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MOVIES AND TELEVISION

Richard Jewell as Everyman Carol M. Swain *****

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?

1917: A Somber Journey into Hell By Kyle Smith

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.

Hulu Documentary to Feature Global Warming Alarmist Greta Thunberg Catherine Smith

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/18/hulu-documentary-to-feature-global-warming-alarmist-greta-thunberg/

Hulu will premiere a documentary chronicling the rise of 16-year-old climate alarmist Greta Thunberg in 2020. The film with the working title, Greta, will follow Thunberg from her August 2018 school strike in Stockholm to her chastising world leaders. Nathan Grossman is directing, and Cecilia Nessen and Fredrik Heinig produce via B-Reel Films. It’s set to premiere sometime in 2020, according to a report by Deadline,

Deadline added that sources say Hulu had joined the project “awhile back and had been involved behind the scenes while deals were being made.” The team behind the documentary has been following the activist from when she was allegedly just a student skipping school in Stockholm, Sweden. Thunberg began her climate activism in August of 2018 by staging a school strike every Friday.

“Her question for adults: if you don’t care about my future on earth, why should I care about my future in school?” reports Deadline.

Breitbart writes, “not too long after that, Thunberg’s public profile exploded as her so-called activism went from skipping school to scolding world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly, at which she proclaimed, ‘I shouldn’t be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean, yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?’”

Jamestown: Where the Empire Began Joe Dolce

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/1964/winter/jamestown-where-the-empire-began/

Jamestown, Virginia, was the first permanent British settlement in the Americas. It was named in 1607 after King James I, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, King of England and Ireland, who also reigned as King James VI of Scotland.

The three types of colonies that the British established in the Americas were Charter Colonies, Proprietary Colonies and Royal Colonies. Jamestown originated as a Charter Colony, in which the King granted control to a local colonial government to establish the practical rules of day-to-day governance. A Proprietary Colony required private investment, and was frequently used to reward friends and allies of the King. A Royal Colony was administered by a governor appointed by the Crown, but Royal Colonies often had elected governments and were self-governing.

Spain, Portugal and France had already made inroads into the New World by explorers such as Christopher Columbus (1492), Amerigo Vespucci (1507) and the Spanish conquistador Don Hernán Cortés (1590), conqueror of the Aztecs and Incas. The enormous riches that Cortés discovered, particularly gold, inspired sponsorship of the early British expeditions by wealthy businessmen seeking to increase their fortunes.

Jamestown is a three-part, twenty-four-episode television mini-series produced by Carnival Films, the people behind Downton Abbey, and filmed in Hungary. Sam Wollaston, of the Guardian, wrote:

[Jamestown’s] certainly a goldmine from a storyteller’s point of view. There are all sorts of horrors here—the birth of the British empire and of modern America, war and slavery just round the corner. It’s an almost endless seam of stories, and the three recent arrivals, each with their own horrors and journeys, are a good route in.

Bernard Cornwell once said, “Most historical novels have a big story, and a little story—you flip them and put the little story in the foreground.”

In Jamestown, the big story is the cathartic transformation of the 1606 trading settlement of the Virginia Company (also known as the London Company)—initially chartered by King James, off the coast of Virginia between latitudes 34 and 41, as an investment, with the aim of discovering gold and silver—into a Crown Colony in 1624, while at the same time bestowing on it the right to self-government. This unusual hybrid, ironically, led to the birth of American democracy.

Richard Jewell – A Review By Marilyn Penn

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

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.

Hollywood Socialism By John Stossel

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.

Jojo Rabbit and the Pitfalls of Nazi Humor By Ross Douthat

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.

Ford v Ferrari Makes Race-Car Movies Great Again By Armond White

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 Good Liar – A Review By Marilyn Penn

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.

China’s Holocaust of Children By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/chinas-holocaust-of-children/

The ‘one-child policy’ involved slaughtering hundreds of millions of babies.

Using the aggressively bland term “one-child policy” is a bit like saying that 1942 Germany had restrictions on Jews. You may never have thought much about how a huge nation enforces a limit of one baby per family, but the horrifying details of China’s Holocaust of children emerge in a powerful documentary told by a woman whose family was one of the countless millions who suffered.

A girl born in 1985 in Jiangxi Province was named Nanfu, or man-pillar. The Wang family, like nearly all others in rural China, desperately wanted a boy, and when one didn’t arrive, her parents gave her the planned boy’s name anyway. After she was born, village authorities threatened to sterilize her mother, who wanted to try again for a boy, but instead struck a compromise. Some rural families were allowed a second child if the parents spaced the children apart by five years. While the mother was in labor, Nanfu Wang says in her documentary One Child Nation (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), her grandmother put a basket in the room and announced, “If it’s another girl, we’ll put her in the basket and leave her in the street.” Nanfu’s brother arrived instead.

It was no idle threat. As Wang discovers, this sort of thing happened all the time. And when you left your baby girl (it was nearly always a girl) in a market, or by the side of the road, here’s what happened: Nothing. No takers. Girls had no value whatsoever. When Wang’s uncle had a daughter, her mother recalls, he wanted to try again for the son. So the family climbed over mountains in the dark to take the infant to a market, where they left her on a meat counter with the equivalent of $20 in her clothes. The family would go back to check on her progress, of which there was none. Soon the baby was covered with mosquito bites. “For two days and two nights she was there,” recalls Wang’s mother. “She eventually died. Then we buried her.” Oh.

Chinese officials would use a variety of pressures to prevent women from giving birth. Sometimes sterilization would be presented simply as an option; you were free to refuse, but then the authorities would burn your house down or steal your pig. Other times women underwent sterilization by force, or suffered as their eight- and nine-month-old fetuses were aborted. A single “family planning” official recalls carrying out an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 sterilizations and abortions, sometimes inducing delivery and then killing the newborn. “I’d do over 20 [sterilizations and abortions] a day,” she recalls now. “Sterilization takes ten minutes.” In many cases the women had been abducted: “Tied up and dragged to us like pigs,” recalls another woman who served as a “family-planning official,” who says, “I initially thought forcing abortions was an atrocity.” But a Party official persuaded her that the more challenging a job was, the more willing she should be to take it on.” “Sometimes pregnant women ran away. We had to chase after them.” One woman “took off all her clothes and ran away naked.” But the “population war” had to be fought: “Our country prevented 338 million births,” notes a propaganda video. The word “prevent” is doing a lot of work there.