RUTHFULLY YOURS

The actor, who depicted film’s first female orgasm, was well known for her scandalous love life and sultry beauty. Now, a new documentary explores how her scientific talents were vastly overlooked.

Hedy Lamarr, the star MGM called “the most beautiful woman in the world”, had two of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood. One of them, she could never escape until long after her career was over. The other, the press took little interest in at the time – but since her death in 2000, this is the story that has come to define her. A new documentary about Lamarr’s life, released this weekend, encapsulates both stories – one about sex and the other about science – in the innuendo of its title: Bombshell. Lamarr’s story is one of a brilliant woman who was consistently underestimated. It also gives us the clearest possible illustration of why on-screen representation matters – of all the parts that Lamarr was given to play, none of them was as fantastic, or inspirational, as her real life.

The actor, who was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna in 1914, was given her new surname by Louis B Mayer when she signed for MGM in 1937. He named her after the studio’s silent-era vamp Barbara La Marr – intending that her dark, heavy-lidded beauty should remind people of MGM’s sizzling back catalogue, not her own. Back in Europe she had made a film that was too hot for MGM’s family-values ethos. Gustav Machaty’s Ecstasy (1933) starred a teenage Hedy as a frustrated bride who finds fulfilment in an affair with a young man: she appears completely nude and performs what is probably the first on-screen female orgasm. Lamarr herself said that her movements in the love scene were prompted by the director shouting instructions and sticking her with a safety pin, but the effect, in this atmospheric, heavily symbolic and near-silent drama, is remarkably intense. The film was banned in the US, but screened illicitly there for years, and no matter how many hits she had at MGM, and despite the studio’s efforts, Lamarr was frequently referred to as the “Ecstasy girl”.

For many years, the Academy Awards has been hosted by post-funny emcees. And why not? Their function is no longer to entertain in the old Bob Hope, Johnny Carson, or even Billy Crystal style; now it’s to mock, grovel, and fawn until the last envelope is opened. Jokes are told to flatter the audience of industry magnates, who somehow convince themselves that they are hipster outsiders, and—most of all—brave. Jimmy Kimmel, once again, proved himself equal to the task of kowtowing to Hollywood’s basest, falsest fantasies about itself.

This year, there were two elephants in the room (the Dolby Theater in Hollywood): the Harvey Weinstein scandal and the #MeToo movement. Kimmel addressed the pachyderms directly. Gesturing to a massive mockup of the award, he noted that Oscar “keeps his hands where you can see them, never says a rude word, and most importantly, has no penis at all.” Staying with the crowd-pleasing political themes, Kimmel pointed out that the Oscar is 90 years old and therefore should be at home watching Fox News, adding that the movie studios don’t make gay-themed pictures like Call Me By Your Name for profit. “We make them to upset Mike Pence.”

Returning to the male/female problem, Kimmel suggested that Best Picture winner The Shape of Water represented “the year men screwed up so baldly women starting dating fish.” It also represented the year that the academy entered its late post-quality period. The Best Picture winner is a witless “lovable monster” movie, with a villain so overdrawn that vaudeville would have given him the hook, a mute heroine out of the grossest Victorian melodrama, and a theme exploited with far greater panache by Beauty and the Beast, Shrek, and at least a dozen other pictures.

Viewing this movie right before the Oscars and anticipating all the virtucrat blather about MeToo, TimesUp and Parkland, one is forced to react strongly to the heavy dose of pornography and violence on screen. Don’t see this if you might be upset by people having their limbs broken, their heads and torsos bashed with a heavy metal object, their skin flayed, their bodies raped, their necks choked, and of course lots of shooting to kill. In fact, this movie is the equivalent of the assault rifle capable of discharging ten or twenty times more firepower than you ever thought possible.

The plot is too convoluted to explain but the gist of it concerns Jennifer Lawrence playing a Russian prima ballerina who is purposely injured by a jealous rival – think I Tonya with toes shoes instead of skates. Since she can no longer dance, she will lose her apartment and insurance both of which are paid for by the Bolshoi Ballet and essential for Jen’s sick mother, played lethargically by Joely Richardson who doesn’t look sick or old enough to warrant the worst of what’s to come. Poor Jen will have to use her special insight into people as a spy/hooker, hired by her pederast uncle who works for the state. For this training, she must go to Whore School where Charlotte Rampling will teach her a thing or two about male and female parts and how to find people’s v-spot (vulnerability) so as to get them to do what you want. This is where we get to see Jennifer frontally and backfully nude and we immediately notice that this voluptuous body belongs more to the art of pole dancing than the rigors of ballet. But never mind – Jen has other changes to consider, such as bleaching her hair, throwing away her cane and being able to run perfectly despite that badly fractured, twisted leg. Did anyone get hired to deal with the continuity in this script?

Women getting undressed on command and abused: Spy thriller or a Hollywood producer’s office?

An outraged Jennifer Lawrence saying, “You sent me to whore school!” in a Russian accent is the defining moment of the spy thriller Red Sparrow, a movie that would have felt very different when it was filmed a year ago than it does now.

Lawrence’s Dominika is a Russian ballerina in present-day Moscow who, after getting Nancy Kerrigan-ed by a rival, is forced to become a spy for a Russian intelligence service on pain of having state-provided health care withdrawn from her sick mom. Dominika’s gig is very different from what I’ve seen in any other spy movie, though: “Sparrows,” as the trainees are known, are sent to the ominous State School Four, where they study pornography, oral sex, getting undressed on command, etc. Recruits are expected to master psychological operations and learn to exploit the enemy’s weakness, which means climbing into bed with him.

“Whore school” is as good a name for it as any, and in Dominika’s case earning her bachelor of dark arts degree means lots of scenes of her stripping nude, getting raped, fighting off a rape, being tortured while naked, etc. So it’s a movie that sells exploitation under the guise of condemning it. Lawrence’s consent to participate in this project doesn’t make it less grueling to watch.

Couldn’t any number of Hollywood women describe their experience as being put through ‘whore school’?

These days it’s hard not to hear eerie echoes in the plot: Does not Star School Four operate much like Hollywood with gray proletarian uniforms? Charlotte Rampling, playing the authoritarian head of the school known only as “Matron,” orders students in her classroom to undress in front of the others in order to break them down for the task of having sex with whomever the state wants them to have sex with. Matron doesn’t much differ from all of those agents and publicists, many of them women, who told their naïve young sparrows, “Go see Mr. Weinstein, he’s waiting for you in the bunga-bunga suite.” Many such actresses must have thought it was in their best interest to simply go along with what seemed to be expected of them. Couldn’t any number of Hollywood women describe their experience as being put through “whore school”?

You wake up in the morning, turn on your computer after fixing a coffee, and read the world and national news from a variety of blog sites, some of them your regulars (Sultan Knish, Pam Geller, Richard Spencer, Diana West, Gatestone, etc.). You’re overwhelmed by a waterfall of information. You’re inundated by the volume of things you’d like to compose a column about. But it’s hard to chose, because not a thing you read doesn’t flash its importance like a neon sign. They’re all important, just more ticks in the advance of cultural Marxism in the government, in society, and just in general.

You read the MSM sites to absorb the latest victory lap about the transgendering of society, or how Muslim “immigrants” were sentenced in Britain for repeated rapes of white British girls and children, but were given light or no sentences. But you do not believe what they have to say or report. You keep getting special invitations to subscribe to the New York Times and the Washington Post , via links from other blog sites with full transcriptions of significant articles of those articles, but you refuse to pay a dime to get regular news from the Gray Lady with a Walker, and its disinformation clone, Jeff Bezos’s new toy, the Washington Post, not after all the lies and evasions both newspapers have promoted and circulated, going as far back as Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize award-winning articles on the Soviet Union that denied mass starvation and government murders in Stalin’s “paradise”.

Speaking of a Stalinesqe paradise, we visit again Black Panther, the latest victory lap of Cultural Marxism, courtesy of Hollywood. This is the fictional African country, Wakanda, that the MSM has touted as a glorious booster of black pride and a new direction of super-hero films. Black Panther is “soul food.”Wakanda is a hidden country whose Ayn Rand-borrowed device hides the country from prying eyes, has eschewd all contact with the world beyond its closed borders, and owes its existence to a vibranium meteor that fell into the regions ages ago, giving the tribe that found it magical powers. Wakanda is a kind of Shakespearean monarchy of elites whose throne is up for grabs, but with far less literacy or literary value.

Last weekend, former Black Panther party leader Sekou Odinga, who spent 33 years behind bars convicted of the attempted murder of police officers in the 1980s, gathered with his advocacy group outside movie theaters in New York City to “educate” audiences of the blockbuster superhero film Black Panther about the real-life Black Panthers.

The UK Guardian reports that the movie, with its all-black cast and message of racial superiority, has revived calls from attorneys, families and civil rights leaders for the release of more than a dozen jailed former members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), the radical group founded in 1966 in Oakland, California.

“Many are in the worst prisons and the worst conditions, and a lot of them are getting older and suffer from health problems,” said Odinga. “This is an opportunity to remind people of the real heroes of the Black Panthers and the conditions they live in today.”

Odinga clearly has a different definition of “heroes” from the one we have at TruthRevolt. We don’t find anything heroic about domestic terrorism, but hey, we’re quirky that way.

The Guardian has more:

“We have to educate people that this has all happened before, and it will happen again if we’re not careful,” said Malkia Cyril, a California activist whose mother was a Black Panther. Kamau Sadiki, a former Black Panther whom Cyril considers an uncle, was convicted decades after the 1971 killing of an officer and is still in prison, where he has maintained his innocence.

Having received an Oscar nomination for his documentary about James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro, the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck created considerable anticipation for his equally political follow-up, The Young Karl Marx. Alas, this is not the first time Marxism turned out to be a crashing dud.

Films about writers face a big obstacle from the start: No one wants to watch a movie about a nerd scratching away at his desk. But Marx was a bit more than just a writer. Unlike the usual fight-the-power types, he actually did fight the power — and was forced out of three countries for it. Today’s radicals never even make good on their promises to move to Toronto.

Beginning in Cologne in 1843, Peck finds a grouchy 25-year-old Marx (the appropriately dour August Diehl) working for a febrile newspaper that is troubled by Prussian authorities, but not enough for Marx’s taste. Even among agitators, he’s an agitator. “Enough fighting with pins,” he declares. “I want a sledgehammer.” Karl does a lot of declaring in this movie.

As, no doubt, he did in life. And this is part of the problem with Young Karl Marx. He may have dreamed up a party, but he wasn’t exactly the life of it. Quoting the kinds of things Marx actually said is going to put the audience in a state of enjoyment approximating winter in Leningrad. Some movies feel like homework; others are more like punishment. When Marx goes to Paris and meets his soulmate Friedrich Engels (Stefan Kenarske), who has been riling up the workers in Manchester, England, at one of his father’s 13 mills, the two discover they can practically finish each other’s sentences, like Jake and Elwood — just call them the Reds Brothers.

Quoting the kinds of things Marx actually said is going to put the audience in a state of enjoyment approximating winter in Leningrad.