RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/miles-davis-documentary-birth-of-the-cool/As the new documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool makes clear, Davis was not a nice man. But his talent for the trumpet was magical.

How delightful it is to learn that Miles Davis, as a boy, used to take his trumpet out into the woods, listen to the animals, and imitate them on his horn. Later, in New York, he was already working as a professional musician when he decided to go to Juilliard to learn classical technique — a risk in his world, where the best musicians feared “sounding white.”

Many were the influences that went into Davis’s music, as we learn in Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, a beguiling new documentary full of strange details, some unnerving, some wonderful. Backed by Davis’s resplendent music, it’s frequently hypnotic, even heartbreaking. The usual talking-head interviews — experts, fellow musicians, and family members appear on camera — intermingle with the reflections of Davis himself, read by the actor Carl Lumbly in Davis’s signature gravelly tone.

Davis was an angry man, often a loner, and one source of his hot temper was racism. Born into affluence in 1926 — his father, a dentist, is described as the “second-richest” black man in Illinois — he went off to Paris in 1949 and found himself not only welcome but the toast of its swells. Via his girlfriend, the actress Juliette Gréco (neither spoke the other’s language), he joined a circle of creative people that included Pablo Picasso and Jean-Paul Sartre. Returning home, he said, “It was hard for me to come back to the bullsh** white people put black people through in this country. . . . Before I knew it I had a heroin habit, which meant getting and shooting heroin all day and all night.”

In Where’d You Go Bernadette, Cate Blanchett plays a woman who has lost her personal mission in life after becoming a mother.  Although she was formerly a super-star architect who won a MacArthur Genius Award, she has slipped into becoming, over the years, her teenage daughter’s “‘best friend” and chauffeur in a baffling relationship that will be unfamiliar to 99% of today’s mothers.  Making this even more difficult to fathom is the slavish imitation of Anna Wintour in Ms. Blanchett’s hairdo, sunglasses and even the name Bea for her daughter.  We look at Bernadette thru the lens of that other highly successful career woman and wonder what the director had in mind.  Did he think the screenplay was insufficient to remind us of whom Bernadette was meant to be without showing us an image of one of the most photographed working women in the world?

This is a bewildering movie directed by Richard Linklater whose previous films, including “Before Sunrise”,  showed great sensitivity to the subtle nuances of male/female relationships.  In this film, we are meant to believe that a highly creative man in his own right never noticed that his highly creative wife had stopped doing anything for at least 14 years.  Though we see or are told that she seldom leaves her house, has no friends, doesn’t sleep, alienates people (including her husband) and has refused any sort of help, we are also supposed to accept that all she needed to finally recharge her batteries was an aha moment along with the miraculous good fortune of meeting the right person at the right time while paddling through the waters of Antarctica.  

So this is essentially a fairy tale not about Saint Bernadette who had 18 visions, but about a fairy queen struck by a magic wand that eclipsed all distances and unlikely occurrences to restore her royal crown.  And since this is a fairy tale, the abusive neighbor next door, played reliably by Kristen Wiig, becomes the tunnel to freedom that Bernadette needed  for her escape to wholeness so that all would be right in the kingdom of Utopia, a word that literally means nowhere.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/jihadi-john-documentary-review/

A new documentary raises important questions about the journey of the Kuwait-born British terrorist to ISIS.

On August 19, 2014, a masked man with a London accent appeared on a video, boasting that he was a soldier for ISIS, and proceeded to behead American journalist James Foley. Security services almost immediately identified the murderer as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwait-born British man of 26. His captives, noticing the British accents with which he and three other captors spoke, referred to the four as John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Emwazi’s media nickname became “Jihadi John.”

Built around interviews with MI5 and CIA officials, leading soldiers such as General David Richards of the U.K. and General David Petraeus of the U.S., and survivors of Syrian hostage camps from the era, director Anthony Wonke’s penetrating HBO documentary Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist makes unfortunate, distracting use of cheesy dramatic reenactments in telling this awful story. But it also raises important questions about Emwazi’s journey to terrorism. The documentary is tinged with a sense of regret that the spooks could have done more to give Emwazi an exit ramp from evil.

As a boy, Emwazi immigrated to England at age six, his family winning asylum because they had been, in Kuwait, members of a persecuted minority, the Bedoon. Emwazi attended a Church of England school in London and seemed well-adjusted. As an adolescent, he began to disengage, to seem “slightly strange” in the words of one of his teachers. Footage of his youth shows him constantly covering his mouth; apparently the other boys liked to tease him about his breath. As a teen, he took up drinking and marijuana, but in college he started adopting Islamic dress and habits. Such faith “gives structure where there was none,” says one observer interviewed in the doc.

Online jihadist recruitment tools began to catch Emwazi’s eye, and he went to Somalia and Tanzania for indoctrination in Islamism. In the latter country he was locked up, beaten, and questioned. On the way back to London, he was stopped again in Amsterdam and again in Dover. British spies tried to steer him to be a double agent and threatened to make life difficult for him if he didn’t cooperate. “Whether we contributed to his further radicalization . . . by stopping him from travel is an interesting question,” notes Commander Richard Walton, Scotland Yard head of counterterrorism.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4995776/
Coming Soon Release Date: July 31 Israel’s Mossad agents attempt to rescue Ethiopian Jewish refugees in Sudan in 1977.
Director:  Gideon Raff

Writer: Gideon Raff

http://politicalmavens.com/

For moviegoers old enough to remember the sickeningly grotesque details of the Manson family’s massacre of Sharon Tate, her unborn child and the other victims in her house, it will be hard to believe that the alternate massacre in Quentin Tarantino’s latest film is greeted with gales of laughter throughout that sequence. The theater was full at the 4pm weekday screening, and I was shocked to see how many of the viewers were at least middle aged and could be expected to have at least read about this shocking mass murder that took place in 1969.

At two hours and 40 minutes, notwithstanding constant background music from the sixties, fast moving cars and two excellent performances by Brad Pitt and Leonard DeCaprio, the movie lacks directorial pace. The scene where Brad Pitt as a movie stuntman comes to the Manson community populated by strung-out young hippies, lingers far too long on pointless dialogue before descending into extreme violence in Tarantino’s signature style. The scene with Sharon Tate kvelling at her own performance in a movie is similarly too protracted and frankly, one inducing a queasy feeling of disrespect for a young pregnant actress who was butchered by what can only be called monsters, some of whom have been released from jail.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-skin-an-israeli-director-portrays-a-neo-nazis-evolution-11563802201?mod=hp_lead_pos10

The Israeli director Guy Nattiv decided to make a movie about a reformed neo-Nazi only after receiving the blessing of his grandfather who survived the Holocaust.

“Skin,” which opens in the U.S. on July 26, is Mr. Nattiv’s first American feature film. Mr. Nattiv said he dedicated it to Ruben Monowitz, who died two years ago at age 96, “because he taught us as grandkids how to accept and forgive.”

Mr. Nattiv wrote the screenplay for “Skin” after persuading Bryon Widner, a former skinhead who co-founded a violent white-power group in Indiana in 2003, to sign over the rights to his life story.

“I’ve got to give Bryon a lot of credit,” said Mr. Nattiv, who is 46. “He gave me full authority to tell his story the way I wanted to.”

“Skin,” which won the international critics prize at last September’s Toronto International Film Festival, draws its title from the hate-filled tattoos that Mr. Widner had removed from his face and body after dropping his racist beliefs and turning state’s evidence.

The film stars British actor Jamie Bell as Mr. Widner and Australian actress Danielle Macdonald as Mr. Widner’s wife, Julie. Mr. Nattiv’s script also focuses on the African-American antiracist activist Daryle Lamont Jenkins (played by Mike Colter) who helped get Mr. Widner into an FBI witness-protection program.

The film explores how easily teenagers with no family ties and limited means can be scooped up and indoctrinated by white-power groups. It also shows how dangerous it can be for them to try to leave the organizations.

Mr. Nattiv, who had already written and directed three movies in Israel, said he struggled to drum up interest for the script in 2016, when he began shopping it around Hollywood. “I did research in Ohio, Indiana and the Rust Belt, and I saw racism and I saw gangs,” Mr. Nattiv said. “However, the reaction to my script was: ‘We like it but there are no real neo-Nazis in America.’ ”

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

Early on in this film about Argentina, we see a solitary man sitting at a table in a crowded restaurant. Another man walks in and stares at him unrelentingly, eventually telling the waiter that he should be given that table since he is ready to order while the man already seated is waiting for his late wife To tell you more about what happens next would be a spoiler except to say that most of it is unexpected and the degree of tension the director (Benjamin Naishtat) builds from this mild beginning is unnerving, brilliant and a sweeping foretelling of events to follow.

Rojo consists of several seemingly disparate set pieces which include an abandoned house being stripped of its furnishings, an eclipse of the sun, a romantic encounter between a young girl and her boyfriend a magic act in a nightclub and several speechifiers who appear in case the audience isn’t sophisticated or sufficiently knowledgeable about Argentina’s history in the 1970’s. Some of these actually lessen the power of the more oblique examples of predominantly male aggression in all forms and many different ages. There is a subtlety to this, particularly in the scene of the eclipse as the sun goes black and then a blazing red, nature’s own rojo as the source of all our light as well as something with the power to blind the viewer Similarly the scene with the boyfriend and later with his car buddies extends the basis of authoritarian brutality down to the everyday behavior or teenagers. the character of the private detective is another ambiguous persona – hellbent of pursuing the villain in the case he was hired for but unwilling to be as helpful to a mother whose son “has disappeared”

Rojo is a welcome addition to the otherwise predictable big budget summer movies that are the antithesis of this quiet genre. It is well worth seeing and discussing and lends itself to probing for additional insights related specifically to Argentina’s politics and more broadly to males in western culture. You will leave the theater thinking, and that’s a good thing to observe nowadays.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/06/jihads_infiltration_of

Imagine my shock as I sat down in a local movie theater to spend a restful Sunday afternoon when during the 15-minutes of upcoming attractions, the audience was subjected to one of the latest “Secret Life of Muslims” shorts titled, “What is a Hijab?”

The marketing piece is sheer genius; the subtle propaganda was superb — and I sat there realizing that the culture war is being won by the other side, and far too many American people have no idea how they are being readied for dhimmitude.

At the Secret Life of Muslims site, we are told that “one helpful rule for being a Muslim on the internet — [is] don’t read the comments.”  Thus, the viewer is already set up to censor any comments that might be factual about Islam.

The short that I saw features Reza Aslan and Linda Sarsour. This was the first clue as to the insidious nature of this infiltration of American entertainment. 

Reza Aslan was born in Iran on May 3, 1972. His family fled to the United States in 1979, to escape Ayatollah Khomeini‘s Iranian Revolution, and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. Raised as a Muslim, Aslan converted to evangelical Christianity at the age of 15. After earning B.A. in Religious Studies from Santa Clara University in 1995, he decided to convert back to Islam.

In addition to his academic duties, Aslan serves on the advisory board of the National Iranian American Council, a lobbying group for the theocratic, anti-Semitic government in Tehran.  Aslan has exhorted the United States to negotiate with the jihad terror group Hamas; he has praised the Hezbollah as “the most dynamic political and social organization in Lebanon[.”]