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MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Shirley – A Review By Marilyn Penn

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

This is a film based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell based on Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, two famous American writers who were married to each other. The key word here is ‘novel’ but the viewer doesn’t know that this is not biographical and this presents serious ethical questions with the liberties taken as various behaviors are ascribed to these individuals without our ability to distinguish between authorial fantasy from reality.

The film hits many current popular marks: male philandering, abusiveness, narcissism along with female insecurity, emotional distress, lesbianism and dependency on drugs and alcohol. The plot concerns a young couple coming to Bennington College for the husband to assist Professor Hyman. They agree to have his pregnant wife do the cooking and housework for the Hymans in exchange for their room and board. At first, this seems like a doubly good idea, allowing the husband to try for a job in the English department the following semester by impressing Hyman and for the couple to save their money for their expected child. They are both unaware of how psychologically damaged Shirley is, spending all her time indoors, drinking, sleeping and writing. Her mood swings are so wide that she seems tri-polar and as abusive as her husband. Of course this becomes apparent as soon as they move in yet the young wife is willing to put up with the situation and becomes infatuated by Shirley, eventually in a sexual manner.

An additional plot point is Shirley’s novel in progress about a young woman who disappeared from the town without being found. This offers more nuances concerning the perils of marriage, friendship and extra-curricular relationships. One of the pivotal scenes recalls Thelma and Louise as Shirley and Rose (the young wife and mother) stand at the edge of a precipice – a device too corny and contrived to be effective. The main reason to see this movie is the performance of Elizabeth Moss, an actress who is capable of making you read her most subtle thoughts without histrionics – a true artist or perhaps magician. The second reason is to remind you to re-read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, one of the great short stories of the 20th century

Remembering the Hill-Thomas story By Silvio Canto, Jr.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/remembering_the_hillthomas_story.html

On Monday night, our local PBS station showed “Created Equal…..Clarence Thomas in his own words.”    

It was a great documentary and I learned a few things about his early days and marriage.  

Like some of you, I recall the day that President Bush nominated him.  I happened to be with my father that day and he seemed very happy with the choice.  He told me that Thomas would make a great justice because he faced a lot of adverisity coming up in life.  (On a personal note, “overcoming adversity” was a theme that my late father would always go back to. It made people tougher and better, he would say)

Then came Anita Hill and the documentary became very intense.  It was interesting to watch then Senator Joe Biden and the late Senator Ted Kennedy sitting next to him.  Am I the only person watching who thought that Biden made a fool of himself talking about “natural law”?  Clarence Thomas couldn’t understand what he was saying either.

Two things really struck me about the documentary:

First, Justice Thomas reminded his opponents that the “Tarring and feathering” would eventually come back to get them.  He must have been thinking about now candidate for president Joe Biden who faces a 1993 sexual misconduct allegation a lot more credible than Anita Hill’s.  I wonder if Mrs. Biden understands the pain that Mrs. Thomas went through?  

Second, the media and the Democrats had no trouble believing Hill.  You can see in the documentary how they all lined up to support a woman who had absolutely no proof of anything.  It all looked so eerily similar to the effort to get Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  

Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

The film Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words will be broadcast nationally on PBS on Monday, May 18 at 9 PM ET (check local listings). I was Associate Producer and Consulting Editor on this engrossing, two-hour documentary.
 
Few know much more about Justice Thomas than a few headlines and the recollections of his contentious confirmation battle with Anita Hill. In the film, Justice Thomas tells his entire life’s story, looking directly at the camera, speaking frankly to the audience. Unscripted and without narration, the documentary takes the viewer through this complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience.
 
To see the trailer go to my website lisashreve.com and scroll down to the lower right. Lisa Shreve

The Greatest Documentary The World at War, a 1973 series, remains an essential primer on history’s deadliest conflict. Paul Beston

https://www.city-journal.org/html/greatest-documentary-14340.html

In the mid-1990s, 50 years after the end of World War II, the American essayist Lee Sandlin asked friends what they knew about the conflict. To his surprise, “Nobody could tell me the first thing about it. Once they got past who won they almost drew a blank. All they knew were those big totemic names—Pearl Harbor, D day, Auschwitz, Hiroshima—whose unfathomable reaches of experience had been boiled down to an abstract atrocity. The rest was gone. . . . What had happened, for instance, at one of the war’s biggest battles, the Battle of Midway? It was in the Pacific, there was something about aircraft carriers. Wasn’t there a movie about it, one of those Hollywood all-star behemoths in which a lot of admirals look worried while pushing toy ships around a map?” For Sandlin, this broad ignorance demonstrated “how vast the gap is between the experience of war and the experience of peace . . . . [N]obody back home has ever known much about what it was like on the battlefield.”

With the 70th anniversaries of victory in Europe and the Pacific marked last year, that gap has only widened for most Americans, but for the tiny percentage who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s easy to sympathize with Sandlin’s respondents, who might have done well to remember all those totemic names. The war’s enormity is intimidating on multiple levels—historically, empirically, morally—and time and distance have made it no less so. Yet the sense that we are, as Sandlin put it, “losing the war,” doesn’t reflect a lack of relevance or waning public interest. Seventy years after its end, World War II, the definitive event of the twentieth century and perhaps of the entire modern age, remains enormously consequential, as the West was reminded in 2014, when Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and menaced independent Ukraine, dredging up in the process unresolved conflicts involving the Nazis. New works on the war continue to emerge yearly, from sweeping single-volume histories by Max Hastings, Andrew Roberts, and Antony Beevor to more specialized studies. In a time when even the most educated adults watch impressive quantities of video, films and television series about the war abound, as well as new documentaries, some featuring colorized archival footage.

What Does Michelle Obama Have to Complain About? By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/television-review-becoming-what-does-michelle-obama-have-to-complain-about/

Michelle Obama has had a blessed American life, but she’s all about her grievances in her Netflix documentary.

There’s a curious joy deficit in Michelle Obama’s video memoir Becoming, the Netflix documentary produced by her and her husband. As she glides from one beautiful space to another, surrounded by beautiful and famous people, with beautiful daughters and a beautiful bank account and much else to be grateful for, the viewer keeps waiting for her Flounder moment: Oh, boy, is this great!

Instead, the tone is mostly dour, pained, even somber. I suspect (and hope!) that, off-camera, the Obamas are a bit more full of joie de vivre than Michelle Obama is in this film, which is largely a litany of complaint. She says she felt so much pressure to be perfect for eight years in the White House that when it was over she let the dam burst by crying for half an hour (half an hour?) when she and her husband departed on Air Force One. She talks about the various times she feels she was targeted by racism, exaggerating what actually happened. She walks us through her press coverage, which she finds indescribably unfair and hurtful.

Hillary on Hulu By Krystina Skurk

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/05/hillary-on-hulu/

It is ironic that the former secretary of state fought for much of her life trying to prove that being a woman didn’t hold her back, but when it came to running for president she couldn’t forget the fact herself.

After two failed presidential runs, many Americans might expect Hillary Clinton to fade gracefully into the background, her political life now history. With her recent public endorsement of Joe Biden and the release of a highly glamorized documentary series, however, Hillary is trying to claw her way back into the limelight. For what ends, we don’t yet know.

“Hillary,” the four-part documentary created by Nanette Burstein and aired on Hulu attempts to put Hillary Clinton into context for a generation that did not grow up with her as their First Lady. Collective memories are short—when many today think of Hillary Clinton they picture her 2016 run for president, her time as Secretary of State, or maybe her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination, but the documentary puts Hillary in the context of over 50 years of cultural transformation. Each episode pivots back and forth from the presumed end of Hillary Clinton’s political career to the beginning. It weaves a narrative of a woman who was “too right too soon,” and who stood up for women’s rights when most women saw their options as limited.

The documentary features segments of more than 2,000 hours of behind-the-scenes campaign footage, some of the 35 hours Burstein spent interviewing Hillary, as well as interviews from Hillary’s friends, family, supporters, friendly journalists, and campaign staff. Missing are interviews of any Hillary opponents or critics.

Battering Norman Borlaug PBS rewrites the history of the father of the Green Revolution.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battering-norman-borlaug-11587769611?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It seems to be an iron law of modern life: Be successful at what you do, and sooner or later you will be labeled an enemy of the people. The latest target of this treatment is the late Norman Borlaug, who is featured in a new PBS documentary called “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World: A Tale of Good Deeds and Unintended Consequences.”

Borlaug was an Iowa-born agronomist who is rightly regarded as the father of the Green Revolution. By producing disease-resistant strains of wheat, and later rice, Borlaug dramatically increased the yields that farmers—especially those in Third World nations—could extract from the land.

As the film does acknowledge, feeding the world without Borlaug’s innovations would be difficult. Readers of a certain age will recall the laments in the 1960s that humanity’s expanding population, especially in the developing world, would lead to mass starvation. Famines were not uncommon in those years in India, China and elsewhere, and Borlaug helped to make them rare and almost solely the result of bad governance. In 1970 Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now comes PBS to rewrite history, going light on the lives saved and heavy on the “unintended consequences.” These include everything from diminished water supplies and depleted soil to increased urbanization in Mexico and a “broken society” in India.

‘Bad Education’ Review: A Scandal With Smarts The real-life story of malfeasance inside a suburban New York school system brings a human perspective to financial crime. By John Anderson

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bad-education-review-a-scandal-with-smarts-11587674969?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2

The rise and fall of Frank Tassone as told in HBO’s blackly comedic “Bad Education” is mostly about his fall and hinges, ever so Greekly, on his own hubris. Early on, Frank, the wildly popular, handsome and successful superintendent of the Roslyn, N.Y., school system on Long Island, is interviewed about an overly ambitious building project by a student journalist, who gets her quote and prepares to go. “It’s just a puff piece,” explains Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), but Frank stops her in her tracks. “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” he admonishes. “A real journalist can turn any assignment into a story.” What you feel then is just a tremor, but the foundation of Frank’s meticulously fabricated life is beginning to turn to sand.

Which it famously did. Frank Tassone and his assistant, Pam Gluckin—played with an actorly joy by Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, directed by Cory Finley—were eventually indicted and convicted in an $11.2-million embezzlement scheme that involved houses in the Hamptons, vacations, plastic surgery, more vacations and Frank’s Park Avenue apartment. It was certainly the biggest crime of its kind that Roslyn had ever seen and made quite the impression on screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who was a student in Roslyn when Frank was indicted in 2004. Mr. Makowsky’s storytelling isn’t just true-crime. It’s true-human.

Blue Bloods Gone Oprah By Joan Swirsky

https://canadafreepress.com/article/blue-bloods-gone-oprah

Among the TV shows I gravitate to with my husband Steve, a former athlete, include live baseball, basketball and football games, historical documentaries, and both true crime shows and crime dramas like Law & Order, Forensic Files, Chicago PD, and Blue Bloods––all studies in the greatest mystery of all time, human behavior.

When Blue Bloods debuted in September 2010, we thought it was excellent, featuring in-depth and provocative episodes, and at last embodying the conservative values we embraced, including a distinct lack of the three-legged stool on which Progressives base their so-called values: moral relativism, political correctness, and multiculturalism.

The show is about the Reagan dynasty in NY City, where the following characters are presented every week with daunting challenges, moral dilemmas, high-action chases and arrests, and touching family dramas:

·   Frank Reagan, a widower and the New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner, played by Tom Selleck.

·   His father Henry Reagan, also a widower and a former NYPD Commissioner, played by Len Cariou.

·   Frank’s son Danny, played by Donnie Wahlberg, a tough, street-smart detective, and his partner Maria Baez (played by Marisa Ramirez). Danny was happily married to R.N.  Linda (played by Amy Carlson) before her death, and they were the parents of two sons played by real-life brothers Andrew and Tony Terraciano.

·   Frank’s daughter Erin, played by Bridget Moynihan, a letter-of-the-law Bureau Chief in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and divorced mother of daughter Nicky (played by Sami Gayle). Erin works closely with Anthony Abetemarco, a detective in the D.A.’s office (played by Steve Schirripa).

Elites Hate Phyllis Schlafly Because She Defeated Them From Home With Six Kids In Tow By Colleen Holcomb

https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/13/elites-hate-phyllis-schlafly-because-she-defeated-them-from-home-with-six-kids-in-tow/

Unable to defeat Schlafly in life, cultural elites in Hollywood are now attacking her posthumously in the brazenly dishonest ‘Mrs. America’ series.

Liberal cultural elites have had it out for Phyllis Schlafly since she defeated the Equal Rights Amendment in 1979. Now, producers of the FX/Hulu series “Mrs. America” have hypocritically done to Schlafly exactly what the women’s liberation and Me Too movements complain “the patriarchy” does to women it cannot control: rape and defile them.

The so-called Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, was a perfect Hollywood cause. It allowed supporters to appear pro-woman, while Hollywood knew the amendment posed no threat to the elite power structure. ERA is touted as an effort to “put women in the Constitution” and ensure women’s equality. Hollywood elites jumped on board supporting ratification, and once the amendment passed Congress in 1972, 32 states passed ratification bills in rapid succession.

Enter Phyllis Schlafly, a Harvard University-educated, anti-communist crusader, who chose to get married and raise her six children instead of pursuing a paid career. Schlafly became a cultural villain when she inconveniently read the ERA and its proponents’ writings.