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MOVIES AND TELEVISION

The False Gospel of the Enemies Within the Church By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/03/the_false_gospel_of_the_enemies_within_the_church.html

An unholy crusade to infiltrate the bastions of Christianity and co-opt churches in the revolution began more than a hundred years ago

Christianity has been intricately intertwined with the history and development of America and greatly contributed to its strength.  Judeo-Christian morality, in fact, has been the compass and one of the most powerful influences on Western society.  So, the Marxists see Christianity as the main obstacle to overthrowing Westphalian principles of sovereignty. To them, the church is the most crucial institution to conquer to usher in the New World Order.  They know that if the churches fail – especially in America, which represents the phenomenal success of capitalism and individualism – the entire culture, including politics, will move to the Left. 

Most Americans will be surprised to learn that an unholy crusade to infiltrate the bastions of Christianity and co-opt churches in the revolution began more than a hundred years ago. It is now threatening to gain critical mass.

This danger is the subject of a new film, Enemies Within the Church, produced by Cary Gordon, Trevor Loudon, and Judd Saul.  It chronicles the destructive infiltration of the churches and the injection of “wokeism” — Marxism, social justice, Critical Race Theory, gender fluidity – into church doctrine.  The choir of radical Left ideology, having targeted and gradually co-opted the media, Hollywood, Big Tech, the unions, and the political parties, set its sights on penetrating and controlling the churches, a difficult, long-term endeavor.  And, as the film explains, the communists eventually succeeded in penetrating the Bible colleges, seminaries, and pulpits of many denominations to push Christianity in the direction they want.

Will Smith Strikes and Berates Chris Rock During Live Oscar Broadcast By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/will-smith-appears-to-strike-and-berate-chris-rock-during-live-oscar-broadcast/?utm_

Will Smith lost his temper after presenter Chris Rock made a joke about his wife’s haircut at the Oscars tonight. ABC apparently censored the moment by silencing the feed for a few seconds, but here’s what happened.

Jada Pinkett Smith, with a shaved head, was seated at a table up front with her husband Will. Rock: “Jada, I love you, G.I. Jane 2, can’t wait to see it!” Will Smith then came up on stage, appeared to strike Rock, and the audience seemed to react as though this were a scripted bit. But Smith twice shouted, “KEEP MY WIFE’S NAME OUT YOUR F***IN MOUTH!” and the crowd went silent. I don’t think Smith’s reaction was scripted. UPDATE: Jada Pinkett Smith suffers from alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss.

Here’s the moment as someone caught it without ABC’s censorship. Warning: profanity.

Tirades by Twits Closing in on half a century of political rants at the Oscars. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/03/tirades-twits-bruce-bawer/

It all goes back to the 1970s, as do so many of the worst features of contemporary American society and culture. At the 1974 Oscar ceremony, Roger Moore and Liv Ullmann stepped onstage to present the Best Actor award. For some reason, Ullmann decided to quote her frequent collaborator Ingmar Bergman: “Often to be most eloquent is to be silent.” This aperçu didn’t seem particularly relevant at the moment, but about five minutes later it would seem the very deepest wisdom.

Anyway, Moore and Ullmann broke out the envelope. The winner: Marlon Brando for The Godfather. But the person who walked down the aisle to accept the award wasn’t Brando. It was a young woman in an American Indian getup straight out of Central Casting. When Moore held the statuette out to her, she held up her palm to refuse it. And then she spoke.

“Hello. My name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I’m Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee. I’m representing Marlon Brando this evening.” Brando, she explained, was turning down his Oscar in protest against “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry…and on television in movie re-runs.” He was, she added, also displeased by the government’s aggressive response to the recent occupation of the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, by members of the Oglala Lakota tribe.

‘The Saboteurs’: Stopping Hitler’s Atomic Bomb Joe Dolce

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/01/the-saboteurs-stopping-hitlers-atomic-bomb/

The six-part television series The Saboteurs (2015, originally titled Kampen om Tungtvannet, “The Heavy Water War”) was directed by Per-Olav Sørensen, written by Petter S. Rosenlund and produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The story focuses on the Nazis’ efforts to develop an atomic bomb during the Second World War and how they were foiled by a small group of Norwegian resistance fighters.

The series is told from four different perspectives: the German side, the Allies’ side, the saboteurs’ point of view, and that of Norsk Hydro, the plant ordered to produce the rare and essential component for the construction of an atomic weapon: heavy water, or deuterium oxide.

The series begins in Berlin in 1938. Hitler has been in control of Germany since 1933. Professor Werner Karl Heisenberg, recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics, is invited to lecture at Columbia University but he refuses to leave Germany. He is visited by the SS and interrogated about his refusal to join the Nazi Party or participate in the 1938 Nuremberg Rally, and for quoting Jews, such as Max Born and Albert Einstein, in his research papers.  

As a chastisement, he is ordered to report for army duty but a last-minute letter from Himmler (whose mother was a friend of Heisenberg’s mother) gains him an exemption from fighting because, as Himmler states, “Germany
needs its scientists.”

Netflix: American Patriots = Neo-Nazis A time-travel thriller demonizes Hollywood’s favorite targets as terrorists. Mark Tapson

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/02/netflix-neo-nazis-american-patriots-mark-tapson/

The Nazis have always been Hollywood’s go-to villains, the bad guys every American who isn’t an antisemite or eugenicist can agree are the epitome of evil. They also serve as a convenient substitute when Hollywood doesn’t want to address America’s real-world enemies; in 2001, for example, when filmmakers were adapting Tom Clancy’s thriller The Sum of All Fears for the big screen, they changed the antagonists from Arab terrorists to European neo-Nazis. But Hollywood’s neo-Nazis of today are – you guessed it – American patriots.

Case in point: In the Shadow of the Moon, a late 2019 addition to Netflix’s repertoire which is unlikely to have been seen by the vast and growing numbers of conservatives who have cancelled their subscription to the left-leaning streaming giant, the home of production deals with such radicals as Barack and Michelle Obama, Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors, and anthem-protesting Colin Kaepernick. For that matter, the movie is unlikely to have been seen by very many people of any political stripe, because it’s not worth watching; its audience rating at the Rotten Tomatoes movie review site is a blah 40, and the rating at Metacritics isn’t much higher (I watch these things so you don’t have to). But the film is notable as a reminder that the entertainment industry is the left’s most powerful weapon for fashioning and disseminating the narrative that American patriots are actually white supremacist domestic terrorists threatening to push the country into a hot civil war.

Hollywood Wokeness Is Becoming a Parody of Itself Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2022/01/hollywood-wokeness-becoming-parody-itself-daniel-greenfield/

If only someone in the industry had the guts to actually give this garbage the ridicule it deserves.

Actor Peter Dinklage is questioning the upcoming live-action remake of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” saying it “makes no sense” why Disney is retelling the “backwards story.”

“No offense to anybody, I was a little taken aback when they were very proud to cast a Latina actress as Snow White. You’re still telling the story of ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.’ Take a step back and look at what you’re doing there. It makes no sense to me,” said Dinklage.

“You’re progressive in one way and you’re still making that f—ing backwards story about seven dwarfs living in a cave together, what the f— are you doing man?” Dinklage added. “Have I done nothing to advance the cause from my soapbox? I guess I’m not loud enough.”

“All love and respect to the actress and the people who thought they were doing the right thing, but I’m just saying, what are you doing?” the actor added. “And if you tell the story of Snow White with the most f—— up, cool, progressive spin on it, let’s do it. All in. But I don’t know.”

An Insider Mocks the Endless Progressive Guilt Trip By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/01/an-insider-mocks-the-endless-progressive-guilt-trip/

Jesse Eisenberg’s directorial debut When You Finish Saving the World skewers the culture of liberal self-scourging.

A n intensely determined social worker played by Julianne Moore drives to work listening to equally intense classical music suggesting her utter, lifelong focus on a dramatic struggle for social justice. Then the camera pulls back to reveal the car she’s in: a pathetic, absurd, lawnmower-sized demi-car.

That’s the kind of perfect juxtaposition — funny, cutting, woefully accurate — that characterizes every smartly-designed scene in When You Finish Saving the World, the sly directorial debut of actor-writer Jesse Eisenberg. Eisenberg (who also wrote the movie, which began as a podcast) politely but devastatingly lampoons the sorts of people he grew up with and works among. And the Sundance Film Festival (where slick Beverly Hills dealmakers in $1,500 ski jackets solemnly take part in “land acknowledgment” ceremonies to parade their guilt about being the heirs of colonialism) is the perfect showcase for the film. Sundance (which is a virtual fest this year) has always hosted an intriguing balance of ruthless Hollywood ambition and silly liberal self-scourging. It can only benefit from taking in a bit of satiric blasphemy about its audience’s culture and politics.

Making Heroes of Muslim Terrorists, Slavers, and Rapists A look at a new Turkish television series. Raymond Ibrahim

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/making-heroes-muslim-terrorists-slavers-and-raymond-ibrahim/

Unlike their Western counterparts, many Muslims are fond of their heroes of the past — particularly the jihadist types who for centuries thrived on terrorizing the West.

This was recently underscored by Barbaros: Sword of the Mediterranean, a television series written and produced in Turkey that aired late last year, and is dedicated to highlighting the clash between Islam and Christendom — in a way, of course, that demonizes the latter and extols the former.

The highly fictionalized series revolves around four Muslim brothers and their naval exploits and battles against the Christian maritime states of the Mediterranean.

While the series portrays the brothers as great heroes who sacrificed much to “defend” the Ottoman Empire against Christian Europe, history — real, actual, recorded history — has a different tale to tell.

The Movie Chinese Communists Hate the Most? By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/the_movie_chinese_communists_hate_the_most.html

Some films are chilling because their fiction penetrates the agonizing core of reality.  The soon to be released Unsilenced, from award-winning Chinese-Canadian filmmaker Leon Lee, is a prime example.  It brings into sharp focus the oppression unleashed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Falun Gong, a movement that emphasizes ethical conduct, qigong exercises, and meditation.  Fearing that Falun Gong would overtake it in popularity, the party has since 1999 been persecuting practitioners with arrest, torture, forced labor, menticide, and execution.  But an underground resistance has established itself, led by ordinary Falun Gong practitioners pushed by extraordinary circumstances into heroic acts.

The film’s lead character, Wang (played by Ting Wu), is based on Wang Weiyu, a survivor of China’s prisons and labor camps.  Wang and his friends pay a heavy price for fighting back.  But with the help of journalist Daniel Davis (played by Sam Trammell), they succeed in getting the word out on the plight of the Falun Gong.  Leading the crackdown against them is the sadistic Secretary Yang (played by Tzu-Chiang Wang).

Although Lee has been living in Canada since 2006, he is no stranger to Falun Gong or the CCP’s atrocities.  His documentary Human Harvest (2014) exposed China’s demonic removal and sale of organs from prisoners and inmates at labor camps.  Many of these are Falun Gong practitioners.  The documentary was broadcast in more than 25 countries and won the Peabody Award.

His Letter from Masanjia (2018) is an equally heartrending true story of a note found in a box of Halloween decorations by an Oregon resident.  The writer of the note is Sun Yi, a Falun Gong practitioner held at an infamous labor camp where the decorations were made.  Tracing Sun Yi after his release, collaborating with him via surreptitious Skype calls, and instructing him on how to use a camera, Lee put together the story of what happens in the CCP’s labor camps.  Sun Yi risked it all and later made his way to Indonesia, since China allows travel there without a passport.  He died in 2017 in Indonesia, most likely poisoned by Chinese agents.

Lee’s company, Flying Cloud Productions, remains committed to bringing “human rights violations to light in both documentary and narrative filmmaking.”  His films are among the most pirated in China, and he often receives emails from anonymous Chinese viewers stupefied by the content they hasten to share, evidence that Falun Gong may be reigniting hope in the People’s Republic.

The filming of Unsilenced, which took place in Taiwan, was replete with challenges.  During production, Taiwanese fighter jets scrambled to intercept Chinese planes intruding Taiwan’s airspace.  Many film professionals shied away from the production, cast and crew used aliases or remained anonymous, and a few actors quit after being threatened.  Lee was under constant pressure to recruit new talent and scout for alternative locations as filming permission would suddenly be withdrawn.  There were post-production hitches, too.  The owner of the Canadian production company wouldn’t risk listing his name in the credits.  Chinese students at Boston University were enlisted to protest a screening of the movie.  The film is as much a testament to his persistence as that of its protagonists.

The Left (Unwittingly?) Spoofs Itself in Don’t Look Up By Jack Cashill

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/12/the_left_unwittingly_spoofs_self_in_dont_look_up_.html

The rumor that the Netflix film, Don’t Look Up, is an allegory about climate change is true. Writer/director Adam McKay, a self-declared democratic socialist and Bernie fan, has admitted as much. In fact, McKay calls climate change “the biggest story in 66 million years. It’s the biggest story in the history of upright apes.” That much acknowledged, my skeptical friends on the right have found the film much more amusing than those on the left. My only question is whether McKay is Bernie Bro’ enough to have intended that outcome.

Spoiler alert: Don’t Look Up tells the story of a planet-killing comet hurtling towards earth. After watching the first ten minutes of it, I thought it a comedy, a pretty amusing one at that. At Christmas dinner, my Democratic friends assured me it wasn’t a comedy and warned me not to finish it before going to bed. I did anyhow and smiled all the way through to its laugh-out-loud epilogue. Yes, the movie is a comedy. It is scary, I suppose, to those like New York Times reviewer Monohla Dargis who believe that the future of the planet is “too terrifying” to contemplate and its inhabitants “too numb, dumb, [and] powerless” to amuse. “If you weep,” writes Darghis, “it may not be from laughing.”

The Right laughs because they know something the Left does not. In that the movie is about information flow, the Right knows who controls it. In an unusually honest article from February 2021, Time magazine boasted of the “well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.” This cabal, according to Time, “were not rigging the [2020] election; they were fortifying it.” Sure, whatever.