RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Memo to writer, director and producer: Kadish the Hebrew prayer for the dead, is not pronounced like radish; it is pronounced like Kahdish or Coddish. Though this may seem picayune, it’s a word that comes up often in a movie about the Holocaust, and particularly one that deals with showing respect for murdered Jews, it’s inexcusable to hear it constantly mispronounced by the Jewish protagonist as well as others. Imagine a movie about French people who call their capital Parees – could we take it seriously?

The Song of Names deals with a Jewish violin prodigy who is brought from Poland to London by his father in an attempt to save his son from the mounting threat of Hitler’s war. The young boy called Dovid’l lives with a non-Jewish family who have a son his age, Martin, who both admires and resents him for being his own father’s favorite. The story is told with a series of flash-forwards and back until it becomes clear that the prodigy has disappeared from London without leaving a trace, presumably leading to the foster father’s stroke and death and the resulting search by the foster brother to find him.

Dovid’l skips out on a prominent concert prior to his departure, a plot point that becomes significant later. More than 30 years elapse during Martin’s search, revealing many heart-breaking scenes that one can imagine dealing with the slaughter of six million Jews seen through the lens of one gifted “genius.” This, along with the hauntingly beautiful violin music, including Bruch’s sonata, make the movie worthwhile. Second memo to writer: the movie’s final revelation is unmoored to anything else that the viewer has seen, leaving the audience confused and uncomprehending. It’s an unnecessary tag-on that should be cut before this goes to Netflix or Amazon. It cheapens the ending and trivializes far more important points that have been made. The cast, headed by Tim Roth and Clive Owen is solid as expected.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/

I left the theater saddened after watching Clint Eastwood’s latest directorial work, “Richard Jewell,” a film about the falsely accused Atlanta Olympic Park bomber and the media’s rush to judgment.

I was disheartened because Jewell, now deceased, represents every American and especially the Trump “ deplorables.” Any of us can be falsely accused of a crime, and our ability to defend ourselves often depends on resources and knowledge that many of us lack.

We live in a society where trials-by-media are commonplace, and due process and the presumption of innocence are fading away, part of a bygone era. In the U.S. judicial system, due process is supposed to mean that every citizen is accorded legal rights and protection from governmental overreach.

We find protection in the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states, “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law,” and it applies to the states via the 14th Amendment.
Due process is accompanied by the presumption of innocence, unless proven guilty in a court of law. So much for that: Witness the recent cases marked by a total breakdown in due process and the presumption of innocence for both Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Judge Roy Moore in their media trials. They represent current examples of a trend that started more than two decades ago.

In the Jewell story, we see a flawed and man-eating media, as well as an FBI that apparently either forgot or ignored its own mission statement to protect the American people and uphold the U.S. Constitution.
Here we are today, more than 20 years after the Atlanta bombing, and once again the FBI—or at least elements and former elements of the FBI—has been brought into question concerning not only the current impeachment proceedings but also that the FBI might have spied on President Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. For real. Protect whom, uphold what?

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/movie-review-1917-contrived-technique-director-sam-mendes/

Sam Mendes is the real star of Sam Mendes’s new World War I drama.

The list of great films about World War I in Europe is surprisingly short: After the acknowledged masterpieces All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) and Paths of Glory (1957), there aren’t many more worth discussing. 1917 is a splashy attempt to join the list that is well worth seeing yet suffers from comparison to the far better film covering the same ground that was released just eleven months ago.

That movie, the Peter Jackson documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, was meticulously, devastatingly real. 1917, by contrast, starts out convincing but comes to seem unforgivably contrived around the halfway mark, and by the end it asks us to suspend disbelief to such a degree that the effect is nearly absurd. I was reminded of Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, whose protagonist developed into a kind of Buster Keaton figure who miraculously bumbled his way through a storm of violence so focused that it seemed as if the Wehrmacht’s sole purpose was to kill this random citizen.

1917 is defined also by its surface contrivance: Sam Mendes has designed the film as a single take (followed, after a brief blackout in the second half, by another single take). Like Birdman, though, as well as the fantastically complicated opening scene of Mendes’s own James Bond film Spectre, 1917 is actually composed of many shots ingeniously woven together using digital wizardry to look like a single take. I dislike the gimmick, at least at this length; staying on a single take creates a sense of hanging in midair as we wonder when we’ll finally hit the ground, and it works beautifully for a single scene like the opening of Spectre or Touch of Evil (1958), the Orson Welles film that inspired all subsequent one-take sorcery. Keeping a take going for an entire movie, though, is a mistake. It redirects the attention from the story to the technique. To be slightly rude about it, it makes Sam Mendes, not his characters, the star of the movie.

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Blessed by serendipitous synchronicity, Clint Eastwood’s movie, eponymously titled “Richard Jewell,” concerns the FBI mishandling of the Atlanta Olympic Park bombing and opened two days after the release of the Horowitz Report found 17 omissions or incorrect commissions in the Carter/Page application submitted by the FBI to the FISA Court. It is startling to see the same malfeasance brought to public attention in 1996, including a sexual relationship with an officer of the FBI, as well as other unlawful behavior in the bureau’s interrogations and investigations. Beyond that unusual coincidence, the movie is noteworthy for its restraint, particularly considering that its producer and director was Dirty Harry at the beginning of his career.

Compared with too many over-the top violent films (The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood), Richard Jewell deals with a 30-something security officer who lives with his mom (an excellent Kathy Bates), and tries his best to be helpful to others and live according to an out of fashion code of behavior. He is out of shape and out of style and lives a lonely life of social ostracism. After he discovers a fully loaded backpack left under a bench at the Olympic stadium, he succeeds in warning the police and negotiating a significant evacuation before the bombs explode, killing two people and injuring at least a hundred others. He is first hailed as a hero, and then considered a suspect according to the profile of a perpetrator who commits a crime in order to become a savior. Richard is played by Paul Walter Hauser in a tour de force of typecasting as well as acting.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/hollywood-socialism/

Hollywood is now obsessing about increasing ethnic and gender diversity. Good. There’s been nasty racial and gender discrimination in the movie business.

Unfortunately, Hollywood has no interest in one type of diversity: diversity of thought.

In most every movie, capitalism is evil.

Greedy miners want to kill nature-loving aliens in “Avatar.” Director James Cameron says: “The mining company boss will be the villain again in several sequels… Same guy. Same mother—-er through all four movies.”

One reviewer calls a scene in the recent “Star Wars” movie “a beautiful critique of unregulated capitalism.”

“Unregulated capitalism” is such a stupid cliche. Markets are regulated by customers, who have choices; we routinely abandon suppliers who don’t serve us well.

In the movie “In Time,” rich people live forever by buying more time, which they hoard while arranging for higher prices so poor people die.

I guess rich movie people feel guilty about being rich.

In the new Amazon series “Jack Ryan,” the hero asks a good question about Venezuela: “Why is this country in the midst of one of the greatest humanitarian crises in history?”

Because socialism ruined the country’s economy! But no, that’s not the answer Jack Ryan gives.

“Nationalist pride,” not socialism, is named as the culprit — and the politician who will fix things is an activist running “on a social justice platform.”

The producers reversed reality, portraying leftists as Venezuela’s saviors rather than as the people who destroyed it.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/09/jojo-rabbit-and-the-pitfalls-of-nazi-humor/

One small but reliable way to amaze someone steeped in our own culture of problematics with a dispatch from the not-so-distant past: Tell them that in the late 1960s, one of the most successful sitcoms in America was a broad farce set in a Nazi prison camp. If you want to compound the amazement, you might add that the actor playing the Nazi commandant was Werner Klemperer, a first cousin of Victor Klemperer, he of the famous Nazi-era diaries. Also, the actor who played the camp’s French POW, Corporal LeBeau, was not only Jewish but a survivor of Buchenwald, where as a twelve-year-old deportee he had escaped death by doing a song-and-dance act for SS men.

The Klemperer and Buchenwald connections, I will admit, were unknown to me until I set out to refresh my memory about the epic strangeness of Hogan’s Heroes — a refreshment inspired by watching Jojo Rabbit, a peculiar and polarizing movie that won a big audience award at the Toronto Film Festival and is being marketed as a love-trumps-hate dark horse to Academy Award voters looking for a passion project. If you want to understand the challenge of that marketing campaign, the memory of Colonel Klink and Sergeant Schultz is a useful place to start, since making a slapstick farce about a Hitler-worshiping ten-year-old surrounded by idiotic Nazis in the waning days of World War II is at least as strange as giving Nazi prison guards the sitcom treatment — and quite possibly a bit stranger.

The director of this odd entertainment is the part-Maori, part-Jewish Taika Waititi, whose name has come up a lot recently in cinephile debates because he made the candy-colored treat Thor: Ragnarok, which is by general consensus the movie that you’re supposed to reference if you’re defending the virtues of the Marvel Universe against that snob Martin Scorsese. “Okay, Goodfellas dude, but what about Thor: Ragnarok? Wasn’t that art?” Well, it wasn’t, really, but it was entertaining and deservedly successful, and riding that success, Waititi has seized his opportunity not only to make the Nazi comedy of his dreams, but to cast himself — as one does — as Adolf Hitler.

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.