RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/04/10/netflix-and-learn-the-woman-who-should-be-on-the-20-bill/

The story of Madam C.J. Walker is inspiring, motivating and definitely binge-worthy. And, for older kids currently out of school, it’s a great history lesson they likely wouldn’t ever hear in a classroom.

Coronavirus binge-watching these days doesn’t need to be limited to guilty pleasures like “The Mandalorian” and “Tiger King.”

On Netflix, the new miniseries “Self Made” tells the compelling, true-life story of Madam C. J. Walker, who should have been the hands-down favorite to be the first woman whose portrait would grace American paper money. Unfortunately, she was overlooked altogether.

Walker was the first American woman to become a self-made millionaire. Born to recently freed slaves, the ambitious Walker rose from humble beginnings of picking cotton and washing clothes for pennies to founding and running her own factory, salons, beauty school, and hair care business.

Motivated by her own pattern baldness, and utilizing her experience as a traveling saleswoman for another hair care entrepreneur, Walker developed her own hair treatment for black women and marketed it around the South as the “Walker Method.” She expanded her business with “Walker Agents”—giving well-paid, much-needed and empowering jobs to the same black women who were her customers.

Walker, who died a millionaire in her early 50s, became a prominent philanthropist. She supported the musicians, writers, and artists who led the Harlem Renaissance. She was an early and generous donor to the NAACP and efforts to combat lynching. She was also instrumental in preserving the home of abolitionist Frederick Douglass.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/04/caliphate-series-every-western-feminist-needs-see-mark-tapson/

As an act of #Resistance! to the misogynistic dystopia America would surely be plunged into by the election of Donald Trump, the leftist media hyped the 2017 Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, in which women are subjugated and dehumanized under a totalitarian patriarchy. “Relevant!” and “Timely!” were the marketing buzzwords used to sell the show to liberal females as an allegory of the horrors they would experience under a Mike Pence-led theocracy. The Handmaid’s Tale became a cultural touchstone for unfulfilled Western feminists whose lives were suddenly given meaning by costuming themselves as handmaids from the show and milling about in protest of their oppression – for example, outside the chambers where Brett Kavanaugh was smeared as a rapist during his Supreme Court confirmation.

The internet series and the original 1985 novel were both set in America, of course, because everyone who has been processed through our Progressive propaganda – er, education system knows that the United States is the historic epicenter of religious intolerance and sexual oppression. Precisely because of this indoctrination, the same feminists who were so inspired by The Handmaid’s Tale are either oblivious to, or intentionally silent about, the real-world suffering of girls and women who are oppressed under an actual totalitarian theocracy outside the West: territories ruled beneath the iron fist of sharia law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/coronavirus-recalls-logic-pottersville-its-a-wonderful-life/#slide-1

It is a wonderful life.

In director Frank Capra’s 1946 holiday classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life, an initial bank panic sweeps the small town of Bedford Falls. Small passbook account holders rush to George Bailey’s family-owned Bailey Building and Loan to demand the right to cash out all of their deposits — a sudden run that would destroy the lending cooperative and its ability to issue mortgages or preserve the savings accounts of the small town.

The villain of the story, Henry F. Potter, who is a cash-laden, though miserly rival banker, played brilliantly by Lionel Barrymore, offers to buy up the depositors’ shares in the Building and Loan — but at a steep 50 percent discount.

Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) tries to explain to his panicked cooperative depositors the logic of their frenzy, with the exclamation, “Potter isn’t selling. Potter’s buying! And why? Because we’re panicky, and he’s not.”

Capra’s post–Depression era movie, even in its black-and-white morality, reminds us that, in crisis, the majority has limited liquidity and cash. And sooner rather than later they must sell assets — property, stocks, shares, and household goods — to operate their businesses or keep their homes until things pick up. In a real depression, those with the least cash fail first and in great numbers.

And the minority who do have cash are always willing to buy, even in a depression, albeit at their price, which is usually steeply discounted. Panic, not logic, eventually takes over the collective mind, as we now see with the downward spiral of the current stock market and the hoarding of goods otherwise in plentiful supply.

The stock market descends in part because sellers need liquidity and think they will have less of it tomorrow, while cagey buyers believe they will sell for even less in 24 hours — and stock managers who sell more than buy conclude that there is not yet enough data or conjecture to convince the terrified public that the virus is either manageable or will turn out to be more analogous to 2009 rather than 1918.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/03/movie-review-moulin-rouge-better-than-broadway-version/

B roadway has shut down until at least April 12. But for those hoping to see Moulin Rouge, worry not. The film version, which you can enjoy from the coronavirus-free comfort of your home, is far superior.

It’s been 20 years since Baz Luhrmann’s famously over-the-top movie musical came to screens. Based on La Bohème, the story (cowritten by Luhrmann) is about a young English poet, Christian (played by Ewan McGregor), who falls in love with a French courtesan, Satine (Nicole Kidman) — the “sparkling diamond” of the famous Parisian cabaret the Moulin Rouge. This leads to a gripping, passionate affair that sadly ends in tears.

The film opens to Nat King Cole’s hit “Nature Boy” (“There was a boy, / A very strange, enchanted boy”) and a 30-year-old McGregor sitting bearded and depressed at his typewriter. Christian then mournfully relays that the woman he loves “is dead.” The rest of the movie is a flashback. We soon learn that Christian is an idealist who moved from London to Paris in 1899 to be part of the Bohemian movement. Soon after moving, he discovered an eccentric band of performers living in the apartment above him. They spotted his writing talent and enlisted his help in selling their show Spectacular Spectacular to Harold Zidler, the owner of the Moulin Rouge.