RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/american-film-institute-top-films-

In a rush to bad judgment, they heap praise on propaganda and scorn on moviegoers.

It’s the first week of December and the nation’s countless, overeager awards groups have already begun parceling out their year-end encomiums. They kowtow to Hollywood, obviously without having seen all the films yet to be released in 2018 — only movies that the big studios from Disney to Netflix have already decided are award-worthy.

The most egregious of these early-starters is the American Film Institute, which rushed the awards race with its 10 Best choices, sprinting out of the gate before a couple of the listed movies have even opened in theaters. The problem is that movies no longer have a chance to register in the culture or to become beloved or reviled by the public. It’s the case of yet another institution, based in Hollywood or D.C. (the AFI has feet in both), making decisions for the rest of us, indifferent to our participation.

The AFI began 51 years ago, after a Johnson-administration call for an organization committed to preserving America’s film heritage. It was originally funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Ford Foundation, so its list sounds official. But the movie awards game is part of the commercialization of pop culture.

Even the debatable idea that the government should finance artists (through any means) is belied by the endorsement of commercialism rather than artistic expression. Be assured, there’s a political component to this: The films that won the AFI’s approval are all politically motivated and represent social-justice precepts rather than moral virtues or aesthetic standards. In other words, they’re propaganda.

Listed alphabetically, the AFI films assume the same values that are promoted in politically biased mainstream media; the list resembles an index for Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/2018/11/26/the-green-book-a-review/

Sometimes a movie that’s been panned turns out to be more enjoyable than those that appeal to critics who pay attention to words like auteur and oeuvre. Sometimes a bowl of mac and cheese is preferable to pate de foie gras and so it is with great pleasure that I urge you to treat yourself to some comfort food in the sizable portion of Viggo Mortenson as you haven’t seen him before.

Playing a mob-connected, volatile bouncer who loses his job at the Copacabana, Viggo accepts a temporary job as chauffeur to Dr. Don Shirley, a classically trained pianist and head of a trio who must do a road trip from New York to the deep south. He needs a man like Viggo, trained in the public relations insights of bouncers because Dr. Shirley is a black man who will be barred from hotels, clubs and dining rooms yet is determined to provoke precisely those confrontations while en route.

To a certain extent, the set-up is a reverse rip-off of Driving Miss Daisy with a working class white man chauffeuring an elite and educated black man who trained in Russia, speaks multiple languages, knows little about pop music or its new stars but is immensely gifted and sought after as a performer. These two men have virtually nothing in common and the gentle comedy that ensues from their mismatch is what fuels the plot. It is the best part of the movie which loses its panache when it tries to drive home the already obvious message – segregation was bad and racists resisted the legal efforts to integrate the south.

Part of the problem is that Dr. Don Shirley, a man invested in the power of personal dignity is a stiff-necked goody two-shoes, determined to correct Viggo’s grammar, speech patterns and habits learned in the old neighborhood in the Bronx. We are amazed at his talent and genius (he was a real person for those who never heard him). But of course, Viggo – handsome even with a paunch – has the charm and common sense that often tag along with the personalities of bad boys and he remains the object of interest throughout.

Don’t minimize the skill involved in his performance – he is never out of character for a single moment and though he works with gangsters and people who don’t wait for backtalk, he manages to make us believe that he’s primarily a family man with a genuine capacity for friendship and love. Think Damon Runyon along with the mis-pronunciations and misunderstanding of vocabulary to distract us from what gangsters do. This movie will remind you of that disarming author and you’ll really enjoy yourself without working too hard. Just see it.

http://politicalmavens.com/

There’s a grand guignol atmosphere in “The Favourite,” with 18th century men coiffed in long sheep-like wigs, made up to look like drag queens and Queen Anne herself looking more like a madwoman than a regal character. Though the story of the queen and Sarah and Abigail, the two women who service her in every sense of the word, is loosely based on historical fact, the language is full of contemporary curse words which seem anachronistic. Surprisingly, they turn out to have been in use during that century – especially the two four letter words with a “u” as the only vowel; this is significant because it lends credibility to some of the sexual behavior you might have thought was not in vogue at that time. Certainly there is no historical record to support the movie’s contentions.

Everything about The Favourite is over the top – the incredible paneled palace, the background music which occasionally rises to the foreground, the oversized ambitions of Sarah and Abigail, well-played by Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone and the complicated, convoluted character of Anne herself in a tour-de-force performance by Olivia Colman. She is sickly and dependent yet willful and demanding; at times a fool and then surprisingly capable of rising to the exigencies of her rank. She remains a deeply unhappy woman who mourns her miscarriages and stillbirths and the early death of her child. She is supremely eccentric and prone to childish tantrums such as summarily dismissing her various ministers so she can return to her bed. Though she is the fulcrum around whom the plot revolves, the main subjects of interest are the two women who are distant cousins, each vying for Anne’s attention and rewards.

Lady Sarah Churchill is a commanding presence who, as the queen’s main lady in waiting, has taken over most of the decision making for the country. She is clever, informed and the wife of the Duke of Marlborough who was leading the British troops in a war against the French. Historically, Sarah is credited with having been the most powerful woman in France in her day. After noticing that Abigail has been demoted to being a scullery maid, Sarah rescues her, bringing her upstairs where the work is more pleasant and where she subtly manages to insinuate herself into the queen’s affections and bedchamber.

How this happens is told in graphic scenes involving nudity, sex, politics, violence, treachery, romance, disillusionment and some surprises. At a certain point, the movie begins to feel like a pile-on that actually makes you lose interest because there’s just too much to digest. The soundtrack, effective at first in foretelling an ominous development, eventually turns into a headache-producing disturbance. But the movie will make you run to the internet to learn more about this unusual triangle of women – no mean accomplishment for director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Yesterday I attended a private screening of a documentary “The Creepy Line” by Peter Schweizer and director M.A. Taylor which reveals the insidious way that Google harvests information from e-mails and searches by individuals who use it. It further discloses the subtle ways in which Google and Facebook manipulate information to influence the behavior, choices and political opinions of their subscribers and users by recondite and difficult to trace means.

The film features commentary by Peter Schweizer, Dr. Jordan Peterson, and Dr. Robert Epstein.

Peter Schweizer is author of many books:
Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends Mar 20, 2018
Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich Jul 26, 2016
Compromised: How Money and Politics Drive FBI Corruption Aug 16, 2018 With co author Seamus Bruner

See the film. It is available on Amazonhttps://www.amazon.com/Creepy-Line-Dr-Jordan-Peterson/dp/B07JQSZN6D/ref=sr_1_2?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1541644975&sr=1-2&keywords=the+creepy+line+documentary

http://politicalmavens.com/

There’s more heat in a New York Times putdown of Melania Trump’s wardrobe than in Jason Reitman’s biopic of Gary Hart’s aborted run for a presidential nomination in 1988. Overstuffed with tons of newsroom and campaign chatter, Reitman neglects to give the primary players – Hart and his wife – sufficient opportunity to deal with the complicated and conflicted inner feelings of a man and his wife watching their shot at a brilliant future slip down the drain. And not because of a grand love affair, but rather a casual dalliance with a young and as played here, vapid Donna Rice. In real life, Donna had a fresh–faced prettiness but Reitman casts her as an overly made-up girl who looks more like a lap dancer than a model or pharmaceutical salesman, both of which Donna was.

Hugh Jackman plays Senator Hart as a man who is blinded by his insistence on his right to a private life, with little understanding of the growing power of the press and television to make or break a person’s reputation. One of the best moments in the film is the footage of Johnny Carson summarizing Hart’s tone-deafness as he watches the late nite show. Though he has lived through the revelations of the Kennedy clan and Watergate, he seems baffled by the indignity of the press in hounding him at his home and digging up dirt that was floating on the surface on a boat named Monkey Business. We never see him crumble as he realizes the enormity of his mis-judgment and the enduring price he will pay for that. Strangely, the famous picture of Donna Rice perched on his lap on the cruise to Bimini is never shown. Vera Farmiga does the best she can as Hart’s long-suffering wife Lee who gets a shot at emotional fireworks on the piano, hardly sufficient to satisfy our curiosity.

What I was left with was the observation that at least what the press and public were castigating was Hart’s behavior at the time he was running and his hypocrisy at stressing morality and ethics while he himself was an adulterer. What a far cry from our recent outrage at the alleged behavior of a 17 year old student, 36 years before his nomination for the Supreme Court and 19 years after a sterling academic, political, judicial, social and personal life. How far we have fallen as we now consider that progress.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/schweizer-stalin-hitler-mao-would-dream-about-googles-power-over-our-thoughts/

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Google and Facebook have tremendous power to influence billions of people, without them even knowing it. An upcoming film documents how they can make companies rich, they can suppress information, and they can sway an election. They can even suggest thoughts and sway culture. This is the kind of power kings, emperors, and even dictators of yesteryear would envy, if they knew it existed.

“Throughout human history, tragically, leaders, ideologies, and belief systems have arisen that want to have total control over our lives, they want to remake human nature,” Peter Schweizer, New York Times bestselling author and writer for the upcoming film “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media. He mentioned Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong.

“They all had police forces, they killed millions of people — tens of millions of people, in some cases,” Schweizer noted. “I’m not suggesting companies like Facebook and Google do that, but these companies do have control or influence over us that those dictators and leaders would dream about.”

“All the crude propaganda that they engaged in, the radio broadcasts, the leaflets, the sort of hypnotic speeches that they would give, pale in comparison with the ability for Google to nudge and to steer us in directions they want us to go and we don’t necessarily want to go,” the author explained.

Facebook and Google “do that by sifting our information, determining what we see and what we don’t see, they also do that by censoring information, and they nudge us in directions that they want us to go.”

“This is enormous power,” Schweizer said. “It’s the sort of power of Big Brother in ‘1984,’ and it’s the sort of power that these totalitarians from the last century would have loved and dreamed of having. They have power over the news and information that we get and the thoughts that we start to form.”
DOJ Invites 24 State AGs to Jeff Sessions Meeting About Breaking Up Google, Facebook

“The film is called ‘The Creepy Line’ because we believe that Facebook and Google are doing things that are out of bounds with what we expect from companies,” Schweizer explained. The phrase comes from a speech in which Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, said his company likes to “get right up to the creepy line, but not cross it.”

“They never define what the creepy line is, but our view and attitude is that they cross the creepy line all the time,” he told PJ Media. “They have the ability to sway and influence people, and they admit this. They brag about it. It gives them a power over the control of information, it gives them the power of suggestion, and it gives them the power to have a dramatic effect on elections.”

M.A. Taylor, director of “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media how this power works. He explained that Robert Epstein — a psychologist who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard — has extensively researched the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), discovering that Google’s search engine “can actually sway your opinion.”

“If I type a character in the search bar and suggestions come up, if they’re all positive, they’ll lead to positive web pages which will lead to a positive effect. If you have a negative in there, that negative is likely to get ten to fifteen times more clicks, bringing up negative pages,” Taylor told PJ Media.

Google gives users ten search results on the first page, and it delivers them in ranks from one to ten, with the top result regarded the most reliable. This involves two biases, Taylor explained. First, it has to sift through results to give the top ten, then it has to choose the most reliable result for number 1. Users want this ranking for the most reliable basic information for searches like, “What is the capital of France?”

“This becomes problematic when you talk about things like candidates or issues, because that algorithm has to make that decision about who’s the best candidate or who should you vote for and things like that,” Taylor said. “That’s where it becomes problematic, because we don’t really know what the algorithm is doing to give us these results.”

Robert Epstein ran an experiment, using a search engine to measure the impact of bias on Americans who had no knowledge of a particular issue — like Australia’s 2010 election, for example. “He thought it would be, we put all positive searches for one candidate, they’ll shift two or three percent,” the director said. “It actually shifted 48 percent.”

Epstein first thought this huge result was a mistake, but he ran the study again, and the shift got bigger, 63 percent! He even figured out how to mask the bias by adding one positive search result for the other candidate into a list of results favoring his opponent.

The psychologist has run this experiment in India and with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. He found evidence of bias, and conservatives would not be surprised to find that the bias favored Hillary Clinton. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/movie-review-fahrenheit-11-9-michael-moore-tedious/

Moore shakes his fist, and I yawn.

A few weeks after President Trump was sworn in, Michael Moore announced a one-man Broadway play using the advertising slogan, “Can a Broadway show take down a sitting president?” The answer turned out to be no. So Moore moves on to Fahrenheit 11/9, a two-hour movie in which he compares the World Trade Center attack to the Reichstag fire and plays footage of Hitler over audio of a Trump speech.

It’s the same old Moore we’ve seen for 30 years, except these days hardly anyone cares: Moore is a bit late to the Trump-is-Hitler party. Today he’s just another indistinguishable voice in a crowd of the very shouty, and his admixture of breathless hyperbole, vague calls for revolution, and corny humor has no zing. Every late-night comic is woke these days, and their writers are a lot more talented than Moore. His big cinematic stunt in this film is to take a tank of Flint, Mich., water to the home of the Republican governor, who isn’t present, and spray it over the fence into the yard: Watering the lawn to own the cons.

In Moore’s second anti-Trump movie (if you missed Michael Moore in TrumpLand, which grossed $149,000, you have a lot of company), our host’s analysis of Election 2016 is to suggest that reporters took it easy on Trump during the campaign because Big Media were run by fellow sexual predators such as Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, Roger Ailes, and Mark Halperin. Moore cites no data, perhaps because even he noticed what actually happened: One study showed 91 percent of network-TV coverage of Trump was negative. The media cheered Trump only through the Republican primaries; then they tried to drag Hillary Clinton across the finish line. The beat reporters covering Clinton were a gang of HRC fangirls who had a collective emotional breakdown when she lost.

Reality-unconstrained conspiracy theories are, of course, Moore’s brand: This is the man who blamed the Columbine massacre on the presence nearby of a company that made rockets used to launch DirecTV satellites, which was the closest Moore could come to saying teen psychosis was caused by the military-industrial complex. This time, judicious as ever, Moore plays footage of the Reichstag fire juxtaposed against audio of news reports of 9/11 including snippets of President George W. Bush’s speeches, then segues into Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims entering the U.S.