RUTHFULLY YOURS

At 87, Clint Eastwood is not only trying new things, he’s trying daring new things, and his new film 15:17 to Paris represents one of the most audacious gambits of his career. To dramatize the tale of three Americans who tackled and subdued a heavily armed Islamist terrorist on a train out of Amsterdam in 2015, Eastwood cast the young men, none of whom had professional acting experience, as themselves. It’s a decision with little precedent in the entire history of motion pictures.

The reason why few directors have ever taken this tack is acutely evident, though: The three childhood friends, Spencer Stone, Alek Skarlatos, and Anthony Sadler, don’t have much to offer in the way of facial expressions or vocal intonations. In short, they’re not actors, and Eastwood should have hired professionals.

A worse failing of the movie, though, is a flat, dull script by Dorothy Blyskal that frames the story in terms of the young men’s backgrounds. 15:17 to Paris is in essence a single gripping scene of about ten minutes puffed out to feature length. Though the movie is, at 94 minutes, the shortest of the 36 features Eastwood has directed, a large chunk of it is filler in which we watch the guys amble around tourist attractions in Rome, Venice, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Absolutely nothing of interest happens in any of these scenes — for instance, Stone and Skarlatos meet a girl in Venice, have pizza with her, and then she disappears and is forgotten — except Stone muses that he’s heading for something important in his life. That sense of purpose is tied in with his faith — all three of the principal characters are practicing Christians — and these days it is unusual for a mainstream Hollywood film to take an unabashed pro-Christian stance.

Fifty years ago, the movie that changed the movies premiered. Anybody old enough to remember films before “Bonnie and Clyde” can testify to the jolting power of Arthur Penn’s kinetic blend of bluegrass slapstick, Depression-era nostalgia, and gruesome, stylized violence. But something else was revealed then, something that I, just 14 at the time, was too callow and ignorant to notice behind the movie’s aesthetic sheen—the moral idiocy that has since come to define so much of contemporary American popular culture.

“Bonnie and Clyde” staked a claim to a moral seriousness that supposedly validated the stylistic innovations and elevated the film beyond mere flashy entertainment. Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, played with fashion-magazine glamour by Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, are “just folks,” as Dunaway says in the movie, salt-of-the-earth Americans driven to crime by the machinations of the evil banks they rob for some justified payback, Texan Robin Hoods admired by the common-man victims of American capitalism. Yet “the Man,” embodied in the sadistic Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, wouldn’t let them be, hunting them down and slaughtering them in the film’s famous bloody climax, just after Bonnie and Clyde had finally found the soft-focus sexual fulfillment long a cliché of Hollywood romantic sentiment.

“Social Bandits” on Screen
The Marxist folk-tale underlying the movie’s otherwise conventional star-crossed-lovers plot was obvious, and as such the cinematic innovations accounted for the film’s popularity with many critics (TheNew York Times’s Bosley Crowther was a noble exception). The movie was, in fact, a popularized version of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm’s 1959 “social bandit” thesis, a bit of communist agitprop arguing that robbers and thieves were really expressions of the “people’s” legitimate resistance to unjust economic and political structures. This notion helped to glorify and justify the violence against authority that exploded in the 1960s, from the bombing of college labs to the depredations of the Black Panthers, the Oakland street gang that was shrewd enough to exploit the delusions of privileged white kids in order to provide cover for the gang’s crimes.

On Golden Globes night, Hollywood preened in front of its black mirror as usual, but the degree to which it was blind to what was obvious to all observers was stranger than ever. It was like that time the pear-shaped Homer Simpson looked at his reflection and saw a torso rippling with musculature.

What was the most crystalline moment of self-unawareness?

Was it when Seth Meyers, a white guy like almost every Globes host before him, set up the first two introducers on the NBC broadcast by saying, “Please don’t be two white guys, please don’t be two white guys”? Or when the actress Connie Britton paraded around in a “Poverty is sexist” sweater that retails for $380? How about when James Franco, winning an award for his satiric portrayal of the shlock filmmaker Tommy Wiseau in The Disaster Artist, invited Wiseau up to the stage but then elbowed him aside when he dared to try to speak?

No, for me it was when the house rolled over for Oprah Winfrey, the nation’s most prominent retailer of quack medicine, the celebrity shill who made herself some $3 billion pitching supernatural wishful thinking and life-endangering crackpot pseudoscience to poor people and women, and NBC declared her our next president in a tweet. Oprah, friend to women and the oppressed, the coming anti-Trump? Say what you want about our president, but no one has linked him to a surge in whooping cough. Winfrey’s prominent place in the anti-vaccination movement is far more appalling than the behavior described in the Access Hollywood tape. If Trump kills, it’s only by tweet-induced apoplexy.

NBC, Oprah: The juxtaposition of those two brands is too perfect to pass without notice. If your memory stretches back even three months, you’ll recall that it was NBC that quashed a series of blockbuster scoops by its correspondent Ronan Farrow that, when he finally was forced to take them to The New Yorker, reported that Harvey Weinstein was a serial rapist. By coincidence, the president of NBC News, Noah Oppenheim, moonlights as a screenwriter who wrote Jackie — the kind of arty, Oscar-bait fare that Weinstein often produced and shepherded to Oscar glory (or at least Golden Globes semi-glory).

You have to hand it to Hollywood—it’s got chutzpah. The holier-than-thou instinct must truly overpower any sense of decency and morality among its luminaries as they mount their pulpits to lecture the world about the only recently discovered horrors of sexual inequality. Like the convict who finds religion after being sentenced and then proceeds to judge all the world around him, Hollywood now presents itself as some sort of vanguard in the fight against sexism.

Sorry, but America ain’t buying what you’re selling. And maybe that’s what’s really eating you.

For years, you’ve ordained yourselves the high priests of the culture. For years, you’ve sexualized our girls and created lower expectations for our boys and men. You’ve created an industry that we all now understand is awash with the decadence, moral rot, and a self-deception that can only come from years of arrogant self-righteousness that is immune to honest self-examination.

You’ve lived lives of hedonistic excess all the while sneering at those who attempted to live sincerely. You’ve spent years on the therapist’s couch convincing yourselves that you’re good people all the while mocking modestly lived lives and now you feel entitled to lecture the rest of America about . . . anything? Physician, heal thyself! No amount of black cloth can cover your shame.

What Kind of Tent Revival is This?
True to Hollywood’s self-deceptive nature, the whole of the Golden Globes broadcast was presented as a solemn Confiteor, but its sole purpose, truly, was to attempt to confer self-absolution through the exercise of judging others. It was a giant revival tent with Elmer Gantry projecting his own moral failings onto his congregation. The Globes were a set piece designed to proclaim to the world Hollywood’s virtue all the while putting it above those poor rubes at home watching.

J Paul Getty might have had all the money in the world but neither all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men can save Ridley Scott’s movie again. Some viewers will remember the 1973 kidnapping of Getty’s 16 yr old grandson and the gruesome amputation of his ear after the richest man in the world refused to pay the ransom, but especially for viewers who weren’t around then, this movie will make little sense We begin with Michelle Williams as the mother of four Getty children sired by one of J Paul’s sons They soon divorce and in that settlement she agrees to take no money on condition that she get sole parental custody In rapid order, we see that her ex-husband has descended to the depths of drug addiction in Morocco where her oldest boy, Paul, loves to hang out. Yanked back to Rome where mother and siblings live, we see little of his lifestyle but from his long unkempt hair, we can guess that his father has been an unfortunate role model. He is seized off the street by a Calabrian gang that sets their opening ransom at 17 million dollars. The patriarch refused to pay anything, claiming that were he to succumb to this blackmail, there would be 14 other opportunities for kidnap and extortion, and Paolo, as he is known, is kept imprisoned by the gang for many many months.

We are left to wonder why his mother never appeals to the families of the boy’s numerous half-siblings to help her raise money. J Paul Sr had been married 5 times and presumably not all of his ex-wives were as noble and short-sighted as she was – nor do we see her try to borrow money from friends of the family, businessmen or bankers. Since she is played not as a flower child but as a common sense source of stability who wears suits and pumps, none of this behavior rings true. Though the three other children are show on screen early on, they are unaccounted for during this tragic event, leaving us to question how they are dealing with this frightening episode and why they were in the screenplay at all.

This column is not about Islam per se, but it is about the growing decrepitude of Hollywood fare. In a sense, it is about the secular version of Sharia, to conform to the nihilism of the Hollywood left. As Sharia’s purpose is to obliterate all personal values and make them Allah’s, the Hollywood left is busy obliterating them in its own manner. The decrepitude is part and parcel of current trends in the culture.

But, what is Sharia?

Total and unqualified submission to the will of Allah (God) is the fundamental tenet of Islam: Islamic law is therefore the expression of Allah’s command for Muslim society and, in application, constitutes a system of duties that are incumbent upon a Muslim by virtue of his religious belief….

The second major distinction between the Sharīa and Western legal systems is the result of the Islamic concept of law as the expression of the divine will. With the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, communication of the divine will to human beings ceased so that the terms of the divine revelation were henceforth fixed and immutable.

In short, Mohammad died, and all divine revelations ceased. His will ceased to be a power. Men would obey his will and utterances without question. This is, on the face of it, pure hokum. If he’s dead, he has no power over anyone’s actions or beliefs – except in those who want to believe in a ghost in the sky and could not live without believing there is a ghost.

The purpose of the Left’s brand of Sharia is to persuade one to conform to or compel one to surrender one’s personal values, and reason for living – for the state. For the “divine will” of the new elites, the SJWs, who will denigrate every value you might have to ensure that you have no values but their own.

My correspondent has plenty to say about what’s happening in popular culture. In this instance, she discusses the decline and ruination of The Walking Dead (TWD), in which several of the key characters, who were heroes and objects of viewer adulation, have been diminished, changed over for the worse, or given nothing significant to do. Sharia, Hollywood style, is being subtly introduced into the characters’ actions and motives. Fans may not notice it, but they will be fed Koranic “wisdom.” “Don’t be angry with your nemesis; be tolerant and friends. The main event, several seasons into the future, will be Rick, quoting the Koran, and forgiving Negan, one of the most villainous and evil characters in cinematic history, for all the deaths he has consciously caused by his own hand, especially the deaths of some of Rick’s most valued friends, with a baseball bat.

Even in the darkest hour, an impeccably dressed set: Winston Churchill (Gary Oldman) prepares to kiss the hand of George VI (Ben Mendelsohn) upon his appointment as Prime Minister.

Churchill is an abidingly popular role with big-time actors once the receding hairline and expanding girth of middle-age set in. Sometimes the player is too evidently suited to the part – one thinks of Robert Hardy on telly in the Eighties – and the jowly gravitas gets clanked around as if Winnie wandered Chartwell and Westminster in never-was-so-much-owed mode 24/7. On the literal face of it, the man who brought both Sid Vicious and Commissioner Gordon to the silver screen is one of the least obvious cinematic Winstons ever, and he wears his lavish prosthetics with a very light touch. Gary Oldman’s is stylistically both a nimbler and more shambolic Churchill – boozy and blustery and blubbery, immensely secure and oddly disconnected. It is a dazzling performance of the indispensable man of the century, intelligent and insightful, yet one that caused me, by the end, a grave unease.

Churchill tends to the Churchillian, which is to say the epic. Darkest Hour, by contrast, is very finely focused. Joe Wright, director, and Edward McCarten, writer, confine their two dark hours of screen time to a couple of critical weeks in May 1940, when Hitler’s invasion of Norway precipitated Neville Chamberlain’s retreat from Downing Street. Aside from some rather elaborately choreographed overhead shots and a lush grandiose score, Darkest Hour is filmed claustrophobically – in poky sitting rooms, Downing Street basements, attics, Westminster ante-rooms, and chilly lavatories; the lighting is crepuscular. The fate of the world is being determined, but we never glimpse the far horizons, only the dingy backrooms.

What happened that month was a showdown between the two principal contenders for the Prime Ministership, Mr Churchill and Lord Halifax. Stephen Dillane is excellent as Halifax, the vulpine cadaver looking down (in every sense) from the Commons gallery at Churchill’s turns at the dispatch box. Unfortunately, aside from skillful deployments of his inscrutable yet condescending eyebrows, he gets somewhat short shrift on screen, so as a Churchill vs Halifax cage match it never quite comes off – presumably because the third Viscount Halifax is entirely unknown in Hollywood, and thus a tricky pitch. (“Third Viscount Halifax? Hey, let’s see what the first two gross before we commit to that…”)

This is a pity, because the two men were on opposite ends of the seesaw, and, capacious as Churchill’s bottom is, most of the other players – the King, Chamberlain, the parliamentary party, defeatist generals, Dominion prime ministers around the globe – were inclined to park their own butts down Halifax’s end. On May 10th, the day Winston became PM, the Germans invaded Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Ten days later, Hitler’s army reached the Channel, and was within reach of throttling the 300,000-strong British Expeditionary Force at Dunkirk, and seizing the entire French fleet. In that dreadful month of May, Churchill wanted to fight on; Halifax preferred to use Mussolini’s “good offices” to sue for a “peace” that would leave Britain and its empire more or less “intact” – save for East Africa, Suez, Malta, Gibraltar and sundry other places that would have to be addressed, per the Italian ambassador in London, “as part of a general European settlement”.