RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.city-journal.org/article/barbies-checkmate

I know. You’ve had it up to here with Barbie. You don’t care about the stunning $162 million global record-breaking opening weekend. You roll your eyes at the Barbie luggage, the candles, the ice cream, the Airbnb listing, the NFTs. You’re sick of the whole “women are so oppressed yet so wow.” You’ve heard it a million times already; the future is female.

Well, you may not be interested in Barbie, but Barbie—or more precisely, Mattel, Barbie’s corporate puppet master—is interested in you. Young children are Mattel’s core customers, but the company has set its sights on a much wider market. It sees the movie as a way for everyone—“teens, young adults, moms, glammas [a portmanteau for glamorous grandmas]” to “engage in the franchise,” in the words of Richard Dickson, Mattel’s former president and COO (now CEO of clothing retailer Gap).

Judging from the pink tsunami of the past few weeks, Mattel’s efforts are paying off. We shouldn’t be surprised. The movie is only the latest in a long series of brilliant chess moves confirming Mattel’s place as the World Champion Grand Master of marketing to progressive, relatively affluent, sophisticated consumers. I don’t know whether the company or the movie are actually as woke as some are grumbling, but I do know Mattel saw the sales potential of the woke phenomenon when Nikole Hannah-Jones was still in elementary school.

Consider Barbie’s origins. For much of commercial toy history, baby dolls were your basic girl toy. Girls would pretend to bottle-feed, dress, and comfort their dolls in imitation of their housewife mothers, who, in turn, tended to their real-life average of five (!) children. The end of the baby-doll era came in the late 1950s, after Ruth Handler, along with her husband Elliot, a founder of the young Mattel company, had a eureka moment. During a visit to Germany, she spotted an unusual doll known as Bild Lilli in a shop window. Based on a risqué comic book character, Lilli was mostly sold in tobacco shops. The character was something of a floozy, with many R-rated adventures. At the time, Lilli was coveted not by little girls but by grown men, though exactly what they did with the dolls no one was saying. To create Barbie, Mattel desexualized and Americanized Lilli, giving her a California glow, evening out her dramatically arched eyebrows and toning down her red, puckered lips. One other seemingly trivial but significant change: Lilli’s shoes were molded to her invisible feet; Barbie’s shoes are removable.

Director Greta Gerwig’s movie opens with a hilarious take on Barbie’s arrival in the U.S. market. A gargantuan doll dressed in a zebra-striped bathing suit and sunglasses suddenly appears, monolith-like, astride a group of sad-looking young girls. Dressed in dowdy, Amish-inspired smock dresses, they are awestruck at this vision of adult sexiness and glamour and immediately smash their baby dolls in angry disgust, a scene that Gerwig gleefully sets to the majestic orchestral opening of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, made famous by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/oppenheimer-a-dishonest-masterpiece/

Although biopics about great scientists have been a Hollywood staple ever since the early days of the talkies, they pose distinct challenges to filmmakers. How, after all, to make the sight of somebody working out a mathematical problem in his head visually exciting? Still, from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and Madame Curie (1943) to The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game (both 2014), the genre has yielded some first-rate results. The latest such achievement is the epical Oppenheimer, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk).

It’s the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-67), “the father of the atom bomb” – not to be confused with Edward Teller, “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” Before seeing it, I read American Prometheus, the 2007 biography by Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird on which it’s based. The book is fascinating, but after finishing it I wondered how Nolan had managed to make it cinematic. Yes, in films like this, sooner or later you know you’re going to see the hero excitedly scribbling complex equations on a blackboard. But in The Theory of Everything we also experienced the human drama of Stephen Hawking becoming increasingly weakened by ALS; in The Imitation Game, Alan Turing’s autistic personality made for plenty of interpersonal conflict; and A Beautiful Mind actually put John Nash’s imaginary friends onscreen.

But what to do with Oppenheimer? The man was a puzzlement, complex and contradictory. Obsessed with the paradoxes of the cosmos, he nonetheless found time to become a multilingual polymath of surpassing erudition — an aficionado of Picasso, Stravinsky, and The Waste Land who taught himself Italian so he could read Dante and learned Sanskrit just for the hell of it. Different people described him in strikingly different ways: for one, he was “angelic, true and honest”; for another, he was a guy who “could cut you cold and humiliate you down to the ground.” In more than one way, his story is similar to Turing’s. Both were geniuses who played outsized roles in winning World War II but who, years later, were punished by their governments for matters unrelated to their work (in Turing’s case, his homosexuality; in Oppenheimer’s, his intimacy with Communists). While Turing’s wartime work gave birth to the computer age, Oppenheimer’s ushered in the atomic age. Both men’s discoveries had their positive and negative consequences; but while the downsides of computers took decades to come into focus, the downsides of nuclear energy were clear from the git-go.

In Oppenheimer’s youth, to be sure, physics seemed innocuous — a matter of working out abstruse calculations about the behavior of atoms and the movements of galaxies that had no conceivable connection to everyday human life. Inclined, in any event, far more to theoretical than to applied science (in chem lab, he was a klutz), he took his undergraduate degree at Harvard, then — in order to immerse himself in quantum mechanics, which back then (it was the 1920s) had yet to gain a foothold in the U.S. — did advanced work at Cambridge, Göttingen, Leiden (where he picked up the nickname Opje, later anglicized to Oppie), and Zurich. Reading American Prometheus, I feared that any film about Oppenheimer would have to jettison these years in Europe, which, though colorful, might be dismissed by some screenwriters as tangential. But my concerns were unfounded: Nolan works just enough of this stuff in to get the gist of it all, and, bless him, puts in every last one of the details I was particularly fond of — such as the spectacle of Oppenheimer, newly arrived in Leiden, delivering a lecture in Dutch, which he’s just taught himself for the occasion.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/lincolnbrown/2023/07/05/sound-of-freedom-shines-a-light-on-the-issue-of-human-trafficking-n1708313

Yesterday, my wife and I did two things. One was to attend a neighbor’s Fourth of July barbecue — something I have not done in about thirty years. The second was to take in a showing of Sound of Freedom. Having been on a human trafficking awareness mission trip to Cambodia, the issue is near and dear to our hearts. We have met the people whose lives were nearly destroyed by trafficking. We have heard their stories and have seen just how devastating this issue truly is.

The victims ran the gamut from five years old to late teens and early twenties. These women and children sustain emotional and psychological damage, and physical injuries from years of abuse. As I have written before, there was one child who had been poisoned. This was done to disable her so that she could beg on the streets. She lived out her short life in a wheelchair, unable to speak or walk.

Sound of Freedom tells a compelling story. It blends action with a message, departing from the glib characterization of “thriller” to produce some moving, thoughtful, unsettling, and frightening moments. Jim Caviezel does a fine turn as Tim Ballard. My wife and I met Ballard for all of three minutes at an event years ago, and Cavielzel does not look like him. But Ballard is only part of the story, as odd as that may sound.

The character of Vampiro/Batman, a former cartel member who is expiating past sins by rescuing children from the sex trade, is one of the most interesting characters in the story. He is a booze-swilling, foul-mouthed, cigar-smoking, tough guy who is fighting the good fight. Actually, he has most of the good lines, and you find yourself rooting for him almost from the moment he is introduced.

The sheer evil of an ex-beauty queen based on former Miss Cartagena, Kelly Johana Suarez, who lures children into slavery, is nothing short of chilling. The traffickers and cartel members in the film are not given “redemptive moments.” That is because there are times when evil must be recognized for what it is and not given a pass for one reason or another.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2023/06/24/sound-of-freedom-go-see-the-movie-exposing-the-huge-child-trafficking-network-n1706026

Millions of innocent children are sex trafficked every single year, many as part of the Biden border crisis. But a movie about to come to theaters is seeking to expose the vast network of predation on kids and tell the stories of real-life heroes who work to rescue victims of child trafficking.

The movie Sound of Freedom exposes the network trafficking two million children every single year. Watch the theatrical trailer below:

The movie follows Operation Underground Railroad CEO Tim Ballard and his mission to save children. It has taken years to bring this important film to the public. Angel Studios President Jordan Harmon, whose company is now Sound of Freedom’s distributor, explained the frustrating process.

”This film has been through the ringer. It was originally done by — Fox was going to be the distributor back in the day,” Harmon said, according to Bounding into Comics. But then The Walt Disney Company and Fox had a merger — and Disney, the same Disney that has featured drag queens, homosexuals, and LGBTQ+ individuals and characters in their shows and movies, wasn’t interested. “Then Disney buys Fox and for whatever reason Disney shelves [the film],” Harmon said. It took a year to get the rights back, and now Angel Studios is the movie’s distributor. What does Hollywood not want you to know?

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/06/25/another-woke-reboot-dies-a-horrible-death-n1706111

We’ve long been critical of Hollywood’s lack of fresh, new ideas and its apparent fascination with rebooting past films or giving us a sequel decades later. Sadly, merely paying homage to the original material is insufficient. Instead, producers opt to incorporate “wokeness,” believing it will be more appealing to modern viewers, but in the process, they end up taking something beloved and turning it into garbage that the masses don’t want to see.

The latest example is Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, the prequel series to the 1978 hit film Grease. I’m not sure who wanted this — it’s bad enough to hear any of the original songs and get them stuck in your head — but once again, the effort seemed less about telling a compelling story, and more about making it an anachronistically diverse, LGBTQ story, flaunting same-sex romances and obsession with racial identity.

Woke reboots, sequels, and prequels don’t have a stellar track record, and it’s hard to understand how Hollywood hasn’t gotten the hint. It’s bad enough that Hollywood doesn’t have enough new ideas it constantly has to borrow from past works, but it’s particularly bad when woke writers take period pieces and shamelessly insert LGBTQ ideology into them or diversify the cast in a way that makes them grossly inaccurate to the point where they’re arguably rewriting history. For example, Disney’s live-action reboot of Lady and The Tramp portrayed interracial relationships and race relations in a way that was grossly unrealistic for the era it took place in. The characters Jim Dear and Darling were made an interracial couple even though interracial marriage was illegal at the time and place the movie was set.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/06/sound_of_freedom_the_story_of_one_mans_war_on_child_trafficking.html

Last week, JPMorgan accused Cecile de Jongh, wife of the former governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI), of working for Jeffrey Epstein and facilitating his underage sex ring.

Meanwhile, JPMorgan itself reached a $290 million settlement with some of Epstein’s victims.

The two incidents do not just highlight Epstein’s vast network; they remind us of the horrific crime of child trafficking, believed to yield annual profits of $32 billion in the U.S. and $150 billion worldwide. It is the fastest growing criminal enterprise in the world, in competition with drug running and the arms trade.

One man, Tim Ballard, has made it his life’s mission to fight this evil and rescue as many of its innocent victims as he can. A former undercover operative for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Ballard worked on its anti-child-trafficking teams but felt frustrated by the limitations of a government agency. In 2013, he and some colleagues quit to set up Operation Underground Railroad (OUR), which now has 150 employees, 80 contractors, and 70 trained dogs. Ballard and other staffers, who pose as customers to infiltrate child sex rings, have so far been involved in 7,000 direct rescues, resulting in 5,000 arrests. They also provide therapeutic aftercare to rescued children and train law enforcement agencies in five regions worldwide.

His valiant story is the subject of Mexican producer Eduardo Verastegui’s film Sound of Freedom, available for viewing nationwide beginning July 4.

Indeed, there’s an Epstein connection: Jim Caviezel, who plays Ballard, says the film features an Epstein island allegory, and wonders how the “three-letter agencies” could not be aware of the extent of the child-trafficking problem. He hopes the film will motivate more witnesses and whistle-blowers into speaking up.

Award-winning director Tobias Elvhage, whose most recent awards include Best Short Film at the 2023 LA Documentary Film Festival and Winner of the 2023 European Cinematography Awards, joins experts interviewed in the Epoch Original docudrama Gender Transformation: The Untold Realities, in the panel discussion moderated by Facts Matter Host Roman Balmakov after the theatrical premiere of the film.

Don’t miss this exclusive event!

Date : Friday, June 16, 2023
Location: Cinema Village in New York City

7:00 PM – 8:30 PM Film Premiere
8:30 PM – 9:30 PM Panel discussion with directors and cast

https://leavingcamovie.com/

“Leaving California: The Untold Story” is a feature-length documentary that portrays California’s growing challenges, causing an unprecedented mass exodus. Siyamak Khorrami, television host of California Insider and editor of The Epoch Times Southern California, takes viewers on an intimate journey of love, loss, tragedy, and hope as California residents face the prospect of leaving their beloved state. About 700,000 people moved out of the state within the last two years.