RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/dave_chappelles_new_show_has_some_truths_and_a_big_antisemitic_lie.html

“Chappelle has become embittered in the last year, with an ugly vein of anger behind his often flabby jokes.”

Dave Chappelle has been rightly celebrated for being willing to speak the truth about transgenderism; namely, that there are two genders and people cannot change their gender simply because they want to. But while applauding that truth and his courage in today’s world to state it, what we cannot ignore is Dave Chappelle’s Big Lie, which was his attack on Jews using the ancient anti-Semitic trope that they seek world dominance, along with the modern Muslim trope that they’re attempting genocide against Palestinians.

What most conservatives heard once Netflix released Dave Chappelle’s latest show was that he bucked the transgender crowd and stated that “gender is a fact”:

“Gender is a fact,” Chappelle says , according to a Daily Beast report of his sixth special on the streaming platform. “Every human being in this room, every human being on Earth, had to pass through the legs of a woman to be on Earth. That is a fact. Now, I am not saying that to say trans women aren’t women, I am just saying that those p*****s that they got … you know what I mean? I’m not saying it’s not p***y, but it’s Beyond P***y or Impossible P***y.”

He’s vulgar but that’s the truth, and bravo to Chappelle for stating it.

Over the years, Chappelle has won plaudits for speaking the truth about lots of things. He’s responsible for one of the best comedy sketches about race that I’ve ever seen. If you haven’t watched his skit about the Black White Supremacist (which is, of course, filled with foul language, so be warned), you’re missing an incredibly astute commentary about the true meaninglessness of race as a way of determining our values:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/10/sopranos_prequel_goes_squishy_on_the_sixties.html

This weekend, I went to the theater to see the Sopranos prequel, The Many Saints of Newark. I watched with the kind of critical eye an astrophysicist might have brought to Star Wars.

At the time of the 1967 Newark riot, the foundational event of the movie, I was a 19-year-old living in Newark with my siblings and widowed mother. My late father had been a Newark cop, and my Uncle Bob, also a cop, was in the thick of the riot from the initial assault on the Fourth Precinct to its bloody end 26 deaths later.

Of note, too, Bob had married into a large Newark Italian family. As a kid, I spent considerable time in the family compound. I knew how that world turned. David Chase should have. An Italian American a few years older than I am, Chase created the stellar HBO series, The Sopranos, and was the creative force behind the movie. In the series, which ran from 1999-2007, there was scarcely a false note. In the movie, alas, scarcely a note rings true. 

Not surprisingly, given the times we live in, race is at the heart of the movie’s misfire. As Chase told a friendly interviewer, he was living in a Newark suburb when the riot erupted. Watching from afar, he and his suburban friends told each other, “I hope they burn that place down, those motherf**kers. Corrupt, c**k-sucking white people.” The “white people” Chase refers to here included not only my family and me, but also — to the detriment of the movie — the characters who people it, cops and gangsters alike.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/review-fauci-a-phony-big-screen-doc/

Deconstructing National Geographic’s propaganda pitch.

You might be one of those people who never want to see Anthony Fauci’s face on TV again — or not. But it’s likely that the man himself will be broadcast and rebroadcast continuously, using the power status that Fauci has attained to further the current administration’s COVID protocols. There’s no better insight into this ideological puffery than the publicity campaign for the new documentary Fauci. This fascinating aspect of film culture is crafty and demands close scrutiny.

Presented by National Geographic, the same outfit responsible for Genius, the other Aretha Franklin biopic, Fauci is being sold with similar veneration. It’s not a film about science but about “following the science” of public leadership — as when politicians assert cant such as “Don’t question my authority.” You don’t expect cant from NG. The trust built up from decades of that iconic yellow-framed print magazine, with its vivid photographs of natural phenomena, makes us susceptible. NG’s film division is now the opposite of informative and wide-ranging; its political bias now resembles NPR’s. The Fauci doc typifies the continued narrowcasting of popular media into the congealed “mainstream” perspective.

And the pitch behind Fauci shows how. NG sneaks past old presumptions about the idea of “documentary.” (Blame the genre’s degeneration on Rob Reiner’s fictitious This Is Spinal Tap, where popularizing “factoids” — familiar legends and speculations — rather than truth created that new phony genre of the “mockumentary.”)

The selling of Fauci mocks our credulousness, increased by high-pressure COVID-19 fear-mongering, another advertising phenomenon. Fauci’s press release urges viewers (and media hacks) to accept the doc on the filmmakers’ non-objective terms: “With his signature blend of scientific acumen, candor, and integrity, Dr. Anthony Fauci became America’s most unlikely cultural icon during the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Gullible reviewers are unlikely to suspect this seemingly innocuous description: “A world-renowned infectious disease specialist and the longest-serving public-health leader in Washington, D.C., he has overseen the U.S. response to 40 years’ worth of outbreaks, including HIV/AIDS, SARS, and Ebola.” The doc leans on Fauci’s role during the AIDS crisis to suggest he’s empathetic. (He’s shown reading the New York Times, quoting The Godfather, bragging about his Brooklyn roots.)

Scamming media naïfs, the release boasts the doc’s exclusivity, claiming that it’s “crafted around unprecedented access to Dr. Fauci.”

That should be the giveaway for any sharp viewer not on the NG payroll. The word “access” means collaboration from a brigade of celebrities. The lineup of their names makes for the release’s most startling clause:

The film features insights from former President George W. Bush, Bill Gates, Bono, former national-security adviser Susan Rice, National Institutes of Health director Dr. Francis Collins, former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Dr. Tom Frieden, journalists Laurie Garrett and the New York Times’ Apoorva Mandavilli.

These aristocrats affirm Fauci’s bona fides and give tribute. They’re what gossip columns call “boldface names,” and they’re also all partisan, as is the film’s tagline: “a revealing portrait of one of our most dedicated public servants.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/no-sudden-move-review-a-noir-with-heart-and-smarts-11625172442?mod=hp_lead_pos13

Every time “Out of Sight” turns up on TV I’m hooked once again. Whatever I’m doing must stop while I watch at least a few minutes of Steven Soderbergh’s 1998 comedy of interstate criminal behavior, with a peerlessly romantic encounter between Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney that plays out in a Detroit hotel lounge on a snowy winter night. The director’s latest, “No Sudden Move,” takes place entirely in Detroit, though romance is hardly the mode. An exceedingly convoluted crime thriller set in 1954, and streaming on HBO Max, this is pitch-black noir with so many betrayals that the characters can’t fathom the various plots they’re caught up in. Yet it’s another Soderbergh film whose allure is sure to endure. Whenever it shows or streams in years to come, I know I’ll be happily in its thrall.

At its simplest the story concerns someone looking for someone to do some reliable work, meaning a shadowy piece of business—extracting an unspecified document from an office safe—commissioned by a shadowy middleman, Brendan Fraser’s Jones, on behalf of an anonymous employer. (A quick word about those shadows. Mr. Soderbergh shot the film himself, as he has often done, and his cinematography draws ravishingly beautiful distinctions between total darkness and a palette of brooding colors that represent the participants’ plights.)

The first hire is Curt Goynes, a petty criminal with a blighted past played by Don Cheadle. Soon he’s joined by Benicio Del Toro’s charmingly devious Ronald Russo. Both men are supervised by Kieran Culkin’s Charley, who’s too sleazy to have a last name, on a surprise visit to the suburbs, where an attractive couple and their two kids live in a pleasant brick house. Every time a new set of characters is introduced, the screenplay, by Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), ups its ante of tension. That’s true of the suburban family, particularly the brittle, cheerful mother, Mary Wertz ( Amy Seimetz ), and the father, Matt Wertz (David Harbour), a man of not-so-quiet desperation who knows someone who knows the safe’s combination.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/review-thomas-sowell-common-sense-in-a-senseless-world/

An inspiring one-hour documentary about the conservative public intellectual Thomas Sowell serves as a superb intro to his thinking.

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 50 years ago, a liberal 25 years ago, and a racist today.” Thomas Sowell, who combines a Mark Twain-level gift for apothegms with the rigor of a data scientist, said that back in 1998, but like many of his sparkling one-liners, it’s more strikingly true now than ever.

At 90, Sowell remains “one of the great minds of the past half century,” as host Jason L. Riley puts it in the one-hour PBS documentary Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World, which can be viewed here, but fair warning: This film is a gateway drug. You are bound to get hooked on Sowell, just like many others interviewed in the film. These include podcaster Dave Rubin, a Silicon Valley executive with Overstock.com; a Dallas rapper named Eric July from the band Backwordz; and Sowell’s friend Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor and linguist. Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and author, makes a perfect guide because he is the Sowell whisperer: His new book Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, is about to hit shelves.

In a film written and produced by Tom Jennings, Riley takes us through how Sowell, who lost his dad before he was born and his mother when he was a small child, rose from poverty. His early years he spent in a house with no electricity in North Carolina, then an apartment in Harlem, where a family friend guided him to a love of the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library when he was eight years old. At the University of Chicago, one of his professors was Milton Friedman, who proved unable to talk him out of being a Marxist. What did the trick was a government job. In the Department of Labor, Sowell found that increased minimum wages reduce employment, but this fact interested no one. “People in the government didn’t give a rip whether it worked or not. They were simply implementing the policy,” notes another black intellectual, columnist Larry Elder.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/05/netflixs-crude-racist-propaganda-wins-oscar-mark-tapson/

If, like most of America, you don’t care about Hollywood’s Academy Awards anymore and you missed its recent all-time lowest-rated broadcast, then you likely haven’t heard about an ugly bit of Black Lives Matter agitprop that scored an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film.

The woke propagandists at Netflix, the streaming service that made multi-million dollar deals with the Obamas and with former British royals Meghan and Harry to create social justice content, produced the half-hour film titled Two Distant Strangers. It was written and directed by Travon Free, whose credits as a writer include leftist political comedy for Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and The Daily Show. It centers on a young, black graphic novelist named Carter who is trapped in a time loop somehow and, Groundhog Day-style, is forced to re-live deadly encounters with a police officer named Merk.

Spoilers follow:

The officer – white, of course – is a caricature of racist evil (“merk” is slang for committing violence, usually killing). Carter, by contrast, is polite, affluent, and intellectual. Over and over in a sort of living nightmare, he experiences being rousted by the cop on the street for no reason, in confrontations that always end with the unarmed Carter being killed – first suffocated to death in a chokehold while complaining “I can’t breathe” (sound familiar?), then shot to death by the trigger-happy Merk in subsequent run-ins.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/the-undying-glory-of-the-ten-commandments/

Why does Cecil B. DeMille’s retelling of the Moses saga still hold our attention 65 years later?

There are three stages of watching Cecil B. DeMille’s epic of all epics The Ten Commandments.

As a kid I watched it just because it was on. Sprawled out on the floor in front of the TV, I’d always fall asleep before Moses found his way out of the desert. Never once did I make it to the parting of the Red Sea.

As a young adult, I found the movie a bit . . . cringe. Is the double-crossing Hebrew Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) from the Canarsie section of Cairo? Is there a worse actress than Anne Baxter as Nefretiri? Could they have found a less Jewish actor than Charlton Heston to play the Deliverer of the Hebrews? Why is God turning Moses’s staff into a cobra that devours two other snakes, anyway? That sounds more like a Satan kind of thing. And those special effects, which were cutting-edge when the film was released, came to look ridiculous over time.

Still, though: I always liked Yul Brynner’s Rameses, the epitome of an antagonist who inspires respect because he sticks to his sense of honor. “Better to die in battle with a God than live in shame,” he says, as demanding of himself as of others. Baxter’s acting may be campy (“Oh, Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!”) but she makes for one of the era’s classic bitchy vixens. As for that desert scene I never got to the end of as a little kid, it reaches a powerful climax when Moses silently contemplates a lamb who serves as the herald of a life-saving oasis. Is this the holy Lamb of God we all heard of in so many church services? It’s a beautiful, simple image of salvation.

Charlton Heston may have made a preposterously Gentile Jew, but his oaken style of acting grew on me over the years. He’s playing Moses; he’s not supposed to be hip or loose. He shouldn’t come across as a self-questioning, internally tormented Marlon Brando type. He is the Lawgiver, one of the all-time heroes, and he is there to personify fortitude and leadership. Heston is stately, manly, commanding.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/03/turner_classic_movies_goes_woke.html

Dear TCM,

Imagine my surprise last week when I clicked on the cable listing you’d posted for a primetime airing of Gone with the Wind and found, in place of the brief synopsis you customarily provide, a trigger warning that the film contained ‘imagery and depictions that may be offensive to modern audiences.’

Just to be sure, I checked with my local cable provider to see if this was their doing and confirmed that the wording for the listing was indeed furnished by TCM. A quick web search later, I learned this treatment was part of a monthlong promotion TCM would be running for March, titled ‘Reframed: Classics in the Rearview Mirror,’ in which your on-air cast of 30- and 40-something woke sherpas would be revisiting a handful of Hollywood’s greatest productions – from Breakfast at Tiffany’s and My Fair Lady to Psycho and The Searchers – to retroactively enlighten us on why these classics, the films we’ve all come to love, are “problematic.”

This, of course, comes on the heels of cancel culture’s collective scalpings of Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potatohead, Pepé le Pew, and Mallard Fillmore as insidious avatars of violent insurrectionist, toxically masculine, militant white supremacist America – cultural touchstones every bit as dangerous to the nation’s youth and delicate sensibilities as boxes of razor wire — and fentanyl-laced Tootsie Rolls handed out by Pennywise on Halloween.

Alyssa A. Lappen
5.0 out of 5 stars Profile in Courage

Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2021

After reading Saturday evening that Amazon had removed this documentary from its rental streaming library, and next from its inventory of DVDs available for purchase, I immediately rented it from Vudu.

By censoring this film, Amazon proved Clarence Thomas correct and, moreover, guaranteed the film’s unrivaled success on other platforms.

I remember the Clarence Thomas hearings. I was then a senior editor at Working Woman.

This is a phenomenal report, regardless of your standing on the political spectrum, and it is a testament to human strength and the true tenor of courage.

Exceedingly well-documented, it tells of Thomas’ rise from an impoverished backwater in rural Georgia, with the help of his loving, wise, no-nonsense grandparents, illiterate though they were.

Through a grueling educational process he learned he had no choice but to achieve 100 percent 100 percent of the time.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/26/minari-shares-one-familys-american-dream-of-yearning-to-belong/

Director Lee Isaac Chung and co-star Yuh-Jung Youn discuss ‘Minari,’ a drama that shows the importance of family ties and faith in the American experience.

After five decades on-screen, 73-year-old actress Yuh-Jung Youn has been winning global accolades this year. In “Minari,” released Friday via on-demand platforms, she co-stars as a no-nonsense grandmother — not unlike herself — in the story of an immigrant family that moves to Arkansas to pursue the American dream.

Youn demurs when asked how the film speaks to current events. “I’m sure everybody has a different opinion,” she told me in an interview. “Always when I have a premiere in [South] Korea, they ask: ‘What message should we get from this movie?’ But I’m not some kind of crusader! If people feel something or are moved by this movie, I’ll be very grateful.”

Writer-director Lee Isaac Chung loosely based the story on his childhood, when English and Korean were spoken interchangeably at home. In the mid-1980s, his father (fictionalized as Jacob in the film) bought a plot of land in Lincoln, Ark. aiming to raise a farm — and a better life for his family.

His wife Monica isn’t so convinced their sacrifices will be successful. Their children, seven-year-old David and older sister Anne, are alternately diverted by and complaining about their unfamiliar new home.

Awards buzz for “Minari” has come in part due to what many consider to be a snub. The Golden Globe Awards, to be telecast on Sunday night, nominated it in their Best Foreign Language Film category. Yet that association did not consider it for Best Film, despite being shot in Oklahoma by an Asian-American filmmaker. Insiders await Oscar nominations on March 15 to see if it fares better with the Academy.