RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/never-look-away-review-towering-art-as-high-drama-11549578464?mod=cx_picks&cx_navSource=cx_picks&cx_tag=video&cx_artPos=6#cxrecs_s

When your debut feature wins an Oscar—and almost universal acclaim—the path ahead probably leads downhill. That was the case for the German filmmaker Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. His electrifying 2006 political thriller, “The Lives of Others,” set in the former East Germany, explored state-sponsored surveillance, the beauty of empathy, and what it means to be human. His second film, “The Tourist,” starred Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp in a silly Hollywood confection about gangsters and mistaken identity; it left Mr. Donnersmarck’s admirers wondering how he would climb back from such a steep descent. “Never Look Away,” in German with English subtitles and entering national release this week, provides the answer: by taking on, with formidable if not total success, a mountainous subject—the power of art as exemplified by an artist who resembles the towering figure of Gerhard Richter, and as dramatized in a fateful family saga across three eras of German history.

Either of those two elements might have been ambitious enough to fill a conventional feature. This one, which runs a few minutes more than three hours, is filled to overflowing, though only occasionally does it seem overlong. (An extended sequence about the avant-garde scene in postwar Dusseldorf conspicuously verges on self-parody.) And as befits a story about the visual arts, it was shot by the great American cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, who gave us the peerlessly pure images in Carroll Ballard’s “The Black Stallion.”

Mr. Donnersmarck’s artist hero, Kurt Barnert (Tom Schilling), offers a perfect pretext for re-examining his nation’s calamitous past, from the rise of the Nazis before World War II through postwar division to unification in unimagined peace and prosperity. “Never Look Away” is equally about the suffering Kurt’s family endures during much of that time, and about Kurt’s art—how he makes it, how it changes him and those it touches. The details of his life sometimes hew closely to those of Mr. Richter’s; at other times they’re freely fictionalized. (The fraught relationship between the filmmaker and Mr. Richter, arguably the world’s pre-eminent living artist, was recently examined in a New Yorker piece by Dana Goodyear.) Rich as the film may be in aesthetic considerations—very rich indeed—it’s the startling arc of Kurt’s life story that sustains the dramatic narrative.

https://quillette.com/2019/02/06/dear-white

When Netflix’s Dear White People made its debut in April, 2017, the show immediately impressed viewers with the complex emotional multitudes it contained—showing its characters to be what author Cheryl Strayed once described as “flawed, and capable of redemption.” The plot focuses closely on the inner lives of black students at Winchester University, a fictional, predominately white Ivy League school that originally was brought to life in a 2014 film of the same name. Creator Justin Simien, who also wrote and directed the film, demonstrates that there is always more to people than what meets the eye.

Coleandrea “Coco” Conners is a young woman who adds weave to her hair and shortens her name in order to become accepted into a Black sorority. Is this an affirmation of black pride or the upholding of European beauty standards? Or both—or neither? When confronted by another student about showing up to a party where white attendees wore blackface, Coco says, “This might come as a shock to you, but these people don’t give a fuck about no Harriet motherfucking Tubman. They pay millions of dollars on their lips, their tans, their asses, Jay-Z tickets, because they want to be like us. And they got to be for a night. I’m not about to go out in the streets and protest a fucking Halloween party.”

Reggie Greene is a fierce activist for his people, and is constantly challenging them to fight for their rights in the face of injustice. But does that mean every white person he encounters who disagrees with him on race issues is a racist? What if a white friend uses the N-word—but does so in reference to a popular rap song in which the word figures prominently?

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/netflix-as-death-cult/

Stop believing in God, G.K. Chesterton is misquoted, and you will believe in anything. A suggested corollary: Stop believing in eternal life and you will be obsessed with death. Human beings can’t bear mortality without the hope of immortality. As we abandon the old faiths, we confront our own mortality naked and afraid. That, I think, explains the extraordinary surge in the horror genre during the past twenty years. It also helps explain the improbably high valuation of Netflix stock.

In 2015 I observed in an essay for the Claremont website:

Ten years ago the horror genre, thrillers with an expressly supernatural element, supplied one out of 25 film industry products. By 2013 the proportion had risen to one in eight. Horror films touch a number of sore points in the American psyche. But the strangest thing about the horror boom is the popularity of zombies. 1968 was the year of the Tet Offensive, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, and global student riots. It is also the year that Night of the Living Dead first transplanted zombies from Caribbean settings to the American heartland. We’ve had nearly 2,600 zombie movies since—500 more than vampire pictures, and nearly 1,000 more than cowboy films. If the cowboy was the emblematic American in the time of Frederick Jackson Turner, the numbers argue that zombies are just as representative today.

That was before Netflix. I finally got around to watching at least part of Bird Box, in which a supernatural entity evokes the worst fears of every individual on earth, resulting in mass suicide. This apparently is Netflix’s most popular offering of the moment. It is preposterous trash, but clearly has struck the national nerve. Then there is Bandersnatch, in which the viewer can choose a number of alternative paths to an inevitable series of violent deaths. The point of the exercise is that choice is illusory and the characters are doomed no matter what.

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

If you happen to be a 6′9″ inch German man named Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck, it’s not surprising that you would be comfortable with an oversized movie that plays longer than Gone With the Wind. At over 3 hrs, the film needs editing and shortening but if you cut it to 2 1/2 hrs., you’d have a minor masterpiece. Even in its present frame, it’s a powerful and moving experience merging World War II with post-war communist Germany seen through the filter of a budding artist searching for his authentic and singular form of expression.

It begins with a visit to the Degenerate Art Exhibition organized by the Nazis against Jewish artists and others who defied classical standards. A beautiful young woman accompanies her very young nephew who loves to draw and we quickly learn of her quirkiness and his talent – two themes that are harbingers of his and her life stories. Hitler’s arm rapidly extends from art to disabled and mentally deficient people and the lovely but erratic Elisabeth is first hospitalized until more drastic measures are taken. As the young boy, Kurt, grows up, we see the further damage that Nazi control wreaks on his family, but he remains dedicated to becoming an artist and enrolls in a school in Dusseldorf where he is exposed to all the trendy aspects of the art world in the 60’s and 70’s, trying desperately to determine how he can contribute something original to a very crowded and chaotic scene.

https://quillette.com/2019/01/14/jihadists

Jihadists (dir. François Margolin and Lemine Ould Salem, Cinema Libre Studio 2018, 75m)

Some years ago, when assessments of the Arab Spring were at their most optimistic, it became common to hear it suggested that al-Qaeda was, if not defeated entirely, then virtually irrelevant. And yet, with all eyes on the Middle East, towns and cities in Mali would soon be falling like dominoes to al-Qaeda and its Islamist allies. This was the context in which two French filmmakers, François Margolin and Lemine Ould Salem, boldly journeyed to North Africa to document life in territory now governed by sharia law. The result of that trip is an extraordinary documentary entitled Jihadists, an unprecedented, unflinching, and unsettling glimpse into life under Islamist control.

While it is increasingly hard to miss the existence of this totalitarian ideology, the same cannot be said for Margolin and Salem’s film. Worried that Jihadists offered no dissenting voices to counter the extremists featured in the film, France’s National Center of Cinematography expressed concern that, rather than repel people, the film’s stark portrait of Islamic rule might instead serve as Islamist propaganda. The French government agreed, and the film was subsequently handed an “18” certificate—a classification both rare and prohibitive in France. According to Margolin, no documentary has been rated “18” in decades. As a result, Jihadists opened in only three theatres rather than the initially slated 30. It will have a belated American premier on January 25 in New York, followed shortly thereafter by a limited run in Los Angeles. That the film continues to struggle to draw widespread coverage is hardly surprising. Its topic and conclusions run contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist. This is a pity, because Jihadists is a powerful and important document that deserves a bigger audience.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/mary-poppins-returns-with-a-socialist-subtext/

Mary Poppins returns, we’re told, but only Baby Boomers will care. Roma offers the nanny Millennials can relate to. Who is this white British twit with a cinched overcoat and bumbershoot who goes about ordering around her betters and consorting with working-class inferiors? No one asked for Mary Poppins’s return to modern consciousness, but her reappearance unmistakably proves that Hollywood Boomers are desperate to justify their own mediocrity through nostalgic sentiment.

Also unmistakable is the nasty political undercurrent that prevents this reboot from being escapist fun. Take the new politically instructive songs in Mary Poppins Returns. Sure, they’re the usual Marc Shaiman pastiche — cliché Broadway compositions (from the composer of the lame musical Hairspray) that lack the memorable delight of Richard and Robert Sherman’s songs for the original Mary Poppins in 1964.

Incapable of a charming tongue twister, or relatable lyrics about medicine in sugary spoonfuls, Shaiman assimilates the #Resistance mood that has overtaken Broadway and Hollywood. Though pretending to be innocuous family entertainment, the knock-off tunes have a faintly repressive, pedantic note, especially in Shaiman’s balloon-song finale “Nowhere to Go but Up.” To careful listeners, it sounds like showbiz Stalinism: “The past is the past / It lives on as history / Let the past take a bow / Forever is now.” Why should a family-movie ditty recall the essence of Soviet erasure of history?

That erasure also reeducates memories of the first Mary Poppins film in which a subservient female nanny, who shows up weirdly out of nowhere, supports the bumbling male head of a stuffy British banking household. She sustained England’s class system almost supernaturally — or supercalifragilisticexpialidociously. Now Mary returns for no better purpose than commercial repackaging. (Meanwhile, minor characters play out a Socialist subtext, campaigning for underpaid workers.)

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/they_shall_not_grow_old_a_box_office_blowout__and_for_good_reason.html

Was there ever a more consequential war than World War I? As a result of the bickering petty politics of Europe’s inbred monarchs, we got communism and the Soviet empire from it, for one. We got 37 million deaths, millions and millions of bright people, a death toll so high that it skewed the demographics of nations such as France. We got grotesque forms of warfare – trench warfare, chemical warfare, and Howitzers, shell shock, tanks, and huge civilian death tolls. We also got the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian empire – Europe’s first truly internationalist empire of tolerance and melting pots – to be replaced by the crummy and oppressive European Union. We got the creation of the morally relativistic cultural Eurotrashiness of Europe in that war’s wake, too – dada art, stupid other kinds of modern art, and a Europe that refuses to fight or stand up for itself, no matter what may come down the pike. The death toll allows us to recognize the rationale with sympathy. And as an awful coda, the war was so badly resolved that it led to a second and even bigger world war. So this is a war that’s still very much with us in effects, one hundred years after the armistice was signed.

This is why Peter Jackson’s brilliant documentary is so compelling, just on topic alone. It’s the 100th anniversary of that war’s end, and the Imperial War Museum wanted someone to come in and look at its archives of grainy, jerky, faded, black and white footage to bring back to everyone today just what happened, show how that war looked. Jackson, the Academy Award-winning director of The Lord of the Rings, who has an artist’s eye for color, visuals, and framing a story, did a brilliant job framing this one through the eyes of the British ordinary soldiers in the war, having them tell their stories in the documentary, using oral histories from the BBC taken in the 1960s and 1970s, and pairing it with on-the-ground war footage of the soldiers themselves – signing up, uniforming up, acting like the World War II soldiers with “a job to do” – and dealing with trench warfare, privations, mustard gas attacks, Howitzer attacks, land mines, barbed wire, rats, lice, and bloody dead bodies, with considerable courage and aplomb. Not all of them were victims, as literary classics such as All Quiet on the Western Front or A Farewell to Arms suggested, worthy as those writings are (and what a pity the Millennials don’t read them). The soldiers cracked jokes, got used to deaths all around them, and dealt with the ordeal.

https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/they-shall-not-grow-old-peter-jacksons-masterpiece-war-memorial/

Our war memorials are usually made of brass or stone. But Peter Jackson’s astonishing new film They Shall Not Grow Old is a war memorial for the big screen.

Jackson’s film has done the impossible: He has created a time machine. Jackson was given access to the sound and video archives of the Imperial War Museum and tasked with producing a documentary about World War I in time for the centenary commemoration of the armistice on November 11, 2018. (Link to trailer here.)

After playing to sold-out theaters across the United Kingdom in October, the film will show just one more day in the United States – December 27. December 17, the only day the film has shown so far in the United States, saw packed theaters.

Jackson’s film portrays the World War I soldier as you have never seen him: in color, in high definition, and with sound.

They Shall Not Grow Old painstakingly cleans up the old jerky films of the Great War. It removes the blemishes, turns them into clean high definition, and colorizes them with thorough, painstaking accuracy. The film speed is even reset to natural motion, so no more unnatural gaits.

Jackson’s technical wizardry turns the landscapes of France into something vivid, expansive, and apocalyptic.

But it’s the faces of the young soldiers that will haunt you. Instead of the old washed herky-jerky films with their blurry soldiers marching by, Jackson uses modern technology to wipe clean the dust of a century and draw out the real people who endured unendurable trench life.

The faces are so young.

They are the kids down the street. They are the people you see every day in your own life. They gaze at you across the century and change forever the history of the Western Front in your heart.

An officer reads a morale-boosting charge before a company roars into the hell of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Jackson’s filmmakers dug up the original orders from that day and produced a voiceover of an officer using the geographically correct dialect based on the regional unit insignia. Indeed, Jackson employed lip readers and voice actors from the correct regions of the United Kingdom throughout the film to provide dialog anytime onscreen lips move.

https://www.steynonline.com/9075/eight-crazy-nights

Happy Hanukkah to all our Jewish readers around the world. I thought it appropriate to look out a slab of Hanukkah Hollywood, but the pickings are thin, save for this 2002 offering from my sometime fellow Granite Stater Adam Sandler. Born in Brooklyn, Sandler grew up in New Hampshire and was discovered in an LA comedy club by Dennis Miller, who recommended him to “Saturday Night Live”. Eight Crazy Nights was a flop on its first release but has become something of a cult film, and is in its way a significant cultural artifact: a big-budget multiplex animated gross-out comedy about a Jewish holiday. Only in America!

It takes its title from a lyric in a comedy sketch Adam Sandler first did on American TV three decades ago. Surrounded by Christmas standards, he decided to create the first Hanukah song – or, if you prefer, Channukah, it being the first major American holiday without an agreed spelling (the Presidents Day/Presidents’ Day/President’s Day variables are a punctuation dispute). Anyway, Sandler’s song includes the attitudinal line that “instead of one day of presents we get eight crazy nights”. Other than that, all I recall from it is basically a laundry list of famous Jews not generally known as such:

David Lee Roth lights the menorah
So do James Caan, Kirk Douglas and the late Dinah Shore-ah…

There was nothing much else in the way of Hanukkah pop, although a couple of decades back, just before he bombed out in the Iowa caucuses, the Utah Senator and songwriting Mormon Orrin Hatch disclosed to me that he was writing a Chanukah number. I don’t know what became of that, but, in the absence of Orrin, Sandler’s song, by default, got an enormous amount of airtime from culturally sensitive radio stations, grateful for a Hannukah anthem the goyim could get a handle on. I think I first heard it on WQEW New York, in between Perry Como’s “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” and Peggy Lee’s “Winter Wonderland”. Having become Mister Hanukah, Sandler then parlayed his hit into Hollywood’s first mainstream animated musical Chanukkah movie. I’ve no idea why they even bothered to release this picture in Belgium or Germany. No other culture but America could have produced this film: not because it’s a mainstream movie about a Jewish religious festival, but because its view of that festival, as just another pretext for an all-purpose secular holiday celebration anybody can be a part of, is so American. Indeed, Seth Kearsley directs, Rob Schneider narrates and A. Film and Yowza! Animation animate the picture consciously in the style of those perennial Rankin-Bass Christmas specials also built around songs: Santa Claus is Coming to Town, Frosty the Snowman and, of course, the now reviled Rudolph. The animation is affectionate and reassuringly familiar. Coming soon: ‘Twas The Night Before Ramadan.

The story opens in Dukesberry, New Hampshire, where a thirtysomething criminal alcoholic (which struck me as a comparative rarity back in 2002, but is now near universal in the state) steals a snowmobile, attempts to total the town ice sculptures, and is delivered by the district court into the care of a septuagenarian basketball coach. Aside from the fact that “Dukesberry” seems to be the most Jewish town in New Hampshire other than the once popular Jewish summer resort of Bethlehem (seriously), Mr Sandler’s first animated feature is, at least initially, in conventional heartwarming holiday mode.