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MOVIES AND TELEVISION

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.

The Power of the Dog’s Unsettled Frontier By Ross Douthat

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.

How ‘The Chosen’ embraced the best of Hollywood and showed it what people really want by Thomas Hibbs

http://www.thomashibbs.org/25907/the-chosen

You wouldn’t know it from the Hollywood buzz machine, but on the first weekend of the month, in a limited release, the film Christmas with the Chosen: The Messengers raked in 8.45 million viewers and came in fifth at the box office. Originally scheduled for a limited three-day release, it has now been extended through Christmas, even while being made available via streaming.

For those who don’t know the work, the short film is an offshoot of one of the most successful crowdfunded streaming projects in history, The Chosen, a retelling of the Gospels that focuses on the backstories of many of the major characters. Projected for seven seasons, with two already available online and a third set to begin filming shortly, crowdfunding has supported the $10 million to $18 million cost for each season.

The success of the streaming series and the Christmas film demonstrates the ongoing market draw for shows that celebrate, rather than ignore or denigrate, traditional faith. Yet many films in this subgenre offer nothing beyond predictable, polemical plotlines.

The original God’s Not Dead, released in 2015, set the pattern, with predictable characters and story. The central conflict is between an overbearing atheist professor who is forcing students to sign a God is dead statement and a rebellious Christian student. The latest installment (God’s Not Dead: We The People) is even more polemical as it shifts, following a strain of contemporary evangelicalism, in the direction of putting faith in the service of direct political advocacy.

The Chosen is different. Accompanied by Bible study-guides and created by Dallas Jenkins, whose father penned the Left Behind book series, the series and the film might seem to be more of the same. Yet, Jenkins repudiates the notion that this is a “stick-it-to-Hollywood thing,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Inspired to become a film-maker after watching the Jack Nicholson film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and who likens The Chosen to rich character-driven dramas like Friday Night Lights, Jenkins combines the best of Hollywood with the best traditional storytelling techniques.

The series and spinoff film pose the question what might it have been like to have encountered the person of Jesus in the course of ordinary daily life, to have lived, dined, traveled, laughed and mourned with him. And what might it have been like to begin to wonder about the strange capacities of knowing, healing and forgiving of this otherwise seemingly ordinary human being. The result is a captivating human drama invested with deep spiritual significance.

The Chosen series, whose episodes have been viewed more than 312 million times, is unique. It is sympathetic to faith in ways that Hollywood finds difficult. Yet in its openness to the best of Hollywood and in its avoidance of culture wars and political diatribes, it is atypical of faith-based films.

Its popularity is a good sign for our culture and for art. It reflects our exhaustion with politics and our longing for meaning that transcends ideological battles.

Especially in the faith-based audience, there is a hunger for depictions of faith that include, rather than rule out, doubt. In one episode, Peter — here portrayed as a desperate fisherman with a gambling problem and mounting debts — complains to God, on behalf of the Jewish people: “You can’t decide whether we’re chosen or not.”

Viewers also want to see complex depictions of the struggle with evil in the depths of the human soul. While Hollywood continues with some regularity to produce fantastical and absurd stories of exorcism, the story of Mary Magdalene, in the inaugural episode of The Chosen, is a compelling and chilling account of what it might mean to be in the grip of evil. Her eventual encounter with Jesus fills her and the audience with surprise and awe.

The brilliance of The Chosen is to take the most influential story of all time and to make it fresh, not by altering it to suit contemporary fads, but by inviting us to inhabit the perspectives of Jesus’ contemporaries. In its use of indirection and in its focus on surprise and wonder, The Chosen adopts both the method of the Gospels and the tools of genuine art. It thus opens a fresh path, one with lessons for both faith-based and mainstream Hollywood filmmaking.

It’s a Bad Time for the Wokes at the Box Office Daniel Greenfield

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.

What Spielberg Gets (Surprisingly) Right in West Side Story By Jack Cashill

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.

Why Must James Bond Be Reinvented as ‘Non-Binary’? By Jim Geraghty

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.

Why ‘West Side Story’ Flopped On Opening Weekend By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-west-side-story-flopped-on-opening-weekend/

I assume Steven Spielberg’s $100 million remake of West Side Story isn’t being advertised quite as heavily in your neighborhood, but on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I live, you can scarcely take a breath without being hit with advertising for the movie. 20th Century Studios/Disney treated this as an event movie, it had the weekend all to itself, it had considerable critical acclaim/hype and some of the target demographic (the theater community, extending out to everyone who ever performed in the show in high school) was intensely interested.

Unfortunately, the movie also suffers from having no stars (sorry, Ansel Elgort, but you make Timothée Chalamet look like Marlon Brando) and it’s based on a property that may be beloved by people over 50 but is, I suspect, totally unknown to those under 40.  People over 50 don’t go to the movies. The single comment I most often hear from people when I tell them I’m a film critic is, “Oh, I haven’t been to the movies in years.” TV is where it’s at these days. West Side Story is on track to gross $10.2 million in North America on its opening weekend — less than the $11.5 million earned by In the Heights in June, even though In the Heights is a little-known property and it debuted on HBO Max the same day. Certainly, the public sense that the pandemic was over in June provided a boost and the reverse is true six months later.

West Side Story is, despite the terrific songs and attempts to update it, still an extremely dated property — corny, maudlin, contrived, phony. I saw it in a huge theater full of enthusiastic fans, and even there reaction was muted. It just isn’t that great. Word of mouth is not going to help this movie earn out.

Fauci on Film White coat supremacy in cinéma vérité. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/12/fauci-film-lloyd-billingsley/

EXCERPTS

Dr. Anthony Fauci, Joe Biden’s chief medical advisor, claims that his critics are “really criticizing science because I represent science.” That was also the theme of Fauci, a hagiographical documentary released back on October 6.

According to Disney+ promotional materials, Fauci is “the ultimate public servant” facing attacks from adversaries, with “science increasingly caught in the crosshairs.” Fortunately, a more cinéma vérité portrayal has been around for some time.

Fauci’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in Communist China, where gain-of-function research could be conducted in secret, with no accountability. In early 2020, Fauci praised China’s handling of the pandemic and initially opposed President Trump’s ban on travel from China. Like Ash, Fauci basically let the Covid virus come aboard.

In similar style in November, 2021, Fauci delayed a travel ban on Omicron-infected African countries and quickly announced that Omicron had arrived in the USA, just in time for the holidays. If some replicated scientific study supported these developments, it has yet to be made public.

With “this degree of transmissibility,” Omicron is going to be “all over,” proclaimed Dr. Fauci, who ought to know. The research NIAID funded at the WIV aimed to increase, not decrease, the transmissibility and lethality of viruses. For Fauci, the covid virus is the perfect organism. It can’t be killed and appears in endless variation. The virus empowers bureaucrats and politicians to impose restrictions, shut down sectors of the economy, demonize their critics, spend vast amounts of money, and portray themselves as heroes.

Anthony Fauci is most responsible for the lockdowns that wrecked the surging Trump economy and inflicted untold suffering on millions of people. Fauci backed New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who sent some 15,000 people to their deaths in nursing homes. Cuomo claimed he was following federal policy, but when CNN asked Fauci if that was true, the man who claims to represent science declined to answer.

The robot science officer Ash had no conscience or remorse. Like Ash, Dr. Fauci holds back any admissions of error or lapses in judgment. The NIAID boss, soon to turn 81, shows little if any sympathy with embattled Americans. Unlike Ash, Fauci has an extensive back story.

Anthony Fauci earned a medical degree in 1966 but his bio shows no advanced degrees in molecular biology or biochemistry. To avoid treating wounded American GIs in Vietnam, Fauci took a cushy “yellow beret” job at the National Institutes of Health. 

Fauci became NIAID boss in 1984 but Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, who earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, thought Fauci was unqualified. According to Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction, Fauci “doesn’t understand electron microscopy and he doesn’t understand medicine. He should not be in a position like he’s in.” But he is, and now claims to represent science itself. That smacks of megalomania, but there’s more to the man.

Fauci wields executive-level power but never has to face the voters or secure the consent of the governed.  As Joe Biden said on December 2, “Hey look, who’s president? Fauci.” Biden thus certifies white coat supremacy, a form of totalitarianism. If that seems a stretch, consider what Fauci told a McGill University audience in October: 

“There comes a time when you do have to give up what you consider your individual right of making your own decision, for the greater good of society.”  The ultimate public servant thus reveals his inner Duce, his inner Stalin.

Fauci and NIH boss Francis Collins both lied about funding gain-of-function research. Both deserve a criminal investigation but that is unlikely under the Biden Junta. With this crew, white coat supremacists stand above the law.

A Good Word for Melbourne’s Queer Film Festival Timothy Cootes

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2021/12/a-good-word-for-melbournes-queer-film-festival/

“Although they may shudder to hear it from from Quadrant, we should offer three hearty cheers for the organisers and schedulers of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival. For once, when the anti-Zionist cancel mob came howling to have an Israeli film scratched from the programme, the organisers told them what to do with their complaints.”

he Melbourne Queer Film Festival (MQFF), I suspect, is not an event to which many Quadrant readers will have rushed to secure tickets. This fixture on the LGBT-etc calendar, squeezed in between Carols by Queerlight (self-explanatory) and Southern HiBearnation (no, Google ‘bear’ for yourselves) offers attendees two weeks of cinematic merry-making, or so I’d been led to believe. The theme of this year’s event, I’m sorry to report, is frequent sniping and a decided lack of chirpiness, and I see little prospect of renewed cheer occurring before closing night.

The trouble began with the inclusion in the lineup of Adam Kalderon’s film The Swimmer, a story about a gay Olympics prospect, the institutional discrimination he faces and his struggle for self-acceptance. Topical and important issues, the reviewers would say. The film also features, I have been reliably informed, lingering close-ups of strapping young fellows in Speedos. For many viewers, that all sounds like a jolly night at the cinema, so one could be excused for wondering what all the bloody fuss is about.

Well, The Swimmer, you see, is an Israeli production, and it turns out that screening such a film is something of a festival faux pas. As soon as the incriminating schedule arrived in the inbox, there was a good deal of inquiry as to why MQFF had failed to adopt the expected policy of anti-Israel fanaticism. A vigorous social media campaign soon got underway, urging MQFF to drop the film, apologise for all the bruised feelings, and commit to being a better ally in the future.

This noisy reaction is due to the fact that some portion of the festival’s supporters also happen to be enlistees in Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), a movement which seeks to extirpate all traces of Israel’s business, cultural and general dealings with the rest of the world. One of the many accusations they bung around is pinkwashing, a term which calls for a bit of elucidation.