentioning a person’s race or gender was appropriate only when it was essential to the news.