RUTHFULLY YOURS

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.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Hope Gap begins with great promise: a movie about two aging characters whose marriage is fraying after almost 30 years They are both intellectual – he a teacher and she a writer currently creating an anthology of poetry written by the masters of English literature and dealing with emotional situations They live in a modest, comfortable home in England and are welcome prototypes of people who seem normal, upper middle-class and stable. We imagine that they will work out their problems with equanimity and restore the missing vitality to their relationship
Without revealing significant plot-lines, the major problem in this elemental screenplay is the disparity between the two actors – Bill Nighy far too introverted and quiet to hold his own against an overly domineering Annette Bening Early on, we see her volatility as she turns over a heavy wooden kitchen table, not a casual act for a woman of her age Subsequently, she harasses her grown son for not taking her side in what has turned into a divorce proceeding Though she offers some cogent comments about the “rights” of husbands and wives, she is far too aggressive and quickly loses our empathy in a scene at the lawyer’s office. Perhaps if her husband were played by a more charismatic actor, there would have been equal understanding of both sides but this rapidly becomes a movie about Annette’s mistreatment by her husband who should have left sooner, her deep sadness and eventual return to equilibrium I believe the current word for this is “meh”

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2020/03/03/the-whistlers/

I can’t call this a review because I will admit that I cannot give a coherent plot line to this Rumanian film about crooks and cops and an ancient whistling language developed for sending messages across hills and valleys in the Canary Islands. I got that info from Joe Morgenstern’s review in the WSJ. He must have learned that from a helpful press release along with some other information that allowed him to sketch a thin line of action sufficient to find a “witty riff on Hitchcock” and a “surreal flow between reality and movie tropes.”

You will be able to recognize bad guys with guns and knives and stolen money, a nude sexy damsel working with them, a double-agent cop, his beautiful aging mother, his very pretty female boss, plus assorted other characters who drift into frame with or without motivation One of these is an American film-maker presumably scouting for locations. This may be a Rumanian wink understood only by fans of the director Corneliu Porumboiu – try saying that in English.

One of the things I find essential for knowing whether a movie is good, bad or both is the ability to understand what is happening. In this case, speaking Rumanian might help a bit, but it would never explain how the people who learned to communicate by whistling would ever be able to convey the message that “cristi is in the Cornaline Hospital in Room 437″ or “When you recover and get out of the hospital, meet me in Singapore in a year.” I know how hard it would be to express those messages in pig Latin so just try whistling those with your fingers in your mouth, your tongue depressed and the rest of you totally bewildered. Puleez!!!

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2020/02/23/emma-a-review/

I haven’t read Jane Austen’s original version of Emma since college, but judging from its latest incarnation, a title that better suits it is Much Ado About Nothing. By now, after so many treatments of the source, everyone must know that Emma is a privileged young woman who fancies herself a do-gooder, particularly vis a vis her friendship with Harriet Smith, a young woman missing everything Emma has – wealth, lineage, social standing and personality. Unfortunately, that last quality is not in evidence in either the screenplay or bland performance by Anya Taylor Joy. But, even if it were, it’s hard to see what the two women would ever have in common except the endless flattery of Emma herself.

The exterior landscapes and interior designs of the various great houses are beautiful, as are the varied musical backgrounds and costumes. The hairstyles couldn’t possibly be less flattering so I will assume that this was the director’s nod to us that these characters were not allowed the freedom to think for themselves. One of the fallacies of many period films is to equate antiquated social customs with primitive thinking – thus none of the women in this film has anything clever to say except the one sentence that Emma utters to humiliate the unfortunate spinster, played by Miranda Hart who was Chummy on Call the Midwife. That may seem extraneous for you to know in this review, but it was a bright note for me to recognize her and smile at the memory of her much better part on that series. I should mention that Bill Nighy, an actor who is normally a scene stealer par excellence, has only one opportunity to do that and mainly functions in this movie as a mannequin of himself.

As you will guess from my suggestion of a better title, by the last scene you will know that All’s Well That Ends Well, so if you’re looking for a chance to take a nap and wake up to a wedding, see Emma.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/television-review-hunters-dumbs-down-nazi-hunting/

Hunting Nazis gets dumbed down to comic-book level in Amazon Prime’s Hunters.

If Al Pacino is doing a TV series, it should be worth watching. Alas, many things that should be so are not. Pacino’s first series is Hunters, on Amazon Prime video, and the more you love Pacino, the more you’ll cringe. “The Americans, but with Nazis” seems to have been the idea. It came out more like “Marathon Man for idiots.”

Created by David Weil, who serves as showrunner with Nikki Toscano (though Jordan Peele, one of the executive producers, is mentioned more prominently than either of these in ads), Hunters is a case study in how an adolescent imagination shrunken and enfeebled by comic-book tropes can be disastrously misapplied when considering history’s gravest events. Pacino plays a Jewish Holocaust survivor turned Bruce Wayne-style mystery millionaire vigilante in 1977 New York City. Pacino’s Meyer Offerman assembles a Super Friends squad of spy/assassin/codebreaker/con artist/bank robber types with the aid of, erm, a yenta (Jewish matchmaker, not ordinarily associated with hired killing). Guided by Offerman, the hunters set to work tracking down surviving Nazi war criminals living in America under assumed names.