RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-ford-v-ferrari-makes-race-car-movies-great-again/

An unusual Hollywood exception to the derision of American exceptionalism

There’s a MAGA moment in Ford v Ferrari when the British-immigrant auto mechanic and race-car driver Ken Miles (Christian Bale) stops being a loner and decides to be a team player. He slows down on the track to let the other American drivers on his team join him so they can cruise across the finish line together. This “bringing them in” scene turns out to be Miles’s undoing, relegating him to forgotten history, but it’s one of the few scenes in Ford v Ferrari that audiences unapologetically enjoy; they respond to it as part of their natural, national, car-culture heritage.

Conservatives should pay attention to any element in a Hollywood film that supports their political and moral beliefs. Ford v Ferrari provides that sustenance. Director James Mangold dramatizes the 1964 competition in the 24-hour race at Le Mans, distilled to a three-man alliance of Miles; his mentor, the veteran driver Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon), who had previously raced Le Mans in 1957; and entrepreneur Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts). They bring the Ford Racing Team up to the level of its faster, sleekly engineered European contenders.

The America First implications of Ford v Ferrari can’t be ignored. After the big-screen spectacle and vibrant sound design of revved-up motors and cheering crowds, Mangold swerves into quasi-political points about character. His best scenes show the way ambitious men commit themselves. It’s not about “toxic masculinity,” as producer Jane Rosenthal described Scorsese’s The Irishman (to make it seem progressive). Instead, he revels in high-speed, high-pressure contexts where egotism, expertise, and privilege vie for domination.

The real measure of a clever script in a suspense film is the aha moment at the end when the viewer realizes that there were clues scattered throughout the film which were either missed or more likely misinterpreted. In other words, the writer or director’s talent was in pulling you in the direction he orchestrated and doing that so well that you failed to connect the dots that were there all along. Hitchcock spoke about providing the audience with a suggestion and sufficient information to figure out the rest. This is a challenge in film since the audience only sees what the director allows us to see but frequently, on second view, you will realize that a line of dialogue, or something in the background, on the night table or hanging on the coat rack might have helped to solve the puzzle.

The Good Liar is the opposite of this – it belongs in the tradition of the entire plot turning out to have been a dream. Its success is solely a tribute to STAR POWER, the ability of two senior actors who are so comfortable in front of the camera that we could watch them having dinner in real time without getting bored. The plot is so farfetched that neither the action in the present, nor the flashback to the past makes any sense. The denouement is so unrealistic that we are left with just a one word comment: whatever. Since it’s impossible to prove this to you without giving away all the connivances, I can only say that it’s not unpleasant to spend some time with Helen Mirren and Ian Mckellen, even at the expense of being had.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/emno_safe_spacesem_what_happens_when_common_sense_and_values_disappear.html

The new documentary No Safe Spaces, starring conservative thinker, radio host, and writer Dennis Prager and liberal, comedian, and podcast host Adam Carolla, is a must-see for anyone concerned with the long-term viability of the First Amendment’s free speech protections.  While primarily focusing on the hostility to free speech laying siege to America’s college campuses, vividly illustrated with compelling clips of violent protests and civil unrest by students from Berkeley to Yale, No Safe Spaces powerfully illustrates how the movement to limit speech has moved into mainstream arenas as well.

Prager and Carolla recognize that “common sense and values” are disappearing for the first time since our country’s founding.  There are appearances by figures on both sides of the ideological spectrum including liberals Barack Obama, Van Jones, Cornell West, Dave Rubin, and Alan Dershowitz, all of whom recognize the dangers to the country when progressive notions of microaggressions and safe spaces become the new normal.

Prager appreciates how unique free speech is on the world stage.  Across Asia, Europe, and even Canada, First Amendment rights are either nonexistent or limited, yet the highly educated elites have decided that our historically exceptional freedoms are now dangerous.  Prager observed:

What’s happening now in the United States, you are not to be heard on a college campus, or at your place of work. This is brand new. This is one of the few things one could say we have no precedent for in the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/movie-review-harriet-woke-entertainment/

It’s the Jaws of slavery movies — woke entertainment as a joke.

As Harriet Tubman — played by British musical actress Cynthia Erivo in the new historical film Harriet — inspires more and more Southern black slaves to desperately join her run for freedom in the North, a newly converted collaborator confides, “We’re gonna need a bigger cart!”

What kind of anachronistic nonsense is this? Both the history and the legend of the Underground Railroad, and the courageous woman who led herself and others out of bondage, are now jokes of woke entertainment. That the film grossed $12 million (a small yet surprising sum) on its opening weekend suggests some moviegoers seem as ready to enjoy this travesty as slaves were ready for liberation. In terms of calculated crowd-pleasing, Harriet is the Jaws of slavery movies.

Set in 1849 Maryland, full of danger, rescues, superstition, frivolous gunplay, and pop-politics, Harriet demonstrates the current exploitation of African-American history, through historical revision, simply to sell tickets while aggravating political identity, tribal separation, and perpetual grievance — the same way that politicians manipulate voters.

Ever since Harvey Weinstein confirmed Hollywood’s Obama Effect, film culture has sought various ways of appeasing racial anxiety through movies about black victimization and white guilt. It’s the new diversity, as one of Harriet’s progressives summarizes: “Civil war is our only hope.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/11/emharrietem_blows_away_democratic_racial_myths.html

Harriet Tubman, a lifelong Republican, led slaves to freedom with a gun in her hand.

History, someone once said, is a lie agreed upon, and nowhere is that more self-evident than in accounts of America’s racial history as told by Democrats. Republicans are the party of racism and slavery when the historical record shows just the opposite to be true.

As Thomas Sowell notes, Democrats value black votes but not black voters.

Democrats need black voters to be fearful, angry, resentful and paranoid. Black votes matter. If Republicans could get 20 percent of black votes, the Democrats would be ruined.

That is what Democrats are terrified of. That can only happen if blacks are denied the truth about their past, present, and future. It is Democrats who owned the slaves, founded the KKK, and wrote the Jim Crow laws. It is Democrats who stood in the schoolhouse door and still do, opposing school choice. It is Democrats who turned on the fire hoses and unleashed the dogs. It was Democrats who blocked the bridge in Selma. A higher percentage of Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act than Democrats The improvement of black lives under Trump and a free market economy is no mirage but a portent of things to come that has the Democratic Party running scared.

The Democrat’s historical amnesia omits the fact that it was Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia and former “Grand Kleagle” with the Klan, who holds the distinction of being the only senator to have opposed the only two black nominees to the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas.

Sen. Albert Gore, father of the former vice president, voted against the act, as did Sen. J. William Fulbright, to whom Bill Clinton dedicated a memorial, current senior senator from South Carolina Ernest Hollings, Sen. Richard Russell and, of course, Sen. Strom Thurmond, a Democrat at that time. The party of Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Sessions beat back the fire hoses and dogs of the party of Robert Byrd, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris.

This Israeli movie won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival this year, also getting rave reviews from Manhola Dargis (NYT) and Joe Morgenstern (WSJ). Written and directed by the Lapids, pere et fils, it purports to be a movie about an Israeli soldier who has completed his service with a profound hate for the militaristic nature of his country and the determination to abandon it for France. Along with becoming an expat comes the decision to forego his mother tongue and speak only French, carrying a pocket thesaurus for assistance, hence the title.

The film begins with a quick-moving camera following legs walking down a Paris street – an homage to French New Wave cinema of the sixties. Unfortunately, Yoav, the protagonist, reminded me more of Adam Sandler than Jean Paul Belmondo and the actress who plays the love interest has none of Jean Seberg’s combination of rebelliousness and beauty. Instead of an actual plot, there is a do-it-yourself grab-bag of scenes that the audience can try to figure out. Among these are the hero’s near death from extreme cold, a mysterious decision by a neighbor to give Yoav ongoing financial support, an extended and gratuitous scene of pornography, an inscrutable scene of men going at each other viciously, a puzzling scene of a man with a yarmulke accosting people with declarations of his Jewishness, an unseen wedding, a classroom of immigrants being taught the French ethos of secularity above all.

Missing from this picture is an over-riding sense of time, place and history. There is no mention of the massive Muslim influx into France and its attendant consequence of violent anti-semitism. There is no indication of how many French Jews have already fled their country, many going to Israel to find safety. We aren’t told that the French government urges Jews not to wear yarmulkes in public. There is no background for the necessity of Israeli military strength in a middle-east determined never to accept a Jewish state in its midst. Are we to believe that Yoav is so uninformed that he knows nothing about the rising tide of anti-semitism in France and Europe? Are we to assume that he isn’t aware of how many wars Israel has fought defensively and what threats it faces now from Iran and its terrorist subsidiaries?

Ultimately, this is a movie about a young man’s rage – we could call it PTSD but that’s too simplistic for all the elements that are tossed at us. The film that’s playing at the Elinor Bunin theater has an introduction by Nadav Lapid, the director, explaining that it’s partly autobiographical. The fact that he had this experience of deserting Israel is not a sufficient substitute for an intelligent presentation of reality in his chosen art form. As is, this movie remains a jumble of free-floating emotional ejaculations – perhaps the reason for the presence of pornography.

http://politicalmavens.com/

Parasite bears an immediate resemblance to Jason Peele’s US, a horror film in which underground tunnels are the habitat of dopplegangers cloned by our government in a failed experiment and condemned to live below eating rabbit meat. In the Korean film, things are a bit better – there is a window to the street above the basement dwelling but the view is of a repeat urinator who chooses that corner for his daily excretions. To summarize the plot, we have a family living in close quarters who manage to insinuate themselves into excellent jobs working for a wealthy family living in the most architecturally dazzling house in recent film history. That and the score are two sufficiently good reasons to see the movie but there are more.

One of the best features is that the characters are not generic – the parents and two children in the basement are lively, attractive people with back stories and ambitions and we are not surprised when they become assets to the wealthy couple, both of whom are somewhat dim despite their good looks and affluence. The best part of the screenplay is in the denouement of how the poor deceive the rich in a fully satisfying way for all concerned. There is a troubled young boy who needs special care and the clever, artistic basement daughter is perfect for that role. The wealthy daughter requires a tutor and the wily basement son is central casting for that. Best of all are the father who becomes the chauffeur and his crackerjack wife who takes over the role of housekeeper with super-human speed and efficiency.