RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm-plus/a-real-pain/

A Real Pain is a comedy-drama Holocaust-themed film. A Real Pain was written, directed, and co-produced by Jesse Eisenberg. The film depicts the journey of two cousins, David and Benji Kaplan, who travel with a tour group to Poland. The cousins’ late grandmother, Dory, was a survivor. The cousins’ journey is an effort to honor her and better understand their heritage.

Eisenberg, 41, plays David; Kieran Culkin, 42, plays Benji. A Real Pain also features Will Sharpe as James, the tour guide, and other tour members Jennifer Grey as Marcia; Kurt Egyiawan as Eloge; and Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes as Diane and Mark.

David is a happily married husband and father. He lives in an attractive brownstone and makes a good living selling ads. He suffers from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder, as does Eisenberg himself. David takes prescription medication to suppress his symptoms.

Benji is a “real pain” – as in, “a pain in the ass.” He is disruptive and socially inappropriate. Benji lives in his mother’s house and smokes a lot of marijuana. He has no committed relationships or steady work. He uses the F-word in every sentence.

David’s pain and Benji’s pain are set against the overwhelming pain of the Holocaust. The tour group members are flummoxed in their attempts to assimilate historical reality. They juxtapose their comfortable American lives with what Holocaust victims endured. They cannot craft a coherent narrative about the world or their own lives that encompasses that dichotomy.

RottenTomatoes awards A Real Pain a hefty 96% positive score. Prognosticators predict Academy Award nominations for Eisenberg, Culkin, and the film itself. Moira MacDonald, writing in the Seattle Times, speaks for many. The film “examines Jewish identity, generational trauma, sibling-like rivalry and the strangeness of being in a country you don’t recognize, but that’s nonetheless partly your own.” Other critics use superlatives like “perfect,” “radiant.” “vivid,” “moving,” “funny,” “devastating,” “masterful,” “superb,” “rueful,” “heart-swelling,” and “poignant.” Peter Travers of ABC news promises, “You’ll laugh till it hurts.”

David Fear in Rolling Stone writes, “Culkin” produces “the single greatest, funniest, most cringe-comic and heartbreaking performance.” Richard Roper, in the Chicago Sun Times, says that Culkin takes “a character who could have been a one-dimensional, shtick-reliant jerk and infuses him with vulnerability and empathy.”

https://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Dinesh D’Souza’s new film, “Vindicating Trump” hits the theatres tonight around the country, and should go a long way towards bringing the real Donald Trump to the public, including Democrats and independents. Go see it.

It’s fast-paced, it’s full of information, it has humorous moments, and it’s a polished production, so it’s a good film to see on movie night as the election seasons carries on.

Done as a tightly scripted docu-drama, and quite professionally done at that, given the short time it must have been produced in (I marvel at how quickly they must have gotten this done so smoothly), it starts with the rise of Trump and ends with the events today, but also projects into the election and the post-election, seeking answers about what voters are concerned about, which is fraud.

The storyline begins with the rise of Trump, brashness and all, and intellectually looks into first the calumny dished out against him, then the lawfare, and finally the assassination attempts, and carefully links how these trains of thinking build on one another, which makes the storyline coherent and powerful.

Some of it features actors in scenes re-enacting the chains of events that sought to take down Trump (and the acting is very good, it’s a splendid look into the minds of sleazeball political operatives, malevolent politicized government officials, and corrupted media satraps. The DoJ official named “Cliff” is particularly nasty. One of the funniest lines was between a couple of Screwtape-like characters not wanting to dig around in CNN’s “trash can” for media promoters). The wokesterly wokesters at the political operative desks are just so comically convincing. The acting here is very engaging, and you find yourself rooting for as well as wanting to throw rotten eggs the antagonists.

But it also features interviews with the actual players, including Trump himself, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump who leads the Republican National Committee, and his lawyer Alina Habba who has been present at all the Trump trials, describing what they saw and felt, and the effect is immersive and engrossing, even if you already know most of the story. 

However, that ‘most’ is merely that — there is a lot of new information and reporting within in that is well worth seeing the movie along for, particularly during the last half hour of the video, which if you see it on streaming, you may want to watch again and again.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20951/two-great-classics-values-for-our-leaders

As we read the summaries below of Robert Bolt’s “A Man for All Seasons” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men,” it could help us determine our selections when we consider what values we would like for our leaders.

“A Man for All Seasons”

What is the main message in “A Man for All Seasons”? A synopsis of the play, about a king and his chancellor, highlights the importance of integrity and conscience, especially at a time when those in power discredit those values and even punish, sometimes with death, those who insist on them?

Why is the play called A Man for All Seasons?

“The title,” notes Wikipedia, “reflects playwright Bolt’s portrayal of More as the ultimate man of conscience, remaining true to his principles and religion under all circumstances and at all times.”

In the play, King Henry VIII’s Chancellor, Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), refused to agree to two of the king’s wishes: to have the pope annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon because she had not produced an heir, and for refusing to accept King Henry as Head of the Church of England. The king ordered More beheaded in 1535.

Soon after, in 1600, Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for proposing that the Earth travelled around the sun, rather than the sun around the Earth, and that we might not be alone in the universe; that there might be a multiplicity of universes. In 1633, Galileo was shown instruments of torture and threatened with them unless he recanted his view that the Earth travelled around the sun. He recanted.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/empire-of-evil/

There’s a reason why the History Channel is often, with dark whimsy, referred to as the Hitler Channel. As I scrolled through the online TV Guide recently to check out the channel’s scheduled programming for the next few days, I discovered shows entitled The Nazis’ Secret Bases, Secrets of the Nazi War Machine, and Hitler’s Celebrations of Hate – not to mention several programs about D-Day and the ensuing “battles for Europe” between the Western Allies and the Nazis.

There was nothing remotely touching on the Soviet Union.

This is very much par for the course. Similarly, it’s no surprise that while a great many major feature films have been made about Nazi Germany, among them The Pianist, Downfall, Sophie’s Choice, Schindler’s List, Valkyrie, and Shoah. There’s only a scattering of lesser-known Hollywood pictures about the Soviet Union – notably, the obscure Gulag movie Escape from Sobibor and the TV biopic Stalin starring Robert Duvall.

Why this dramatic disparity? Because the people who write and produce feature films for the major studios, or documentaries for clients like the History Channel, have an entirely appropriate contempt for Hitler and everything he stood for. But the Russian Revolution? Lenin? Many of them – whose knowledge of history tends to have been shaped by left-wing university professors – have something of a soft spot for the people who overthrew the Romanovs. After all, the czars were pretty monstrous – most of them, anyway.

So it is that all too many people who want to make powerful films about history are happy to return yet again to the worst horrors of Nazism, but Soviet Communism? The most famous single movie about that topic is Reds, whose protagonist, the American journalist John Reed (Warren Beatty), was an eager fan of, and participant in, the Russian Revolution. Yes, the film ultimately acknowledges, sort of, that the revolution turned out not to be everything that Reed thought it was – but along the way to that conclusion we’re given a hell of a lot of stirring, heroic images of Lenin and company doing their thing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/irenas-vow/

Irena’s Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena’s Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena’s Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena’s Vow “One of the most astounding holocaust stories.” He says, “It’s true, if fantastic.” The film is “anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength.” Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, “It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that.”

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, “a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears.”

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, “About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening.” He worked for years to get the film made.

From Janet Levy Ross

In 1941 Occupied Paris, Jews are instructed to identify themselves to the authorities.  Jeweler Joseph Haffmann makes arrangement for his wife and children to flee from Vichy France and offers an employee the opportunity to take over his business and upstairs living quarters until it is safe for him to return.  As his attempts to escape and join his family are thwarted by the omnipresence of Nazis in the city, Haffman is forced to reside in the basement of his home with his employee and his wife.  Their relationship is transformed in intriguing ways but poetic justice prevails in the end.  Excellent acting by the nonpareil Daniel Auteuil and others.