RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/04/02/netflixs-the-boy-who-harnessed-the-wind-tells-a-young-inventors-inspirational-tale/

They say necessity is the mother of invention. That aphorism was particularly apt for William Kamkwamba, who at age 14 constructed a wind turbine and saved his family from starvation. Netflix commemorated his 2006 engineering feat in “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” screened at Sundance and released in early March. The movie is inspired by the eponymous autobiography coauthored by Kamkwamba and Brian Mealer.

Chiwetel Ejiofor stars as William’s father Trywell Kamkwamba. Best known for his title role as Solomon Northup in “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013), “Wind” also marks Ejiofor’s directorial motion picture debut. Maxwell Simba plays William in the supporting role. The sharp outlines of cinematography by Dick Pope reiterate that this harrowing story isn’t a fairy tale.

Unlike other teen prodigy films, such as “October Sky” (1999) and “Spare Parts” (2014), “Wind” revolves not around an esoteric hobby or scholarship contests, but devotes its object to the avoidance of starvation in a sun-baked and dusty landscape. Imagine living in Malawi, a country that has the population of New York state across an area nearly the size of Pennsylvania with a gross domestic product equivalent to that of Guam. That’s where Kamkwamba’s story takes place.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/trans-ballet-dancer-nora-monsecour-girl-always-fascination-legs/

When Nora Monsecour was 15 and training as a transgender ballerina in Belgium, she decided to join the womens’ pointe class. But her school wouldn’t let her.

Monsecour was transitioning. Having taken puberty blockers at the age of 11, she was halfway through her female hormone replacements, with her sights set on gender reassignment surgery.

And yet, her school principal told Monsecour that she was “going through a phase”. Worse still, the principal blamed Monsecour’s mother, saying she was giving her daughter medication because she’d always wanted a daughter over a son.

Later that year, in 2009, Monsecour left the school. Her story made headlines, prompting aspiring Flemish film director Lukas Dhont, who was only 18, to send her a Facebook message. He wanted to make a documentary about Monsecour’s life. She said no.

A few years later, Dhont asked again, and this time Monsecour reconsidered. If the film was a fictionalised account of her life, rather than a documentary, she would do it. The result was Girl, out now in cinemas, starring 27-year-old breakout actor Victor Polster, a student at the Royal Ballet School of Antwerp, as 15-year-old transgender ballerina Lara.

http://politicalmavens.com/

This movie takes place in Hamburg in 1946, as Keira Knightley arrives from London to join her Colonel husband (Jason Clarke) who is in charge of dealing with the aftermath of a war that left the German city decimated. Though the Allies were permitted to take over the houses of wealthy Germans and evict them during their stay, the Colonel extends the gesture of allowing the father/daughter owner/residents to remain in the palatial mansion, occupying only the top floor while he and his wife live on the main floor. We learn that each family has suffered a tragic personal loss and we see the initial antipathy of the Colonel’s wife to all things German while her military husband insists that the war is over, the Allies have won and it is time for reconciliation.

As the film progresses, a relationship develops between the Colonel’s beautiful wife and the very handsome owner of the house (Alexander Skarsgard), one that is consummated on the dining room table in broad daylight – the most egregious of several unbelievable scenes. His teenage daughter is a surly character, angry at the loss of her mother and the takeover of her home by “the enemy.” She will turn into a pivotal character through her relationship with a young Nazi thug, intent on further terrorist activity. The tension between the love story and the reality of the hostile daughter’s aiding and abetting an imminent assassination becomes an insurmountable obstacle to the audience reaction What is intended as a surprise ending is one we have been rooting for from the get-go, so it seems more of an expectation than a surprise.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/cold-war-movie-anti-communist

Director Pawel Pawlikowski’s masterful film mounts a subtle, power-packed critique of the socialist phenomenon.

The best narrative art eschews didacticism in favor of subtlety and nuance and moral reflection. The Polish film Cold War, released last year and directed by Pawel Pawlikowski, is no exception. It tells the story, inspired by Pawlikowski’s parents, of Wiktor Warski (Tomasz Kot) and Zula Lichón (Joanna Kulig), whose amour fou burns against the backdrop of postwar Europe.

Wiktor’s passion for Zula consumes him. It haunts him for years after he flees Poland, and drives him to return despite the certainty of imprisonment. Zula herself is a beautiful, broken creature, the victim of abuse, talented but insecure, flirtatious, charming, impetuous, melancholy, who dulls her anxieties with alcohol. This passionate and doomed romance also has a political dimension. Which is why Cold War is not just melodrama. It’s a masterpiece.

The film is a subtle but devastating critique of the socialist phenomenon. Wiktor and Zula meet shortly after the end of World War II, when Wiktor is tasked with assembling a musical troupe that will perform folk music for the nomenklatura of the Soviet client government. With his partner, choreographer Irena Bielecka (Agata Kulesza), Wiktor tours the countryside, recording ancient melodies. They occupy what looks to be an old estate — a ruin of the ancien régime — where they hold auditions. Among the aspiring dancers and singers is Zula, to whom Wiktor is immediately drawn. Irena doesn’t share Wiktor’s enthusiasm, especially after Zula performs a song from a Soviet movie. But she relents. Zula joins the group.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/true-story-behind-keira-knightly-film-aftermath-british-family/

The European winter of 1946/7 was one of the coldest of the 20th century. The Allies had won the war, but severe and relentless snowfall compounded the hardship across the continent – not least in Germany, where a defeated population had to rebuild a flattened nation during what came to be known as the Hungerwinter.

Out of this environment came a remarkable tale of reconciliation and friendship, when Walter Brook, a British colonel installed by Allied powers as governor of Pinneberg, a county near Hamburg, rejected official advice and moved in with a German family. The occupying British forces had been given orders to requisitions homes and cars… anything they might need in order to govern, with German families being sent to camps or denuded of their possessions.

Rather than requisitioning the family home of local baker Wilhelm Ladige and his wife, Erika, a wealthy heiress, Walter decided it was big enough for both families. It helped that the Ladiges had been as “anti-Hitler as far as one dared” – especially as a family with three children. So in February 1947, Walter’s wife Anthea and their three children – Kim, eight, Sheila, 15, and Colin, 17 – moved into a grand mansion with the Wilhelm and Erika and their children: Holger, five, Heike, seven, and Theo, 12.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/oscars-2019-academy-awards-fakes-history-remakes-new/

When it comes to movies, the Oscars are one way of learning history. Students of film can peruse the annals to gather a sense of what movie culture was like in different periods, reading the list of winners (and nominations) as a guide to cultural standards and film-industry norms.

But journalists — those who cover the entertainment beat as well as the Beltway — abuse the historical function of the Oscars by routinely hijacking its significance. Specifically, when Ruth E. Carter and Hannah Beachler won Academy Awards for, respectively, the costumes and art direction of Black Panther, many media wonks (professional and amateur alike) immediately proclaimed that they had “made history as the first African-American women to win” in those categories.

What kind of “history” is this really? When the reporting of news events carries such automatic estimation of cultural value, the term “first” is used as manipulation, a measuring rod of social progress.

This makes the political idea of “progress” more important than the subject being reported. Carter’s and Beachler’s work goes undescribed; their personal histories as people are delimited to the social-justice categories of race and gender. First-semester journalism classes used to teach that mentioning a person’s race or gender was appropriate only when it was essential to the news.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/01-02/mars-dreaming/

For a dead and apparently lifeless planet, Mars certainly gets more that its share of attention. From HG Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs to Ron Howard and, most recently, Sean Penn, the distant red orb has proven irresistible to any and all with more than an ounce of imagination.

Since the publication of The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells in 1897, popular imagination has been drawn to the idea of humans travelling to, and colonising, the planet Mars. Every decade new books and films are released exploring scenarios about whether life exists or ever existed on Mars, whether Martians would be benign or hostile, and whether the planet could sustain human life, should we be able to figure out a way to get there and settle. Although we have landed men on the moon, that journey was a mere 384,000 kilometres from Earth, whereas Mars is 54.6 million kilometres away.

The latest Mars dreaming is the eight-episode series created by the British television network Channel 4, and US streaming service Hulu, The First, starring Sean Penn. It was created by Beau Willimon, the writer-producer behind the American adaptation of the BBC’s House of Cards.

The drama in the premiere season of The First takes place in the not-too-distant future and focuses on the astronauts, their families, and the ground crew, rather on the flight or the experiences on Mars. Rob Thomas, of the Capital Times, wrote:

Beau Willimon seems to be atoning for House of Cards with his new Hulu series The First. Whereas Netflix’s first big hit often focused on the worst about humanity—not just evil but ambition, greed and weakness—his new show, The First, reminds us of the best about us.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272973/what-you-didnt-miss-oscars-bruce-bawer

Who watches the Academy Awards anymore? Movies are worse than ever. TV is better than ever. Who wants to go to a movie theater nowadays and worry about picking up bedbugs from the seats, having a rat scurry up your leg in the dark, or getting into a fracas with some psycho over the armrest? I haven’t seen any of the films nominated for an Oscar this year, and didn’t even realize the Oscars were being televised last night until a couple of hours before the show came on.

But I watched it anyway. Not because I cared who won or lost, but because I was curious to gauge the extent to which the Hollywood establishment was still clinging to the whole identity-group thing. Answer: a lot. Almost every pair of award presenters consisted of a white person of one sex and a person of color of the other sex. Also, it was obvious that these egomaniacs had recovered entirely from the brief humiliation of the #metoo movement – and had unashamedly resumed their sacred job of instructing us peons in how to think about race, sex, politics, etc.

Some highlights, in chronological order.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/the-tree-of-life-masterpiece-film-director-terrence-malick/

Set aside your devices and diversions for two hours, and you’ll see something wonderful.

‘There are two ways through life — the way of nature and the way of grace,” remarks the saintly mother at the outset of The Tree of Life, one of the most awe-inspiring films of the 21st century. She continues:

Grace doesn’t try please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked, accepts insults and injuries. Nature only wants to please itself, get others to please it. . . . It finds reasons to be unhappy when all the world is shining around it and love is smiling through all things.

I wonder what the TV Guide capsule of Terrence Malick’s inspired, autobiographical meditation on a Christian existence might say. How about: “Three members of a midcentury Texas family deal with an unbearable loss over the course of years. Also, there are dinosaurs.” Malick makes some daring, strange, brilliant choices whose connections reveal themselves only gradually and obliquely.

Starting with an epigraph from Job (“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?”), Malick meditates on a family much like his own, shifting among the perspectives of Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt), a strict and sometimes brutish disciplinarian; his wife (Jessica Chastain), an angel in a housedress; and Jack, one of their three sons (played by Hunter McCracken as a boy and Sean Penn as an adult). Malick wends his way through the interior monologues of these three as they reflect on their lives together in the 1950s, their responses to a catastrophic event, and the mystery of consciousness.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/02/gosnell-movie-late-term-abortion-new-york-virginia/

A new law in New York legalizes the actions for which abortionist Kermit Gosnell was sent to prison for life.

Rarely has a new movie become available at a time when the news made its subject matter timelier and more appropriate. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer is the true story of a doctor who went to prison for life in 2013 for stabbing several infants he had delivered alive inside his hellhole of an abortion clinic in Philadelphia. After being almost completely ignored by critics during its release last year, last week the movie went on sale in Walmart and on Amazon, where it is the No. 1 best-selling dramatic DVD. At the same time, infanticide became a key issue in major stories in Virginia and New York.

Last week, Virginia governor Ralph Northam became engulfed in a controversy over whether he had appeared in his medical-school yearbook in costume, either in blackface or in the white sheet and hat of a Ku Klux Klan member. The photo came to light because a medical-school classmate of Northam’s was appalled at the governor’s candid support for a bill that would remove many restrictions on late-term abortion. While the media outrage was largely directed at his alleged racist actions 35 years ago, the abortion bill was promptly killed in committee, hours after Northam had been overly honest in describing what the bill would allow.