RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2020/02/06/bong_joon-hos_parasite_is_overrated_implausible_class-struggle_nonsense_104067.html

In the years after World War II, Korea’s economy was in tragic shape. In 1948, the country’s per capita income of $86 put it on par with Sudan. Disastrous policies led to hyperinflation, snail-paced growth forced mothers to make choices about children along the lines of Sophie’s, plus literacy rates in the country were among the lowest in the world. Analyzing the situation, one U.S. official concluded that “Korea can never attain a high standard of living.” The reason, he observed, was that “there are virtually no Koreans with the technical training and experience required to take advantage of Korea’s resources and effect an improvement over its rice-economy status.” 

Happily, however, predictions are made to be discredited. The speculation about what became South Korea’s future proved incorrect. Wildly so. Fast forward to the present, and South Korea now finds itself impressively prosperous. Though GDP isn’t the most accurate or worthy of numbers, what was once wrecked by war (among other things) is now one of only two countries (along with Taiwan) to “have managed 5 percent growth for five decades” on the way to its economy presently ranking as the world’s 13th largest. South Korea is one of the biggest trading partners for both China and the United States, and it can claim some of the most prominent global consumer brands, including LG and Samsung. All that, plus the country’s citizens enjoy, according to The New Koreans author Michael Breen, “the fastest, most extensive mobile broadband networks and the highest penetration of smartphones in the world.” Much has changed in this once desperately poor country, and it’s surely for the better.

All of the above, and realistically much, much more, rates as a backdrop to commentary meant to offer a counter-argument to all the excitement among critics about the 2019 South Korean film, Parasite. Directed and co-written by Bong Joon-ho, it’s presently the longshot but trendy pick to take home the Best Picture prize at Sunday’s Academy Awards. That it’s even nominated is a reminder of how politicized everything’s become, including critiques of films.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/manuel_quezon_littleknown_savior_of_jews.html

A new film debuted around the world last month, an account of events during World War II in Manila: Quezon’s Game directed by Matthew Rosen, a filmmaker who began in London and lives in the Philippines. 

The film provides, using three languages, a version of a little- known story, of which there is no definite official statement and a lack of historical manuscripts, of the rescue organized by President Manuel L. Quezon starting in 1938 of 1200 German and Austrian Jews, coincidentally the same number of Jews saved by the well-known Oskar Schindler, who found shelter from the Holocaust in the Philippines.  Quezon had proposed an “Open Door policy,” one that would admit up to 10,000 Jews, but only 1280 made it. The ambitious and generous plan failed because of events in World War II and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.

The context of the story is that the country, which by the Treaty of Paris 1898 that ended the Spanish-American war was ceded to the U.S as a territory, was trying to get full independence from the U.S. which it finally obtained on July 4, 1946. Until then the country was a protectorate of the U.S.  The Commonwealth of the Philippines from 1935 to 1946 was the administrative body governing the country, preparing for a transition to full independence, controlled visas for entry.

Manuel Quezon in October 1935 won the first national presidential election, gaining 68% of the vote. As president he was determined to allow Jewish immigrants from Europe into the country but has to contend with internal critics and American policy on the issue.  Suffering from tuberculosis, he was fluent in English, a gifted pianist, brilliant lawyer, card player of poker and bridge, and had been a playboy who shaved off his moustache because it tickled the girls too much.  Quezon was a compassionate individual, a light of morality, and his story deserved to be better known.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/television-review-hillary-documentary-clinton-still-blaming-america-for-her-failures/

“Apart from a few journalists, the other interviewees in the film are her husband and her various sycophants and flacks. All seem like so many Dr. Frankensteins trying to inject some life into this soulless object. Seen in archival footage, it is Trump who makes the most salient points. “I think the only card she has going is the woman card,” Trump is seen saying in a TV interview. Cut to Hillary in an interview done for the film: “Yeah, you’re right. I am.” This was indeed what she offered the American public; she badly miscalculated the value of her I-deserve-this argument, and that’s why she lost to a man who had a 36 percent approval rating at the time. Far from being a feminist icon, she got as far as she did solely because of her husband’s success. None of us would today know her name if she hadn’t married Bill Clinton.”

A four-hour documentary shows Hillary Clinton is still blaming America for her failures.

Imagine a socially maladept but extremely wealthy friend of yours was told, “People like tap dancing. You should tap-dance more.” You would cringe when the person was telling you about a major career setback and suddenly lurched into a little tap-dancing interlude. “Did I ever tell you about the time the world turned to ashes for me?” Tap-tap, tappity-tap. You’d feel sorry for your friend but mainly you’d feel that this person is deeply weird.

At some point in recent years one or more of Hillary Clinton’s many handlers, advisers, or consultants told her, “You should laugh more. People like laughter.” Except she is sour, dour, and without a humorous molecule in her body. Her laughter is always feigned, hence always a non-sequitur. When she reminds herself it’s laughing time, it comes across as a tic. It’s as bizarre as sudden-onset tap dancing.

http://politicalmavens.com/

If you’re sick of being accused of racism, white privilege, toxic masculinity, insufficient attention to Climate Change, MeToo’ism and the LGB alphabet; if you’re exhausted by the long-winded House Managers’ vitriolic performances and if you’re depressed by the diminution of old-fashioned flag-waving, anthem-singing patriotism – run to see The Last Full Measure.

This is an old-fashioned movie written and directed by Todd Robinson, with big stars like Christopher Plummer, Diane Ladd, Ed Harris, Samuel Jackson, Peter Fonda and William Hurt who are all excellent. This is also a movie about heroes – dead and alive – and what they need and deserve. It concerns the failure of our government to award a posthumous Medal of Honor to a Vietnam war veteran who went above and beyond the call of duty to save lives, losing his own in this endeavor. It illustrates the long-term after effects on veterans who fought in an unpopular war and came home to a country that behaved disgracefully towards them. We have spent far more time worrying about the welfare of illegal immigrants than we did about rehabilitating our own veterans, and this movie illustrates their loneliness, isolation and continued dedication to each other. It also heralds their undaunted efforts, along with those of the government representative who worked so hard to get the medal issued.

When you see it, bring tissues and stay for the credits which feature some interviews with the real people represented in the film. In addition to all the emotional reactions you will have, you will be amazed to learn that only three members of the Air Force who were not officers have ever been awarded the Medal of Honor. If nothing else, it should serve to remind us about the importance of preserving and insisting on the merit system in many aspects of our lives.

http://politicalmavens.com/

In order to succeed, satire and parody require a common understanding of what is being satirized. If the audience doesn’t have this, satire quickly degenerates into flat-tire. Sadly, 75 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, most Americans have little idea of the history of World War II and the extent of brutality that tortured and murdered six million Jews, one million of whom were children.

The elite private school Fieldston in Riverdale which has a significant population of Jewish students has had two episodes of anti-semiitism, the first featuring swastikas that appeared in hallways and classrooms in 2015. The school initially explained the swastika as an ancient symbol of peace without mentioning the word Holocaust, and only after objections from parents, did the school call an assembly to refer to the symbol in connection with the murder of six million Jews. In October 2019, a Muslim speaker from Columbia Law School spoke at Fieldston and compared the Israeli survivors of the Holocaust to Nazis, accusing them of similar violence against Palestinians It took a month before the school responded simply by reaffirming their firmly held values without specifying what these are or condemning the outrageous comparison.

The academic response to Israel Apartheid Week on campuses across the U.S. is another example of refusal to deal with the dangers of anti-semitism No other minority would be continually pilloried in this way on any American campus but objections to turning Jewish students into pariahs have been sporadic at best, and the accompanying BDS movement, directed solely at Israel, has been supported by many campus groups including faculty.

Now for JoJo Rabbit, a film about a ten year old boy infatuated with Hitler and thrilled to be a part of Hitler Youth. Hitler appears to the boy, remaining invisible to everyone else, and the two have lively exchanges about Nazis, Jews and the need to kill them whenever possible. Oddly enough in a movie that takes place during the war, there is no mention of ghettos, concentration camps or mass shootings into pits dug by the victims. The only Jew we see is a lovely young girl who is being hidden in the attic of JoJo’s house by his mother, a sympathetic Scarlett Johansson who pays for her kind empathy later in the film. Jews who were hiding during the war lived in sewers, underground cellars, sometimes on a closet shelf for prolonged periods of time None of this is revealed or mentioned in this movie. Ironically, the only military violence we see is that of the Russian and American liberators who destroy JoJo’s town with armor, machine guns and mass explosions. If asked to review this movie, it wouldn’t be strange if a student reported that WW II was about the mass destruction of Germany.

What would the reaction of Hollywood and the Left be to a movie about illegal immigrant children who were being kept in “cages” if only one was shown in a comfortable waiting room and the only violence was that of the long lines of raucous adult immigrants storming the border fences? Would this pass as an acceptable subject for satire and would the above theoretical description be considered appropriate?

JoJo Rabbit ends with a quote from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
The Squad and Black Lives Matter would never allow that quote to be affixed to their contemporary complaints. To our eternal shame, it has become acceptable when it comes to the indescribable horror of the Holocaust.

JoJo Rabbit has been nominated for six Academy Awards incuding Best Picture of the Year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/movie-review-les-miserables-superb-french-crime-drama/

An African-French first-time director has made a superb police drama.

I f I favorably compare a movie to Fort Apache, The Bronx, you ought to pay attention, because I don’t do it very often. That 1981 Paul Newman drama was a chaotic swirl of wrongdoing in and around a besieged Bronx police precinct that made earlier police dramas look like Disney movies. A first-time filmmaker named Ladj Ly — born in Mali, raised in Paris — has devised a devastating successor set among the graffiti-scarred housing projects in Montfermeil, outside Paris. Audaciously, ambitiously, and a bit waspishly, Ly has entitled his film Les Misérables: A scene from Victor Hugo’s novel is set there, and a school in town is named for Hugo. In its narrative power, in its appreciation of detail, and in its moral complexity, Les Misérables is clearly superior to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, to which it bears a resemblance. Yet it’d be unfair to Ly to characterize the film as simply a serious dramatization of social issues; it’s also fast-paced entertainment, with a plot that has so many crazy twists it reminded me of the 2017 Queens odyssey Good Time, one of the finest crime dramas of recent years.

French-language cinema these days has become clouded with miserabilism (the films of the Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, in particular, scintillatingly evoke the experience of watching fungus grow). Despite its title, Les Misérables isn’t like that; it’s a punchy and exciting day-on-the-beat story of a newbie cop, Stéphane (Damien Bonnard), who joins two other plainclothes officers as they drive around the projects, known as “Les Bosquets,” which are filled with African immigrants and their children, many of them Muslim. As Stéphane rides in the back of an unmarked car, the driver is Gwada (Djebril Zonga), a black man who we will learn is himself a Muslim and a son of at least one African immigrant. In the passenger seat is Chris (Alexis Manenti), one of those seen-it-all white cops, who takes a dim view of humanity in general and relentlessly goads his new partner Stéphane in a tone that’s meant to be jokey but is really just nasty.

https://nypost.com/2020/01/05/golden-globes-2020-ricky-gervais-hits-hollywood-stars-exactly-where-it-hurts/

How Hollywood sees itself: dedicated craftsmen, important artists, world thought leaders. How Ricky Gervais (and everyone else) sees them: criminals, perverts and dopes — a gang of pretentious jerkwads who dropped out of high school when people noticed they were pretty, then mistakenly started to think their insights on world affairs matter. Hired to host the Golden Globes for the fifth and last time, Gervais saw it as his duty to tell Hollywood to eff off, and that’s exactly what he did. All those comics who think they’re “bold,” they “bite the hand that feeds them,” they “speak truth to power” — this is how it’s done.

“Let’s have a laugh — at your expense,” Ricky the G warned the roomful of celebrities, machers and blowhards in the only awards show that’s worth watching anymore because it’s the only one that would think of hiring someone like Gervais to host it. Thank you, thank you, Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and yes, you have my permission to print this column in the Bulgarian scandal sheets and Azerbaijani websites you work for.

Gervais (slugging what looked like a pint of beer but probably wasn’t) told the swells that if the Academy Awards could fire Kevin Hart for having made offensive tweets in the past, the Globes should have taken the hint. “Hello?’ Gervais said. ”Lucky for me the Hollywood Foreign Press can barely speak English.” He mentioned arriving in a limo and said, “Felicity Huffman made the license plate.” Ouch. Half the people in that room worked with Felicity Huffman and probably a lot more than half pulled strings to get their kids into college. Gervais was as welcome as a guy who breaks wind in an elevator. Tom Hanks looked like he’d just had a bowl of arsenic bisque. He looked almost as bad as I did when I watched “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/eastwoods_jewel.html

Not many things get better with age. Clint Eastwood might be the exception.

At age 89, Eastwood still manages to redeem a film industry that usually panders to liberal tropes or adolescent morons. His latest offering is a biopic about Richard Jewell and the Centennial Park bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Albeit 25 years in the making, Richard Jewell, in 2020, is a pitch perfect and timely film treatment of dirty cops and fake news in America. Jewell, once a security guard at the ’96 Olympics, discovered a pipe bomb, alerted authorities, and was subsequently falsely implicated with incendiary headlines and televised slander by the FBI and the press for a crime he did not commit.A dirty cop, probably an FBI agent, leaked Jewell’s name as “a person of interest” to an Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter, Kathy Scruggs.

That leak, and the media blitz that followed, tortured Jewell and his mother for nearly a decade. The real bomber, Eric Rudolph, was eventually caught, but only after two more bombings.

Rudolph was convicted and jailed eight years hence with little press fanfare by the FBI or media.

The Eastwood film, coming as it does midst the fake news campaign against Donald Trump, serves to remind us that corruption at the FBI and in the media are still with us.

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

One of the main handicaps in watching the latest incarnation of this classic novel is the difficulty in recognizing that any of these “girls” is meant to be truly young. Amy, the youngest sister, looks as developed and fully grown as Beth, Jo and Meg. Because of this, the audience has no way of contextualizing her behavior as that of the little girl who is frequently excluded from some activities because of her tender age. It’s impossible to understand her unforgivable and un-fixable act without recognizing that it’s driven by the uncontrollable impulse of a child, not yet a teenager. Serendipitously, the viewer has a chance to see what I mean by watching the 1994 version of Little Women which will be on Showtime Showcase at 7 pm tonite – Friday, Jan 3rd. Record it.

I saw this before I went to see Greta Gerwig’s version and cannot recommend the former highly enough. It’s a spirited version in which you see the girls put on plays written by Jo and costumed by her – a reminder of how young people entertained themselves before their heads were buried in phones and virtual everything. That cast is brilliant – Winona Ryder, Claire Danes, Trini Alvarado as the older March sisters and a young, adorable Kirsten Dunst as Amy. In Gerwig’s version, the role of Laurie (Theodore Laurence) is played by Timothee Chalamet, an effete actor who looks younger than the girls and as gay as he was in Call Me By My Name. By contrast, in the 1994 rendition, his role is played by a handsome and very masculine Christian Bale with another important male part given to Gabriel Byrne The private dance that is done by Jo and Laurie is a romantic connection in the earlier film whereas in the update, Saiorse Ronan and Timothee merely let loose without any emotional imprint on the audience.