RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/emthe_catcher_was_a_spyem_a_review.html

One of the best films of the year, The Catcher was a Spy stars the superb Paul Rudd — more familiar to audiences as a light and lovable comic persona, or the droll Ant-Man (Ant-Man and the Wasp), in the Marvel franchise now doing boffo box office. Here, Rudd is enigmatic, restrained, a never-less-than compelling presence.

Here, he is the remarkably accomplished Moe Berg, who is scooped up by the Office of Strategic Services from the field as a catcher in the Boston Red Sox in the early 1940s, to stymie the potentially terrifying development of the atomic bomb by a German scientist, played by chameleon-actor Mark Strong as Professor Werner Heisenberg.

If you recall your high school physics, that is the very same Heisenberg as the originator of the Heisenberg Principle, which posits that you cannot pin anything atomic down, since the very act of studying it changes it, so uncertainty is the only certainty. (NB: My slight interpretation, of course.)

Playing with an accent and a curly hairstyle that irritated my colleague at our viewing, Paul Giamatti nicely conveys the heebie jeebies of a scientist, Samuel Goudsmit, guide-along who of necessity accompanies Moe Berg as Berg infiltrates, leads a double life, trying to reach and charm his way into the needed contacts behind enemy lines and execute his mission.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/pentagon-papers-spielberg-film-the-post-celebrates-liberal-myths/

Editor’s Note: The following piece originally appeared in City Journal. It is reprinted here with permission. https://www.city-journal.org/html/true-meaning-pentagon-papers-15834.html

Shrouded in liberal mythology perpetuated by a new Hollywood film, the landmark court case was wrongly decided—and has been wrongly remembered.

In Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg offered an account of selfless heroism manifested by the most ordinary of men — a man more pronounced in his vices than his virtues. Oskar Schindler risked everything he had in order to rescue, from the Holocaust, as many of the innocent as he could. It was a story that needed no embellishment.

In his recent film, The Post, Spielberg sets out to tell a story with the sense, again, that the plain facts should speak powerfully for themselves. But here, he has produced a fairy tale. He has offered the narrative that liberals wish to tell themselves, filtering out facts that tell a strikingly different moral lesson. The legend involves the brave owner and editors of the Washington Post. Katharine Graham put herself and the future of her newspaper at risk by doing what even she and her lawyers recognized as a violation of the law: publishing “classified” papers on the war in Vietnam. (The recent controversy over Hillary Clinton and her handling of classified material makes the story sharply relevant.) And what deepened the danger is that her editors were stirring the ire — and the legal resistance — of an administration headed by Richard Nixon.

But then, vindication: The Post could celebrate itself for chalking up a notable victory for the First Amendment, as the government went to court, trying to get an injunction to bar or delay the publication of the papers. When faced with such crises in the past, the government stayed out of court, lest it draw attention to the unwarranted release of secrets. (During World War II, the Chicago Tribune inadvertently published the names of Japanese ships involved in the Battle of Midway. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to put Colonel Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s publisher, in jail for revealing that the U.S. had broken the Japanese code. But if the Japanese had not noticed the article, there was no point in broadcasting it through a public trial.) In the case of the Post, though, the classified documents were dribbling out day by day, drawing ever more attention — and making it clearer that the executive branch lacked control over some of its most sensitive papers on national security.

It’s no small irony that Nixon himself was not inclined to respond to the provocations of the New York Times, which took the lead in publishing the purloined papers. If the papers disclosed any wrongdoing, it concerned the record of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara. Some of the documents could be read to suggest an intention to expand the war in Southeast Asia after LBJ won the election of 1964. And he did win it, in part by painting Barry Goldwater as the candidate ready to trigger a war. But it was Henry Kissinger who jolted Nixon from his studied indifference. According to H. R. Haldeman, Kissinger argued that Nixon did not quite grasp “how dangerous the release of the Pentagon Papers was. . . . The fact that some idiot can publish all of the diplomatic secrets of this country on his own . . . could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy. If other powers feel that we cannot control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.” What Kissinger had in mind were the negotiations then in the works to make the breakthrough with China. Those negotiations were bound up, in turn, with attempts to deal with North Vietnam, steer into the agreements over strategic-arms limitation with the Soviet Union, and handle the delicate dance over Berlin.

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/television/2018/07/line-troy-tv/

One might quibble about some of the historical details or the scriptwriters’ habit of weaving new storylines into the novels that inspired it, but ‘The Last Kingdom’ on Netflix is well worth a binge session. Homer would have thought so too.

Bob Car and Greg Sheridan, together on the same page in today’s Australian (30/6/18), both make the case for the structured reading of the great books of the Western Canon. Homer’s Iliad and its sequel, The Odyssey, are widely accepted as being the very first of these. We should look at them in a new light when it comes to Netflix’s The Last Kingdom during these winter nights of immersion in streamed entertainments.

What an eye-opener these two ancient poetic books are. The gods pitch into the battles of Agamemnon and Achilles in the great ten-year Trojan wars, taking sides in human affairs, even fighting amongst themselves in Olympus over the rights and wrongs of the protagonists they support and the women over whom both heroes and gods battle. Betwixt and between times, and after it all, Odysseus/Ulysses meanders his slow way to Ithaca’s home shores, back to the women and slaves he left on his warlord estate to keep the home fires burning. Ever it was thus, as religion intrudes into the battle sphere and warrior lords gather their fighters, even from the farms, for mighty conflicts where women and treasure are the prizes, deals are sealed and the gods retire happy until the next time.

Among the inheritors of all of this drama are TV’s hugely popular Vikings series and, more recently, BBC America’s The Last Kingdom (with a third season to be released later this year), both of which titles draw those who’ve never heard of Homer right onto the battlefields and emotional concerns of Europe’s ancient Indo-European warrior culture. For this was still the way of things in outer north-western Europe, ever beyond Roman reach, after that period when Rome, beset with its own concerns, had bequeathed only a very shaky Christian civilization to Britain.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/supreme-court-lets-brendan-dassey-conviction-stand-in-declining-making-a-murderer-case/

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case of Wisconsin man Brendan Dassey, whose lawyers argued that his confession to a 2007 murder was coerced. His confession played a large role in the controversial case of Steven Avery, the focus of the Netflix true crime show “Making a Murderer” (2015-).

“Making a Murderer” show suggests that Avery — who was convicted of sexual assault and attempted murder in 1985 but released after 18 years when DNA evidence exonerated him — was then set up by local law enforcement and convicted of a murder in 2007. In 2003, Avery had filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against Manitowoc County, its former sheriff, and its former district attorney for wrongful conviction and imprisonment. These officials, the story goes, then attempted to frame him for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.

Dassey, whose case the Supreme Court rejected, was convicted of being party to Halbach’s murder. At age 16, he was convicted of being party to first-degree murder, mutilation of a corpse, and second-degree sexual assault. He was sentenced to life in prison, with the earliest possibility of parole in 2048.

Dassey recanted his videotaped interrogation and confession at trial, and parts of the footage were shown in the Netflix show, which echoes his lawyers in claiming police coerced a confession from the teen. Dassey and Avery appear as themselves in the show.

Ted Williams was so good at baseball, he had more than one nickname — “The Kid,” “The Splendid Splinter,” and “Teddy Ballgame” — but the only nickname he wanted was “The greatest hitter who ever lived.” During a remarkable 19-year career as a left fielder for the Boston Red Sox (for which he was named an All-Star 19 times), Williams cemented his reputation as one of the best players in the history of the game. But his life was bigger than baseball, and Nick Davis’s film TED WILLIAMS tells the full story of Williams’s life in a delightful, complex portrait of an American hero.

AMERICAN MASTERS PRESENTS
TED WILLIAMS: “The Greatest Hitter Who Ever Lived”

an Albert M. Tapper Production
in association with Major League Baseball, Nick Davis Productions, and Big Papi Productions

Produced and Directed by Nick Davis
Narrated by Jon Hamm
Edited by Josh Freed
Music by Joel Goodman

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/movie-review-the-catcher-was-a-spy-moe-berg-biopic/The writing and directing are flat, and Paul Rudd is miscast as the curious, multifaceted Moe Berg.

The major-league baseball catcher Moe Berg had a lengthy if undistinguished career on the diamond: 15 seasons, including five with the Chicago White Sox and five more in the rival hosiery of the Boston team. But it was his off-field hobby that earned him the honor of a 1994 biography by Nicholas Dawidoff and a new film adaptation, both entitled The Catcher Was a Spy.

Tinker, Tailor, Catcher, Spy? Movies telling yarns about the dark arts of espionage are notoriously difficult to pull off, being cerebral and internal, which is why most spy movies are simply action movies with some intel jargon thrown in. That isn’t really an option when dramatizing the case of Berg, though the movie tries to James Bond-ify him with, for instance, a ludicrous early scene in which the veteran, nearly washed-up ballplayer (Paul Rudd) beats a rookie teammate into strawberry jelly because the younger man is snooping on him. In life, unlike in spy movies, you’re not actually entitled to assault someone for observing you in a public place, and the scene has the further fault of showing the elusive, pensive Berg acting completely out of character.

Berg’s life proved well worth a biography, full of incident and intrigue and unanswered questions, but it isn’t obvious that there is a movie in here, given the lack of any overtly cinematic accomplishments on his résumé. A bit desperate for filler, the movie at one point resorts to showing Berg starring in a pickup game of baseball amongst G.I.s. As he was an actual professional baseball player, though, albeit one with a career .243 batting average, it’s hardly surprising that he can knock the hide off a baseball that’s being served up to him by a non-athlete.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/06/03/a-clueless-

Remember the Duck Rabbit? That’s the famous image that, seen one way, looks like a duck but, seen from another angle, looks like a rabbit. The image has provided fodder for children’s books and also philosophers, its inherent ambiguity being catnip to both light fancy and epistemological lucubration.

I thought of that teasing graphic confection when I encountered “The Final Year,” Greg Barker’s HBO documentary about the last 12 months of the Obama Administration’s foreign policy. At first I thought it was intended to be a duck: a sympathetic portrait of its main characters: President Obama himself, of course, but also Secretary of State John Kerry, our ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, and Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes. But the more I watched, the more the rabbit theme intruded: the more, I mean, that it struck me as a devastating portrait of mandarin entitlement gone horribly wrong.

I am really uncertain what Greg Barker intended. He indulges in no editorializing. The camera follows the principals around the world and simply captures their speeches and conversations: Samantha Power and John Kerry, President Obama at the U.N., Obama on his final trip to Greece, Ben Rhodes padding about the White House and elsewhere. It’s all presented in a very straightforward way to outline the Obama Administration’s ambitions as well as its frustrations as world events—the mess in Syria, the unbelievable election of Donald Trump—unfold around them.

The main characters are given plenty of on-air time to explain what they hope to accomplish and also to describe the forces, domestic as well as international, that they see as frustrating their aims.