RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/oslo-review-getting-them-in-the-room-1492135200

EXCERPTS ONLY

The play is generally so smartly written, the characters and their realization so vivid, and the direction of Bartlett Sher so taut that you are drawn into a three-hour drama about something intrinsically undramatic, in which nuance and minutiae are generally more crucial than action: negotiations. It also helps quite a bit if you accept the play’s premises, which I think most people will.

I do not. But before explaining why, I should note that the play received its premiere last summer in Lincoln Center’s smaller Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and the production was slightly modified for its new “Broadway” run. The author’s research was considerable (he previously took on the Rwandan genocide in “The Overwhelming” and 1980s Afghanistan battles in “Blood and Gifts”). And the true-to-life aspect of “Oslo” is startling. Much of it takes place in a castle outside Oslo (abstractly suggested by Michael Yeargan’s spare sets) where a Norwegian sociologist, Terje Rød-Larsen —played by Jefferson Mays as a polished but obsessed ironist—is eager to apply theories of negotiation to the conflicts of the Middle East. Together with his wife, Mona Juul, an official in the Norwegian Foreign Ministry—played by Jennifer Ehle as a stern but gracious overseer who fills the audience in on details—they secretly assemble their subjects (neither side wanted to be publicly seen meeting the other) and set the wheels in motion. The surprise is that in September 1993 this resulted in the Oslo Accord, marked by a historic handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin, Israel’s prime minister, and Yasser Arafat, the PLO’s head, soon to lead the newly formed Palestinian Authority.

Since Mr. Rogers pulled off this success, it also seemed more plausible that the historical characters thought they could too. We are reminded of the play’s historical claims again and again, both by actors impersonating Israeli politicians ( Yossi Beilin, Shimon Peres ) and by the cast interjecting reminders of terrorist attacks and retaliations during the negotiations and, at play’s end, into the present. We are meant, ultimately, to side with Mr. Rød-Larsen, who declares that, despite it all, what was achieved should give us hope. The play is a plea for the value of negotiations.

The truth is, it depends. Most recently, negotiations removing chemical weapons from Syria proved to be a sham. The Vietnam peace talks led to a completely worthless agreement. And remember Munich?

It depends on who is negotiating and why. What we don’t learn from the play, for example, is that Israeli leaders had already had confidential meetings with a PLO-connected figure, Faisal Husseini, before the Norwegians took on this project and the talks led nowhere for multiple reasons. Oslo may have “succeeded” partly because it was so flawed: Israel had no security representative involved; the Palestinians had no legal representative. And the PLO, which had become impoverished and sidelined, was being brought back into power.

The play’s epilogue acknowledges that troubles did not end, but mentions just two terrorist attacks in the two years after the signing—both by Jews, one being the assassination of Rabin in November 1995. But that is a distortion. In May 1994, Arafat called for a “jihad” to liberate Jerusalem and referred to the agreement as part of a staged plan for dismantling Israel. And in the 21/2 years after the signing, 210 Israelis were murdered in terror attacks—three times the average toll of the previous 26 years. Before his 2001 death, Mr. Husseini boasted of the Oslo accord as a Palestinian Trojan Horse. …..

Terence Davies’s A Quiet Passion has an impossible heroine — the poet Emily Dickinson. With his signature concentration, gravity, and beauty, Davies tells her story of spinsterhood and genius in Amherst, Mass., where she lived around the time of the Civil War. The film is not simply a biopic; it’s also an emotional autobiography, as are all Davies’s films, from last year’s Sunset Song on to The Deep Blue Sea, Of Time and the City, The House of Mirth, The Neon Bible, his family chronicles Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, and his debut Trilogy, which depicted his struggle with Catholicism and sexuality.

As those titles indicate, Davies is a cinematic poet who rigorously challenges conventional storytelling with fixed compositions, bold camera moves, and sound design that mixes music and narration with stark, complex imagery: A transition scene of an open window, with curtains blowing, overlaps with the silhouette of a preacher whose sermon deeply moves Dickinson. In this, Dickinson’s longing is palpable, but the scene also expresses an agnosticism so candid and stubborn that it even includes metaphysical awe.

Though far different from this week’s action franchise The Fate of the Furious, A Quiet Passion could also have borne that movie’s title. Dickinson’s isolated intelligence and artistry are subjects unique to Davies’s filmmaking. A kind of creative fury — apparent in Davies’s radical formalism (and made vivid by actress Cynthia Nixon) — is what drives this movie.

Determined to show how Dickinson’s art was born out of both suffering and inspiration, Davies makes her an exasperating presence at school, at home with her family, and even for her admirers. The opening sequence of her resistance to the era’s Evangelism makes her a “no-hoper.” From this funny but pointed scene, Davies launches a bravura transition, borrowed from Michael Jackson’s revolutionary 1991 music video Black or White, in which Dickinson family portraits morph each character into adulthood.This age and time device is a miniature of the entire film’s powerful style. Every sequence — especially a montage showing reclusive Dickinson’s subconscious fantasy of desire (“up the stairs at midnight”) — attests to Davies’s fearless emphasis on Dickinson’s single-minded integrity. There is a tendency to make a martyr of Dickinson — “You have a soul anyone would be proud of,” says her sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle, whose luminous smile balances Nixon’s tight-faced bitterness). Sometimes Davies records Dickinson’s intransigence as though he is paying tribute to her proto-feminism. Yet Vinnie also warns her sister: “Integrity, if taken too far, can be ruthless.”

Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet.

Despite Davies’s dour approach, his artistry prevents him from indulging in self-pity. Like pop singer Morrissey, a fellow British Catholic manqué, Davies always undercuts his own mandarin pride with a sense of humor, and A Quiet Passion features his wittiest exchanges yet. In one scene, Dickinson welcomes her brother’s newborn child by improvising the famous “I’m Nobody / Who are you?” It’s like a moment from a biopic about a Hollywood pop composer, but the “Eureka” moment gives the audience a sense of discovery.

‘Homeland’ Actor: The Real ‘Guilty Ones’ This Season Are White Men, Not Islamic Terrorists By M.G. Oprea

‘Homeland’ has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons.

“Homeland’s” season six finale will air on Sunday night. If you’re like me, at this point you couldn’t care less. That’s because the show has taken such a sudden turn toward political preaching and progressive tut-tutting that its story and characters barely resemble those of the previous five seasons. If you’ve been wondering what on earth happened, wonder no more.

On Thursday, the actor who plays Saul Berenson, Mandy Patinkin, explained everything on NPR. In an interview with “Here & Now’s” Jeremy Hobson, Patinkin discusses past accusations that the show is Islamophobic. He says that although the “Homeland” crew never meant to be Islamophobic, and certainly didn’t expect that kind of criticism, it is nevertheless true. According to him, the show became “part of the problem of the Islamophobia.”

He goes on to explain that the whole point of this season was to stop being the problem and start “trying to be part of the cure,” something Patinkin feels they were “tremendously successful” in doing. Patinkin, who is active in assisting with the Syrian refugee crisis in Greece, added that the “guilty ones” are “certainly not the Muslim community, certainly not the refugees or the immigrants that have come here, but the white male membership of, even members of the intelligence community and other parts of our government.”

So, there it is. “Homeland’s” monumental shift in narrative and tone this season wasn’t an accident. It was a 100 percent intentional effort to atone for the show’s previous sins. But the self-flagellation is so heavy handed, and such a departure from previous seasons, that it’s jarring for the viewer. It’s also boring.

Political Correctness Is Boring

Part of what made the first five seasons of “Homeland” so entertaining is that they were unconstrained by political correctness. They were at liberty to craft the most compelling terrorism-espionage story they could dream up. The main characters, Carrie Mathison (played by Clare Danes) and Saul, were realists about the dangers of the world, about who’s an enemy and who’s a friend—even if they weren’t always right. But season six is an exercise in pure political correctness.

Carrie has become a civil rights activist. She has renounced her previous views about terrorism, most notably that Muslims are ever terrorists. The show implies that prior to this season, she had been a racist and is now trying to right those wrongs to atone for her past sins. (By the way, this suggests that you’re a racist, too, for enjoying those seasons.)

Not only is the young Muslim-American in the show, Sekou Bah, not a terrorist, the real conspiracy is run by the white male CIA agent, Dar Adal, who is trying to make it look like Sekou blew up a truck in New York City. With the help of Mossad, Dar is also trying to convince the new president-elect that Iran is breaking the nuclear deal, which of course they’re not. Oh, and in case you weren’t getting the message, one episode features Saul visiting his sister in a West Bank settlement, which affords him a pulpit from which to preach on the evils of Israeli settlements.

Politicization Destroys Art And Entertainment

Homeland: Uh-oh, Hillary lost! Now what?By Patricia McCarthy

The writers of Season 6 obviously were so confident Hillary Clinton was going to be the next president their new narrative had a female Democratic Party candidate win the election. Elizabeth Marvel is a wonderful actress and a pretty fair doppelganger for Hillary Clinton. But the writers got it all wrong. In an interview, show creator Alex Gansa revealed that their scripts were by design following real events but “five or six episodes had been completed when the election happened.” Hillary lost and they were stuck with the wrong real-life president-elect. M.G. Oprea wrote a terrific article at The Federalist about the ridiculous turnaround that has characterized this season. All those involved with the production have apparently come to feel sufficiently guilty about their realistic focus on Islamic radicalism and terrorism over the first five seasons that they have reversed course and become submissively pro-Islam. What was for five seasons a very fair representation of the worldwide problem of Islamic terrorism became a televised apologia for all the good work that came before.

Carrie Mathieson is now a pro-Muslim activist living in New York. She becomes close to the president-elect, then not close, then close again, then not. Dar Adal, who from the beginning of the series was sinister and menacing, is gradually but finally revealed to be the mastermind of an odious cabal subverting the president-elect with the help of others in the intelligence community and special ops military. Think Burt Lancaster in Seven Days in May or Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate. (Adal even sees to it that Carrie’s daughter is taken from her by child protective services). He and his partners in crime plan to assassinate the new president. Why is never made clear, for nothing remotely disturbing is revealed about her until the last shot of the finale after she has justifiably had all those who plotted against her arrested. Then she then begins arresting even those who tried to protect her. Suddenly the people who have been running the CIA for years, the good guys who were trying to protect the country, set out to murder the president-elect! Did they construct the new direction after Donald Trump won? The latter must be true because the first woman president-elect, a Democrat, is by the finale somehow a female Donald Trump to be dealt with exactly in the manner the real left has been behaving since their loss to Trump in November. Total derangement. Consider all the leftists who have called for Trump’s assassination on Twitter and other social media, the chaotic protests, silly marches, etc.

The writers have inadvertently demonstrated exactly how the left functions, not the right. Now that we know the Obama administration functioned like a crime syndicate it is easy to surmise how easily they projected these tactics onto their own characters. They even created a character, (presumably based on radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones), who operates a massive bot organization to propagandize by social media. He is clearly meant to be a right-winger who, along with Adal, unfairly maligns the reputation of the president-elect’s dead soldier son. She is at this point a person for whom the viewer feels sympathy.

In one scene in this British film, two women who work together are having a conversation and one remarks to the other that she appears tired and worn out compared to how she looked some time before when she looked so ______; she searches for the right adjective, waits several beats and finally says “so vivid.” The retrieval of this uncommon “mot juste” as opposed to more generic possibilities, crystallizes what lifts this small movie into the realm of memorable film. The dialogue is precise and intelligent; the characters speak in complete sentences; they are adults living through the blitz during the second world war. There are no stock caricatures to be found. The narcissistic actor who craves the spotlight is also articulate and self-aware with redeemable charm. It’s a part tailor-made for Bill Nighy and his delivery is flawless. The ingenue, a young woman who gets recruited to help write a propaganda film to entice the U.S. to enter the war, is someone who already had the gumption to leave Wales and live with her lover. Her earnest collaborator wears serious glasses but is intuitive enough to have guessed much more about her background from a small detail which I won’t reveal. The two of them spar and circle each other but we feel their growing bond and cheer them on.

Since this is a movie that up-ends our expectations repeatedly, I won’t belabor the plot. I will say that the cast is perfect, the sentiments it arouses are authentic and , despite some harrowing scenes, there isn’t a maudlin moment in this screenplay. I can’t think of another movie about writing a movie that captures as perfectly as this one both the mechanics of constructing scenes along with the graceful talent it requires to lift the prosaic to rarified heavenly heights.

The first thing you’ll notice about After the Storm is the height of its star, Hiroshi Abe; in a country where the average male is 5′7″ this man is a towering 6′2″ and looks like Gregory Peck – both wonderful attributes. Except that this casting interferes with the plot. We’re asked to accept this character as a down and out writer, unable to summon the money he owes his short ex-wife for child support and reduced to borrowing from his short sister and stealing from his shorter mother. But all we can think is – are you kidding me? this guy could get a job in a minute as a model or movie star earning way more money than he did with his novel. He’d be plucked right off the sidewalk by ten different modeling or movie agents before he walked three blocks in downtown Tokyo. Imagine casting George Clooney as Willy Loman and you’ll understand the problem.

As I tried to overcome this stumbling block, I looked around the theater and saw the man next to me fast asleep, two women chatting, several others having the need to organize their handbags. It was then that I realized that I too must have nodded off as I couldn’t recollect seeing something that was clearly a prior occurrence. This is a very quiet film about some very dull people with very ordinary life problems. You need a Chekhov to make something out of soporific material and writer/director Hirokazu Kore-eda is not that man. In a year in which LION featured a spectacular screen debut for irresistible young Sunny Pawar, you can’t interest audiences in a reticent boy of similar age (short) who has no screen personality As he and his father decide to weather the eponymous typhoon in a playground, we are forced to acknowledge that this is too misguided to be a good bonding moment What if a tree branch came whirling towards them to smack the very tall man in the head? The old mother comes across best of the bunch but since that’s saying so little, I can’t praise her performance either. Miss this unless you’re having serious trouble napping………………

“There are two ways to disable people. One is by denying them an opportunity to compete. The other, more crippling, is to tell them they no longer have to compete and that every door will be opened. Such people can only wonder whether their accomplishments are real or simulated. Black Americans must refuse to surrender to incompetence, self-devaluation and self-marginalization. ”

People should never be defined by circumstances beyond their control—a principle exemplified by the three women whose stories are popularized in the Oscar-nominated film “Hidden Figures.” Based on a 2016 book by Margot Lee Shetterly, “Hidden Figures” chronicles how NASA mathematicians Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan overcame legal segregation and racial discrimination to play a critical role in astronaut John Glenn’s orbital mission aboard Friendship 7 in 1962.

There is a thirst among black Americans for such inspiring messages. I witnessed evidence of this yearning last week when I attended a book signing with Ms. Shetterly at the Fredericksburg, Va., campus of the University of Mary Washington. The 1,000-seat auditorium was filled to capacity by a predominantly African-American audience. People were packed into the balcony and there wasn’t a spare inch of standing room anywhere along the walls. The 100 copies of “Hidden Figures” that organizers had brought to the venue sold out well before the presentation began. Even the local bookstores ran out of copies.

During the question-and-answer session following Ms. Shetterly’s talk, some in the audience lamented that they had not known earlier about the heroines of “Hidden Figures.” Children in the audience excitedly raised their hands to learn more about these pioneering “human computers” and their triumph over adversity.

There are thousands of such stories embedded in the history of black America. Sadly, they are rarely told by the elite media—black or white—and often ignored by academia. The most powerful antidote to disrespect is not protest but performance. Stories that convey this idea, however, are considered “off message” in the national narrative.

The dominant racial message today attributes black failure—academic, occupational and even moral—to an all-purpose invisible villain: “institutional racism.” Those who shake their fists and proclaim that white America must change before blacks can achieve anything are embracing a version of white supremacy clothed as protest. The debilitating effects of this attitude are exacerbated by liberals’ “white guilt.” Since the time of “race norming” and the promotion of Ebonics as a separate national language in the 1960s, white liberals have approached the black community with a combination of pity, patronage and pandering. CONTINUE AT SITE

The title of this adaptation of a Julian Barnes novel seemed prophetic as several people in the rows near me could be heard asking each other for clarification of exactly what did happen at the end of the movie. This was not a purposeful device on the part of the director who wished to leave certain information ambiguous – instead, it was the result of a pile-on of too much information crammed too quickly into a tidy ending. It reminded me of what a hostess does when guests are at the front door too early and miscellaneous stuff needs to be collected and tossed into a closet so the entrance way looks neat.

If memory serves, some of the plot points have been added on in order to make the movie more relevant to today’s mores, such as a mid-thirties pregnant lesbian daughter becoming a single mother, played by Downton’s formidable Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery). Though she lights up the screen, this side-plot adds little to the story of a man whose past catches up with him through a surprising bequest of his best friend’s diary and the subsequent unraveling of the differences between memory, longing and some difficult truths. Jim Broadbent plays the aging Tony Webster, a former Oxford student whose life as a divorced, uptight owner of a small camera shop belies the promising future he once imagined. Charlotte Rampling plays the aging woman he once loved who betrayed him with his own best friend, provoking Tony’s mean-spirited letter that contained an ominous curse on that relationship. Unfortunately, Rampling bears no resemblance to the actress playing her younger self, a big casting mistake since it’s hard to see her as anything but a new person in his life. What works better in the novel than the film are the serendipitous off-hand observations and overheard remarks that give this anti-hero his eventual epiphanies into what really happened and what kind of man he actually is.

Besides being confusing, these realizations seem gratuitously forced as opposed to earned and the semblance of a hopeful ending all around is more trite than profound. For a much more satisfying adaptation of a Barnes novel, see the first-class t.v. mini-series of “Arthur & George,” (2015) a fascinating take on a true story concerning Arthur Conan Doyle and a man convicted of a crime he did not commit. The ending will be crystal clear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-uUOv7UCkQ

Yes, you’re right. The best way to deal with today’s Hollywood community is to try to ignore it. The Oscar ceremony is a parade of mostly dimwitted narcissists whose fame and wealth have convinced them that their inane parroting of received elite opinions amounts to thoughtful political expression. And the nominations and awards themselves, especially in the documentary and foreign-language categories, are often based less on artistic accomplishment than on identity politics and other PC considerations. This year, it was widely assumed that the annual festival of shameless self-celebration would also be an all-out attack on Donald Trump, and that we would all have served ourselves, our country, and our culture best by tuning out. Plus a fact, I, for one, had nothing to root for, since I’d seen only one of the nominated pictures: Silent Nights, a nominee for best short film that happened to have aired on Danish TV immediately prior to the red-carpet nonsense.

But in my case, curiosity won the day. Would the winners, presenters, and host Jimmy Kimmel actually go after the president, and thereby alienate half the country (and bore much of the other half), thus continuing the show’s yearly slide into low ratings and cultural irrelevance, or would they do the smart thing and leave politics out of it? It didn’t take long to learn the answer. Preening statements about walls and religious bigotry and international brotherhood abounded. So did tired Trump humor: Kimmel kept flogging that dead horse, and each gibe was worse than the next – but that didn’t keep the glitterati from laughing reflexively at each lame gag. (It was interesting to note that when Kimmel, in reference to the winning feature documentary, O.J.: Made in America, actually cracked an O.J. joke, the audience response was one of discomfort – so much so that Kimmel commented on it, joshingly serving up a faux apology for having mocked “our beloved O.J.”) Also worth mentioning is the winner of the short documentary award, whose director, upon accepting his statuette, piously intoned that ubiquitously misquoted line from the Koran, “To save one life is to save all of humanity.” The audience, of course, applauded lustily.

But the highlight, or low point, of the whole preposterous pageant was the presentation of the award for best foreign-language film. A couple of days before the ceremony, the directors of the five pictures nominated in this category signed a joint declaration in which, presuming to speak “[o]n behalf of all nominees,” they expressed their “unanimous and emphatic disapproval of the climate of fanaticism and nationalism we see today in the U.S. and in so many other countries, in parts of the population and, most unfortunately of all, among leading politicians.” Subtle, huh? Speaking up for “the diversity of cultures,” they decried those who raise “divisive walls” that categorize people by “genders, colors, religions and sexualities” and celebrated the power of film to offer “deep insight into other people’s circumstances and transform feelings of unfamiliarity into curiosity, empathy and compassion — even for those we have been told are our enemies.”

Who were the signers of this pompous document? Martin Zandvliet of Denmark, Hannes Holm of Sweden, Maren Ade of Germany, Marin Butler and Bentley Dean of Australia, and – last but not least – Asghar Farhadi of Iran. Farhadi ended up winning the trophy, but didn’t show up. In fact he may have won precisely because of his announcement, some days before the big night, that he wouldn’t be showing up. His motive: to protest Trump’s temporary ban on travel to the U.S. from his country and six others. When his victory was announced (it was his second in the category, after A Separation in 2011), the audience cheered, and it cheered again, quite fervently, when an Iranian-American woman read aloud a statement by Farhadi in which he explained that he’d stayed home “out of respect for the people of my country and those of other six nations who have been disrespected by the inhumane law that bans entry of immigrants to the U.S.”