RUTHFULLY YOURS

J Paul Getty might have had all the money in the world but neither all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men can save Ridley Scott’s movie again. Some viewers will remember the 1973 kidnapping of Getty’s 16 yr old grandson and the gruesome amputation of his ear after the richest man in the world refused to pay the ransom, but especially for viewers who weren’t around then, this movie will make little sense We begin with Michelle Williams as the mother of four Getty children sired by one of J Paul’s sons They soon divorce and in that settlement she agrees to take no money on condition that she get sole parental custody In rapid order, we see that her ex-husband has descended to the depths of drug addiction in Morocco where her oldest boy, Paul, loves to hang out. Yanked back to Rome where mother and siblings live, we see little of his lifestyle but from his long unkempt hair, we can guess that his father has been an unfortunate role model. He is seized off the street by a Calabrian gang that sets their opening ransom at 17 million dollars. The patriarch refused to pay anything, claiming that were he to succumb to this blackmail, there would be 14 other opportunities for kidnap and extortion, and Paolo, as he is known, is kept imprisoned by the gang for many many months.

We are left to wonder why his mother never appeals to the families of the boy’s numerous half-siblings to help her raise money. J Paul Sr had been married 5 times and presumably not all of his ex-wives were as noble and short-sighted as she was – nor do we see her try to borrow money from friends of the family, businessmen or bankers. Since she is played not as a flower child but as a common sense source of stability who wears suits and pumps, none of this behavior rings true. Though the three other children are show on screen early on, they are unaccounted for during this tragic event, leaving us to question how they are dealing with this frightening episode and why they were in the screenplay at all.

This column is not about Islam per se, but it is about the growing decrepitude of Hollywood fare. In a sense, it is about the secular version of Sharia, to conform to the nihilism of the Hollywood left. As Sharia’s purpose is to obliterate all personal values and make them Allah’s, the Hollywood left is busy obliterating them in its own manner. The decrepitude is part and parcel of current trends in the culture.

But, what is Sharia?

Total and unqualified submission to the will of Allah (God) is the fundamental tenet of Islam: Islamic law is therefore the expression of Allah’s command for Muslim society and, in application, constitutes a system of duties that are incumbent upon a Muslim by virtue of his religious belief….

The second major distinction between the Sharīa and Western legal systems is the result of the Islamic concept of law as the expression of the divine will. With the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, communication of the divine will to human beings ceased so that the terms of the divine revelation were henceforth fixed and immutable.

In short, Mohammad died, and all divine revelations ceased. His will ceased to be a power. Men would obey his will and utterances without question. This is, on the face of it, pure hokum. If he’s dead, he has no power over anyone’s actions or beliefs – except in those who want to believe in a ghost in the sky and could not live without believing there is a ghost.

The purpose of the Left’s brand of Sharia is to persuade one to conform to or compel one to surrender one’s personal values, and reason for living – for the state. For the “divine will” of the new elites, the SJWs, who will denigrate every value you might have to ensure that you have no values but their own.

My correspondent has plenty to say about what’s happening in popular culture. In this instance, she discusses the decline and ruination of The Walking Dead (TWD), in which several of the key characters, who were heroes and objects of viewer adulation, have been diminished, changed over for the worse, or given nothing significant to do. Sharia, Hollywood style, is being subtly introduced into the characters’ actions and motives. Fans may not notice it, but they will be fed Koranic “wisdom.” “Don’t be angry with your nemesis; be tolerant and friends. The main event, several seasons into the future, will be Rick, quoting the Koran, and forgiving Negan, one of the most villainous and evil characters in cinematic history, for all the deaths he has consciously caused by his own hand, especially the deaths of some of Rick’s most valued friends, with a baseball bat.

Even in the darkest hour, an impeccably dressed set: Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) prepares to kiss the hand of George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) upon his appointment as Prime Minister.

Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part – one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties – and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch. Gary Oldman’s is stylistically both a nimbler and more shambolic Churchill – boozy and blustery and blubbery, immensely secure and oddly disconnected. It is a dazzling performance of the indispensable man of the century, intelligent and insightful, yet one that caused me, by the end, a grave unease.

Churchill tends to the Churchillian, which is to say the epic. Darkest Hour, by contrast, is very finely focused. Joe Wright, director, and Edward McCarten, writer, confine their two dark hours of screen time to a couple of critical weeks in May 1940, when Hitler’s invasion of Norway precipitated Neville Chamberlain’s retreat from Downing Street. Aside from some rather elaborately choreographed overhead shots and a lush grandiose score, Darkest Hour is filmed claustrophobically – in poky sitting rooms, Downing Street basements, attics, Westminster ante-rooms, and chilly lavatories; the lighting is crepuscular. The fate of the world is being determined, but we never glimpse the far horizons, only the dingy backrooms.

What happened that month was a showdown between the two principal contenders for the Prime Ministership, Mr Churchill and Lord Halifax. Stephen Dillane is excellent as Halifax, the vulpine cadaver looking down (in every sense) from the Commons gallery at Churchill’s turns at the dispatch box. Unfortunately, aside from skillful deployments of his inscrutable yet condescending eyebrows, he gets somewhat short shrift on screen, so as a Churchill vs Halifax cage match it never quite comes off – presumably because the third Viscount Halifax is entirely unknown in Hollywood, and thus a tricky pitch. (“Third Viscount Halifax? Hey, let’s see what the first two gross before we commit to that…”)

This is a pity, because the two men were on opposite ends of the seesaw, and, capacious as Churchill’s bottom is, most of the other players – the King, Chamberlain, the parliamentary party, defeatist generals, Dominion prime ministers around the globe – were inclined to park their own butts down Halifax’s end. On May 10th, the day Winston became PM, the Germans invaded Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Ten days later, Hitler’s army reached the Channel, and was within reach of throttling the 300,000-strong British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and seizing the entire French fleet. In that dreadful month of May, Churchill wanted to fight on; Halifax preferred to use Mussolini’s “good offices” to sue for a “peace” that would leave Britain and its empire more or less “intact” – save for East Africa, Suez, Malta, Gibraltar and sundry other places that would have to be addressed, per the Italian ambassador in London, “as part of a general European settlement”.