RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was sophomore year of college when Absurd Feminist burst into our English-department seminar room with steam puffing out her ears. “Are there any WOMEN in this book?” she demanded, to no one in particular, slamming a paperback on the table. I happened to be nearest to her blast zone of accusation, so I replied: “Not really.” The book in question was Dispatches, Michael Herr’s account of life among infantry grunts in Vietnam. “Then I CAN’T GET INTO IT!” she exclaimed.

In a moment of clarity I understood what the two main imperatives of higher education were to Absurd Feminist and to so many of her peers: First, instead of broadening her horizons and taking her outside herself to discover the world, she demanded the educators filter all knowledge through her own experience to make it relatable to her. Second, all learning was to be valued in proportion to how effectively it could be made into a cudgel in the identity-politics war. Dispatches, with its virtually all-male cast, represented a pernicious advance for the patriarchy, even if it was about the agonies suffered by men.

Fast forward a few years, and another absurd feminist is here to tell us what’s wrong with Dunkirk: It’s about men. Why couldn’t it have been about women? No, really, Marie Claire’s reviewer wants to know:

Dunkirk felt like an excuse for men to celebrate maleness — which apparently they don’t get to do enough. Fine, great, go forth, but if [director Christopher] Nolan’s entire purpose is breaking the established war movie mold and doing something different — why not make a movie about women in World War II? Or — because I know that will illicit [sic] cries of “ugh, not everything has to be about feminism, ugh!” — how about any other marginalized group? These stories shouldn’t be relegated to indie films and Oscar season. It’s up to giant powerhouse directors like Nolan to tell them, which is why Dunkirk feels so basic.

“Basic,” you may or may not know, is the current term of derision used by young women and gay men to indicate feeble, unimaginative taste. Oh, you’re wearing a Ralph Lauren Polo shirt? You’re so basic.

It seems unlikely that Marie Claire’s reviewer, Mehera Bonner, has before her an exceptionally bright career of writing about film. As for a career of writing about feminism, though, the sky, for Bonner, is the limit. Her essay could plausibly have appeared on any number of bristling feminist sites. What is her reasoning except feminism taken to its logical extreme? Feminists often declare to the world that they stand merely for an entirely reasonable proposition — say, that women’s lives are as important as men’s. Who would dispute that? Yet feminist writing usually continues far past this point into a need to prove women and men have been equally important in every context, even in history. If women turn out to be mostly irrelevant to an incident, then it is the moral duty of socially conscious creative artists to ignore the matter. They should retrain their sights on something that will give absurd feminists something they can relate to, something that will advance the cause of feminism in general.

Feminists have a habit of obsessively dividing the world into teams — us, them. Ideas and even facts get considered in the light of whether they are good for Team Woman or not. Instead of seeing men and women as close collaborators in the human project, feminists often suppose that the sexes are rivals, opponents. This is sheer tribalism. Bonner looks at Dunkirk and is irritated that men like the film. She sees it as a celebration of manly courage and bravado, or at least manly endurance and grit, and this repulses her. Feminism means constant maintenance of an imaginary set of scales, and she fears Dunkirk adds weight to the masculine side, tipping the culture away from women. If Dunkirk — “Christopher Nolan’s new directorial gift to men,” she calls it — shows men at their best, it must therefore be bad for women.

The reason we can’t have a Dunkirk that’s about women and “marginalized” people is because there weren’t a lot of them on the beach in June 1940. The only Dunkirk that would satisfy Bonner would be a Dunkirk that simply didn’t exist. Can’t men just shut up about all the stuff men have done? Their sense of history is so . . . basic.

— Kyle Smith is National Review Online’s critic-at-large.

AFTER LOVE

Directed by Joachim Lafosse

A film for devotees of dense, moody relationship dramas, After Love is a searing exploration of the post happily-ever-after time, when you share kids you both love, but unfortunately — because of financial exigencies — still cohabit in the same space. Uncoupling, in case we forgot, is complicated.

Berenice Bejo, so amusing in the prize-winning silent, The Artist (2011), a fetching presence, is in constant motion as the film progresses, cooking, making her twin daughters Margaux and Jade brush their teeth, wash up, and do their homework. It is as if she wants to outwalk the sadness and annoyances of having run out of love with her handsome but unreliable architect husband, Boris (Cédric Khan, director of the French Red Lights), who does not seem to respect the boundaries of divorce, as he flouts the legal strictures of the divorce judgment, comes and goes at all hours. He loves his children, we see as he cooks for them and tries to maintain some sort of foodie integrity (“Don’t let them eat ice cream: They should eat their stewed fruit cup…”) And as someone commented in the vestibule when we were discussing the film’s merits or de-, No matter that he’s a gambler and an uncertain provider, “…it’s still so rare to find a man so good with kids…” So all is forgiven, kiddies?

No. Lots of divorced men love their children but don’t invite themselves to parties they are told to leave, or owe massive debts to shady guys who visit without warning.

Still, although the subject area is rich with possibility, is it the first or even the 10th filmic treatment of nasty matrimonial detritus to come along?

It is well scripted and photographed, the translations from the French are, for a change, quite accurate and timely, and the two daughters are, thank goodness, not angelic, giving some verisimilitude to the taut grimace-inducing interchanges between the principals. Marthe Keller, not seen for many years on the silver screen on these shores, plays the frustrated mother of Bejo — but the years have taken their toll of the lissome lovely seen opposite Dustin Hoffman in 1976’s Marathon Man.

Though redemption — spoiler alert — does not come over the transom by the closing credits, should you be curious about how divorced people still sharing the same domicile get through the week, this is the ticket.

In French with English subtitles

Official selection: Directors’ Fortnight, Cannes Film Festival

INGRID GOES WEST

Directed by Matt Spicer

Set in sunny California amid the sandy dunes and the palm trees, Ingrid Goes West is a dark picture. Watching it, colleagues felt disturbed throughout the length of the picture. Ingrid Thorburn is a woman with clear esteem issues verging on the stalkerazzoid who follows her instagram and FB muse to the West Coast, using every tool at her disposal to ingratiate herself with the goddess-like figure she admires (Elizabeth Olsen plays the sunlight-radiating, image-idealizing Taylor Sloane) on her various branded posts. The film devolves greatly on the cell phone and the instant messaging and pic posting so beloved of millions.

The ugliness of character that is blatant in the protagonist, played by an unnerving Aubrey Plaza, throughout the two hours is, unfortunately, echoed by millions of tweens and teens, for whom followers and going viral is all important. She may be unhinged, but the characters she interacts with seem not to notice for far too long.

A key problem with the script is that events proceed far too swiftly without logical script underpinning. She’s taken in by a sweet, hunky local guy — the only relatable person in the cast, Dan Pinko, played by the extremely likable O’Shea Jackson, Jr. — without a single document or checkup of her references — even if she does, because of an inheritance, pay cash upfront. She escapes arrest too easily. She insinuates herself into being her landlord’s “girlfriend” without a second thought — or regard of his being already taken.

Implausible at it increasingly becomes, you can’t tear your attention away, though you are engulfed in discomfort over her counterfeit life. She’s an instant friend of people who don’t know the smallest thing about her. She is able to stay off the grid for far longer than her initial stash would seem to have covered. The easy druggy, drinky, hard-partying life exuded by Taylor and her husband Ezra (a Kris Kristofferson-the-younger look-alike, Wyatt Russell) and nasty brother, Nicky (Billy Magnuson), looks somewhat, sometime, seductive. But it’s just a glossy easily erased photo on Instagram, when you think about it.

No special effects. No ‘language’ issues. Some expected violence and pushback. But lots of up-to-the-minute unapologetic psychoneurotic disorder.

The audience does laugh at those points where insane talk or behavior (or foodie absurdities) would be laughed out of the room in the East, but where La La Land goofiness covers every gold-plated nuttiness with a cozy effusion of acceptance and “Whatever, dude.”

In “Dunkirk,” an astonishing evocation of a crucial event during the first year of World War II, Christopher Nolan has created something new in the annals of war films—an intimate epic. The scale is immense, and all the more so in the IMAX format that shows the action to best advantage. The density of detail is breathtaking; it’s as if the camera can barely keep up with what’s happening inside and outside the frame. Yet the central concern is steadfastly human. Whether we’re watching a huge Allied army encircled by Nazi forces on a beach in France or tracking the progress of their would-be rescuers, the drama turns on individuals and their feelings—of terror, excruciating vulnerability and fragile hope that they will make it back home, only 26 miles across the English Channel.

What the film excludes is historical context. It is not, and wasn’t meant to be, an explanation of the circumstances that led, in the spring of 1940, to the entrapment of some 400,000 British, French, Belgian and Canadian troops, including what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the whole root and core and brain of the British Army.” Instead, “Dunkirk,” which Mr. Nolan directed from his own screenplay, is a fictionalized, impressionistic account of a calamity that culminated in a near-miracle, although many lives were lost in the process—the rescue of 338,000 of those soldiers by shallow-draft naval vessels plus a large civilian flotilla of fishing boats and yachts.

With sparse dialogue, a minimum of digital simulations and an emphasis on spectacular images, the production follows, among others, a young British enlisted man, Fionn Whitehead’s Tommy, from the moment he emerges from the streets of Dunkirk to join vast throngs of other men, most of them young and all of them frightened, on the sands of what was formerly a vacation resort. They have no more idea than he does what’s in store for them. All they know is that they’re totally vulnerable to German tanks and planes, and unlikely to survive. (The cast includes Harry Styles, of One Direction, making his acting debut.)“Dunkirk” is hardly the first film to depict the mad chaos of modern war. The champion in that category remains “Apocalypse Now,” with “Black Hawk Down” and “Saving Private Ryan” as strong contenders. Still, Mr. Nolan has spoken of his own list of influences being topped by “The Wages of Fear,” Henri-Georges Clouzot’s peerless thriller, made in 1953, about desperate men in South America driving nitroglycerin-laden trucks over primitive roads. What’s the common denominator? Existential terror, for sure, an awareness that one’s life may be snuffed out at any moment, but also classic suspense. CONTINUE AT SITE

The critics loved this movie adapted from a Russian novel, “Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,” written in 1865 by Nikolai Leskov. Based loosely on Shakespeare’s cold-blooded character, this adolescent wife, purchased by the father of the groom to entice his son to produce an heir, begins as an abused woman and morphs into a sociopathic murderer whose two favorite activities are sex and violence. Despite her fitting perfectly into the contemporary cinematic cult governed by the same naked drives, there is an appalling logic gap in this movie which seems to have escaped the attention of its fawning fans, though not of its audience.

The bride is brought into a Gothic house ruled by a tyrannical husband and his aging father. There are workers and servants in this house, but except for the lady’s maid, the others are mostly invisible except for isolated scenes. When the husband leaves home on an extended business trip, the young wife elevates her groomsman/lover into a foppish facsimile of master of the house and has him served at the dining room table without fear that this will engender chatter by the kitchen help that will eventually reach the ears of the community. And when the young wife shoots her bludgeoned husband’s horse twice, she is clearly not concerned that the sounds of those gunshots will reverberate to the suspecting household staff as well. Nor is there any fear in Lady Macbeth that the unburied horse will be spotted by the search team wandering the forest where it was killed while they look for a missing child. Though these are small details, they accumulate rapidly leaving us to wonder where the screenwriter disappeared while these events occurred.

This Lady Macbeth has a script written by someone who hasn’t learned that both character studies and thrillers depend on pivotal details and that once our disbelief has been aroused, it doesn’t matter much what follows. Credibility is the key to identifying with protagonists whether they are likable, hateful or both. As Johnny Cochran might have said, “without some common sense, the criminals are dense.” To crown the disregard for some degree of accuracy in the characters’ behavior and circumstance, there is the misleading Scottish connection since this Lady Macbeth apparently lives in Northern England.

When this movie opened, I postponed seeing it, thinking that I had seen so many other movies about World War II that this one could not surprise me. And was I wrong! Turns out that I knew just about nothing concerning this particular attempt to assassinate Hitler while he spoke in Munich in 1939. For most of you, this movie will be revelatory both in terms of history and the character of Georg Elser, the unsuccessful perpetrator whose home-made bomb exploded 13 minutes after Hitler left the lectern.

Told in the real time of Elser’s arrest and interrogation and the flashbacks to his life in the decade leading up to the event, this movie artfully details every aspect of the rise of Nazism and the national mood in Germany. The set designs of factories, steel-work installations, offices, beer-halls and rural houses are pitch-perfect as are the depictions of women working in the fields, children caught up in the frenzy of Hitler-Youth and ordinary people seduced by the peer pressure of an entire population hypnotized by the Fuhrer’s promises of power and glory for the Homeland. The character of Georg, a jack of all trades artisan, furniture-maker, skilled technician, musician and ladies’ man is singular and captivating. We see him playing the accordion, then singing, then capturing the heart of a young woman who attempts to teach him the tango only to be led by him with the grace and control of a seasoned dancer. Georg is a man who thinks for himself, avoids joining any political group and has the clarity and instincts of a true humanist. The contrast between his deepening awareness of the moral depravity around him with the mob euphoria of the crowds leads to his eventual decision that he must act alone.

Driven by his conviction, he must leave his family, the woman he loves and the town that has grown so foreign and abhorrent to him. Though we are familiar with re-enactments of life in concentration camps, there are scenes of torture in this film that make water-boarding seem like the pause that refreshes. But nothing is gratuitous here – these are records of one of the darkest periods in man’s history. The fact that one man had the strength and determination of an ancient prophet is a symbol, however small, of the redemptive power of character, rational thought and human values. The fact he failed was tragic but his heroic effort and resistance to the forces of evil was a startling triumph. Previously unknown to most of us, Georg Elser has been given his proper recognition in a remarkable performance by Christian Friedel and a well-crafted film directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel.

Happily, the audience for the delicate, moody-erotic The Beguiled is not that lowest common denominator so often seen at the Biff-Bam school of entertainment, where special effects rule.

The Sofia Coppola-directed historical drama is rich with atmosphere, with photographic meditations frequently invoked through the sultry, tenebrous Spanish moss-draped Southern landscapes, wild grasses and brambles, figurative representations of the subcutaneous emotions of the seven young boarding school charges of Nicole Kidman’s governess, Martha Farnsworth, in bucolic Virginia during the late Civil War.

With several murkier films under her directorial belt, Coppola just became only the second woman in film history to take the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Director prize.

The toothsome found enemy, a Union soldier with a broken leg, played by the sinewy Colin Farrell, lying in favored state, is attended to by the bevy of boarding school beauties sequestered as the war proceeds within actual earshot, just miles away. We hear the muffled booms of the cannon from afar.

How the houseful of lissome and flirtatious young ladies succors the manipulative, perhaps dangerous but handsome soldier with his wounded leg is the tale. Each sedate but demurely aroused female demonstrates unambiguous interest in this unwonted male guest as a semi-resident in their cloistered enclave. Amusing to note their individual stratagems for dropping in on their soldier.

Farrell is, of course, the “other side,” and thus a risk, both to them and to any home-team soldiery who might come to claim him.

For all the suppressed erotic longings, it is a decorous series of weeks, furtive-innocent nighttime visits, on many pretexts, from cups of water to berries fresh picked – with period language and comportment worthy of Henry James. Coppola wrote the script from a novel penned by someone else.

Nicole Kidman starred as a governess previously in the tense Gothic ghost story The Others (2001), another film with elements of psychological horror (directed by Alejandro Amenábar) evoked by the current decorous offering.

Standouts in the cast are Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning as two of the steamy-repressed ladies in waiting under Kidman’s ministrations and tutelage.

The Big Sick, on the other hand, is the true story of how Pakistani comedian Kumail Nanjiani met his real-life wife, Emily. Aside from the misconceived and off-putting title, this is an endearing, warm-hearted, exceptional biopic with a goodly trove of laughs and insights into the often irksome life of a comic, especially one whose family is traditional Muslim – and disapproves utterly of their son’s raffish and low-esteemed career.

Some reviewers have found fault with the erasure of important issues such as slavery from Sofia Coppola’s version of The Beguiled based on a novel about a southern girl’s school set during the Civil War. The school is on a beautiful ante-belum estate surrounded by magnificent trees and woods that let us know we are in a place where innocence will come to a reckoning far more primal than politics. In the opening scene which captures the essence of so many fairy tales, a young girl with pigtails is walking through the deep woods gathering mushrooms in her basket. Instead of a wolf, she comes upon a wounded Union soldier and out of compassion for his plight, helps him back to the school There, he is confronted with a handful of girls and women, all of whom will eventually be implicated in his fate.

Played by Colin Farrell, the soldier can’t help being a sexual turn-on to the range of young lovelies held in check by Miss Martha, the headmistress played by Nicole Kidman. Steady and steely but also open to suggestions from the girls, she asks their opinion on how to deal with the “enemy soldier.” Cool and rational, she agrees to let him remain while he convalesces from her surgery on his leg. We watch as Farrell plays each of the women with intuitive skill while they compete for his attention and affection. Coppola maintains the tension with a minimum of histrionics and some quiet scenes of the girls saying their prayers, playing music and dressing for dinner set beautifully at a candle-lit table that offers a surprising bounty during a time of war. Quite obviously, this is not a kitchen drama about wartime privation.

Ms. Coppola is painting on a larger canvas than American history – the scale is more mythic than realistic and the outside world appears only once briefly with an unexpected appearance by two confederate soldiers who are quickly dispensed with. It would be a spoiler to discuss the plot beyond this set-up but this is a movie skilfully directed, beautifully filmed and more thought-provoking than it first appears. It may take you back much than the 19th century, perhaps as far back as the Garden of Eden.

Although at times it feels—quite correctly—like one is swamped with Politically Correct propaganda in the movies and television and magazines, a number of films have been made over the years that buck the trend. Unfortunately, many of them have not been well-publicized and/or not as patronized by conservatives as they should have been. By comparison, every time Hanoi Jane, Michael Moore, or Oliver Stone make a movie, liberals trample themselves over in a mad stampede to support their propaganda movies; conservatives, on the other hand, when they hear of a movie that might be putting up a fight against the totalitarians, often stay at home scratching their rear ends, complaining that Hollywood doesn’t make enough movies that support their viewpoints—and then wait until the movie comes out at Redbox or Netflix.

So here is a list of movies that you might want to watch:

Red Family

Although Kim Ki-duk did not direct this film, he wrote and produced it and it still came out great. The film centers around North Korea sleeper agents passing themselves off as a South Korean family, all the while carrying out espionage and assassinations and maintaining a harsh discipline and ideological purity. Throughout, Damocles’ sword is hanging over their heads because they are being monitored by other agents. Although initially being vicious, cold-blooded killers, with time they become corrupted by their environment and start acting more human, and even humane, with foreseeable results.

Katyn

You have to feel for the Poles. The Russians Germans, and Austrians have repeatedly raped Poland over the centuries. The Katyn massacre is one of those items that make up That Which Must Not Be Mentioned about WWII (another one is that the Soviet Union and the Third Reich were allied during the first few years of the war as they had agreed to partition Europe between them, starting with Poland. Later, when one of the allies attacked the other one, the original pact of alliance was never mentioned, as being in bad taste if you did).

The Katyn massacre, in particular, made a deep scar in the Polish psyche. Perhaps it was due because Russia invaded the country when it was trying to fight off the German invasion, perhaps because the subsequent occupation by the Communists tried to convince the Poles that the Russians were their friends, perhaps because the Russians refused to acknowledge what everyone knew. Who knows.

Another thing that makes one sick is that the Poles behaved with honor towards the conquerors, not realizing at the time what vicious monsters they were dealing with. Example: (a) the professors naively show up at the university, summoned by the SS officer, only to be brutally rounded up and sent to Sachsenhausen (b) the Polish officers are initially loosely guarded, which means that many could have easily escaped, but did not do so and therefore were subsequently butchered by the Communists. The ending of the film is brutal to watch, but it needs to be watched

Unfortunately, to people who are unacquainted with the history, as was the case with my wife, events seem to jump and are a bit disorienting. Had the director simply inserted at the right time in the film what is going on historically, e.g., the pact of alliance between Russia and Germany, the subsequent invasion of Russia by Germany, the occupation of Poland by Russia, etc., the movie would have flowed smoothly.

Hail, Caesar!

The first time I saw it, this film left me a bit befuddled. It took me a second time of seeing the film to truly appreciate it. Part of my initial confusion is that there were so many subplots going through the movie.

Anyway. The title of the movie is the title of the movie being filmed in the movie, sometime in the 1950s. Got that? The main star gets kidnapped held for ransom from the studio. However, the main character is Eddie Mannix, one of the head honchos of the studio and he is primarily a “fixer.” He is presented with one problem after the other and he fixes the problems. Then, he is presented with the kidnapping. The kidnapping, by the way, was carried out by Hollywood communists, who are presented as a pack of intellectual buffoons spouting Marxist jargon. Mannix at the same time is being sought after to quit his job and go work for Lockheed, but he cannot make up his mind. At one point, one of the Hollywood communists gets picked up by a Soviet sub and is presumably taken to the Iron Curtain (in actual life, one of the Hollywood 10 communists did disappear and surfaced in East Germany). There are a lot of in-jokes regarding Hollywood of the ’50s, some of which, frankly, went over my head.

Pawn Sacrifice

When I was in my early 20s, I was touring Europe and the talk everywhere by Europeans was the intense chess confrontation between Fisher and the Russians in Iceland, exemplified by Spassky. Everyone was chuckling over Fisher’s antics and Spassky’s apparent befuddlement at Bobby’s behavior, thinking that the latter was messing with the Russian’s head. They jokingly referred to Fisher as being a crazy guy and were rooting for him. What nobody knew at the time, except for a handful of individuals was that Fisher was really crazy, that his antics and demands were not psychological warfare. This secret came to light many years thereafter.

The Soviets’ philosophy was that if they excelled at chess and at the Olympics, even through cheating, then it proved that Marxist totalitarianism was superior to a Western decadent democracy, so the state-funded chess players (and athletes) and gave them special treatment, unlike the Western countries. This fact is emphasized in the film.

Unfortunately, although Liev Schreiber does a convincing and likeable Spassky, the film does not show that he was a pretty decent guy, far from the usual mindless apparatchik. At a chess tournament against the Czechoslovakian players shortly after the Soviet invasion of their country, he shook their hands even though they wore black armbands as a sign of mourning, something that the Soviet authorities got angry about. Also not shown was that after Spassky lost the tournament in Iceland and returned home, he was hassled at the Moscow airport.