RUTHFULLY YOURS

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[.”]

http://politicalmavens.com/

What a wonderful relief is was to watch a current movie that is meant for viewers who are articulate and appreciate a script that has not one vulgar four-letter adjective to precede every noun. After the rave reviews of The Long Shot, a film that is soaked in slime in which highly educated people sound like they walked off the set of The Sopranos, Tolkien was a return to inspiration from brilliant and creative characters whose dialogue matches their intellectual talents.

Both Tolkien and his love interest Edith are orphans who have pursued their respective interests – language (philology) and music – notwithstanding the difficulties in their lives. This biopic of the famous scholar and writer goes back to his early friendship with like-minded schoolmates who form a club dedicated to changing the world through their art. In keeping with this theme, the set designer of the movie has provided perfect examples of period furnishings and William Morris wallpapers, not to mention the beauty of the outdoor landscape and architecture.

The scenes in the trenches of WW I are horrific but we see the brutality of the firepower foreshadowing the dragons and beasts that will surface in Tolkien’s future masterworks. The cast, headed by handsome Nicholas Hoult and beautiful Lily Collins, along with a welcome cameo by Derek Jacoby are as picture-perfect as the other details and despite the complaint of some critics that this film is too “slow,” I urge you to see it and be reminded of the joys of literacy, determination and accomplishment.

http://politicalmavens.com/

To see the real Nureyev, a magnificent dancer see the utubes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHD6Ly0oYpA rsk

A film about the greatest male dancer of his generation should convey at the very least the speed and perfection for which he was known. Unfortunately, The White Crow, a biopic of Rudolph Nureyev, is too often a static production with too little depiction of the dancer in an extended ballet sequence and too much mooning at his yearning or irritable face – the default expressions the director has chosen to emphasize . We see short scenes of the dancer’s talented leaps and twirls and too many scenes of his petulant tantrums which become increasingly annoying with each escalation.

The film leads up to and ends with his request for political asylum in Paris and we see little of his great international successes in America and Europe, nor does the script by David Hare take us up to his tragic death from AIDS.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/04/red-joan-joins-a-rogues-gallery-of-resisters/

Judi Dench in a guess-the-genre political sob story

Red Joan is a love story, a political thriller, a woman’s coming-of-age sexual memoir, and a history of British espionage just before and after World War II. It is also a crock. Based on real-life KGB spy Melita Norwood, Red Joan’s sentimental exoneration of one woman’s treason and sedition fits with how today’s media pay tribute to the kaffeeklatsch of political resisters.

Judi Dench plays title character Joan Stanley as a kindly widow suddenly exposed by the British government for her activities, 60 years earlier, relaying wartime bomb secrets to Russia. Crone Joan’s mummified on-trial look (Dench’s facial wattles, a padded, thick rump, and flabby legs with an ankle monitor) dissolves into flashbacks played by pouty Sophie Cookson, who beams a girlish complexion and period hairdos as a student at Cambridge University. Cookson never locates her character’s sexual-political tension, which was the key to every characterization in the film version of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, because that complexity isn’t part of this film’s reverential concept.

Young Joan is seduced by a pair of sexy Jewish radicals, Sonya (Tereza Srbova), who teaches her espionage tricks, and firebrand Leo (Tom Hughes), who talks of religion when he has politics in mind. Their exoticism, flaunting past political persecution, is meant to excuse WASP Joan’s uncritical fascination.

Asked, “Who politicized you then?” Old Joan’s response, “That’s a strange way to put it,” epitomizes the disingenuousness of red-diaper-baby filmmaking that dodges political intent and refuses to admit its Communist sympathies. This is where Red Joan stops being entertainment and becomes romanticized indoctrination. Leftist attitudes are dramatized as the norm.

Joan defends her romantic intrigues and professional deceptions that include blackmailing her Cambridge colleagues. She prevaricates: “I have also been accused of deceiving my country. I am not a spy. I’m not a traitor. I wanted everyone to share the same knowledge. Because only that way could the horror of another world war be averted and I think if you look back at history, you’ll see I was right.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/04/foul_play_to_silence_patton.html

U.S. Army general George S. Patton, renowned for strategic military prowess and leadership, led World War II troops into Casablanca, Sicily, and France; relieved Allied forces at the Battle of the Bulge; and drove deep into Nazi Germany. Patton was equally renowned for his no-holds-barred opinions, colorful attire, profanity-laced speeches, and disregard for orders he thought ineffective, all of which did not sit well with the Allied high command.

The new “must see” film, Silence Patton, suggests that the general’s premature death in a mysterious auto accident may have been orchestrated to silence this oversized, historic personality. Written and directed by Robert Orlando, the film uses documentary footage, direct quotes, and interviews with historians to ask whether Patton’s forthrightness, outspoken judgments, and criticism of battlefield leadership may have led to assassination. Robert Wilcox, an investigative and military reporter, voiced the same theory in this 2008 book, Target Patton: The Plot to Assassinate General George S. Patton.

In Silence Patton, Orlando presents a non-lionized, realistic portrayal of a consummate yet flawed warrior, whose personal qualities often hindered him from obtaining the necessary orders to execute his desired military strategies. The film opens with a re-enactment of the accident in which an Army truck struck the car Patton was riding in, leaving him paralyzed and near death. The image of a dying Patton looms large throughout the film, which examines his impressive yet controversial military career and the suspicions surrounding his end.