RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/12/27/the-power-of-the-dogs-unsettled-frontier/#slide-1

A movie that actually deserves its Oscar buzz.

In an age of strong ideological pressures, there’s an unusual frisson when a drama sets up a group of archetypes, develops them in what seem at first like very politically predictable ways — and then suddenly takes the story somewhere well outside of the audience’s moral expectations. That’s the case with The Power of the Dog, a historical drama currently being held up as an Oscar front-runner: It plays for a while as a western version of The Shape of Water — the tediously Manichaean Best Picture winner that helped usher in the Age of Woke — only to take a third-act detour into much stranger and darker territory. Or rather, what feels like a detour — until you reach the end, think back, and realize that the turn was coming all along.

The movie is the first film from Jane Campion since 2009’s Bright Star; in the interim she made the murder serial Top of the Lake, which is a good example of how a drama can conform to ideological expectations — it’s a feminist-themed story about the horrors that wicked men inflict on women and children — and still be absolutely terrific.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/12/its-bad-time-wokes-box-office-daniel-greenfield/

Steven Spielberg’s Woke Side Story crashed and burned already. Defenders were hoping that the holiday season box office would bail it out, but considering its $100 million budget (not counting promotional cost), it would take a lot of bailing and there’s no sign of it happening.

Politico, among others, dedicated high-profile articles promoting The Matrix Resurrections and its effort to “un-red pill America”.

That’s not going so well either.

The webbed wonder swung past the White Rabbit on Christmas Eve.

In the battle of the holiday season sequels, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” continued its box office dominance Friday, taking in $19.7 million, according to Box Office Mojo.

In second place was the family friendly “Sing 2,” which sold $5.3 million in tickets. The poorly reviewed fourth installment of the “Matrix” franchise, “The Matrix Resurrections,” took in just $2.7 million.

The third installment of director Jon Watts’ Spidey series, which stars Tom Holland, is on pace to earn up to $100 million over the weekend and $478 million in its first 10 days in domestic theaters, Variety reported.

It probably doesn’t help that the studio is hedging its bets, releasing TMR on HBO Max and then swinging back to an exclusive theatrical release in some complicated formula that probably made sense in boardroom meetings, but not to the general public.

But things aren’t looking very good.

Wokeness is very much a part of the Hollywood culture industry, but it also looks like some of the worst offenders are taking a beating.

Older adults have largely dropped out of going to movies and young audiences weren’t going that often before the pandemic. Alienating sizable chunks of the potential audience is not proving to be a good formula for Hollywood.

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

I had serious reservations about the Steven Spielberg version of the film classic West Side Story.  Rumors of wokeness haunted the new movie from the first casting call through to its dismal opening weekend.  I expected to wince throughout, but Spielberg did something brave and unexpected.  He gave the Jets a rationale for their existence and their resistance.

The 1961 original did not.  As a 14-year-old living in a “transitional” neighborhood very much like the one the Jets and Sharks inhabited and not far away, I fully identified with the white gang, the Jets.  My friends, even my black friends, did as well.  Despite our affection for our homies, we had a grudging respect for the Puerto Rican gang, the Sharks.  Their guys were arguably cooler, their girls hotter.

Missed by liberal observers, then and now, is that vestigial urban whites saw Puerto Ricans not as another “race,” but as another ethnic group, no more alien than Italians were to Irish or Irish were to Germans in generations past.  Like Tony, we would definitely date their girls if they’d have us.  The absurd racial delineation for “Hispanics” would come later.

As much as I liked the original movie, however, it struck me even then as a confection.  The Jets were too soft, feckless, even, especially Tony, their legendary leader.  They seemed ungrounded, their defiance more cinematic than real.  Spielberg’s critical revision was to root the new version in the real world of New York’s West Side circa the late 1950s.  Much has been said about the “texture” he gave to the Puerto Rican characters, but he gave equal texture to the Jets.  That is what surprised me.  It would have been so easy in today’s environment to portray them as Archie Bunkers in training, Proud Boy wannabes, but he chose not to.

As the film makes clear from the opening scenes, redevelopers were leveling whole West Side neighborhoods to make way for the Lincoln Center complex.  In fact, the producers of the original film used the vacated but as yet un-demolished buildings as backdrop for the street scenes.  In this version, a wrecking ball seems to hover over every shot.  The Jets and Sharks are contesting for limited space in a shrinking universe.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-must-james-bond-be-reinvented-as-non-binary/

Perhaps the woman who’s running the James Bond franchise is just speaking off the cuff and not ruling anything out, and not signaling an intent to overhaul one of the most iconic characters in the history of movies to comport to woke sensibilities.

James Bond could be a non-binary character in the future, the boss of the 007 franchise has suggested in an interview.

Barbra Broccoli, who co-owns Eon Productions — the production company behind the franchise — didn’t rule this out in a recent interview on the Girls on Film podcast.

The 61-year-old producer said she thinks James Bond should be a man’s role — as more films should be made about women, rather than having women playing traditionally male roles.

She added: “So I think Bond will be a man.”

And when podcast host Anna Smith asked whether the role could be non-binary in the future, Barbara said: “Who knows? I mean, I think it’s open. We just have to find the right actor.”

But if this isn’t just a stray thought, and the next time we see James Bond on screen, the character will suavely look at some femme fatale and declare, “Nonbinary. Very nonbinary . . .” then some of us will be left shaken, not stirred.

This continues the unpleasant new trend of taking an established and beloved character and changing the character to fit some sort of woke category, instead of starting afresh with a new character in that woke category. Thor’s a woman! Sulu is now gay! Dr. Who is a woman! Superman is going to be black next time, reportedly!

There’s no reason that talented and creative producers couldn’t make a thrilling and exciting spy series featuring a a nonbinary protagonist. Sure, some segment of the audience might be initially wary or repelled by this aspect of the character, and another segment of the audience would be initially excited or intrigued by this aspect of the character. In the end, the movie would rise or fall based on how compelling, interesting, and appealing that protagonist is — and hopefully a good antagonist, plot, thrilling action scenes, and so on. Lots of white people paid to watch Black Panther, and the Zorro movies, and Bruce Lee movies, and so on.