RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/film-festivals-now-afraid-to-showcase-films-that-might-anger-the-woke/

Fresh evidence that the Left is totalitarian and brooks no dissent from its agenda comes from the wonderful world of cinema. Film festivals in general have been fairly far to the Left ever since they began operating, but now they’ve become positively Maoist in their determination to march in lockstep with the woke agenda. The hardening comes as a result of a dutifully Leftist film unexpectedly becoming the target of the woke guardians of acceptable opinion, and consequently savaged and destroyed. Now the film festivals have been put on notice: no ideological deviation, even of the smallest kind, is allowed.

This has been no trivial shift. In fact, it has been so conspicuous that even Variety, always a reliably Leftist organ, took note of it Wednesday in a lengthy piece entitled “Why Film Festivals Are Steering Clear of Controversial Movies.” Variety explains that the new rush to ideological conformity began with the controversy in early 2022 over a documentary film called Jihad Rehab at the Sundance Film Festival. The film “earned critical raves during its run at the virtual festival a month earlier but was being targeted by a small group of vocal detractors.”

Those detractors insisted that Jihad Rehab, which “depicts a handful of Guantanamo detainees who have been released from the U.S. prison into a 12-month Saudi de-radicalization program,” was “Islamophobic” and thus should not have been showcased at Sundance (or anywhere else, for that matter). This charge was odd in light of the fact that the film’s director, Meg Smaker, explained that the whole idea was to make the audience sympathetic to the terrorists: “What we intended in the film was that these three guys’ personal journeys are going to challenge audiences’ stereotypes about who these men actually are. Hopefully it takes away the simplistic stereotyping and gives their lives value that they haven’t seemed to have before in our national narrative.”

Smaker added, “The film was crafted so that it’s not just a journey for these men. It was intended as a journey for the audiences who see it.” A journey to Leftism and anti-Americanism: “I knew that the alt-right in the U.S. were probably going to come after us, and I’m sure they still will.” She explained that the “horror” of Guantanamo was “essentially what the film is about.” The film uses the word “terrorist” of its subjects, but only in order to “invert its meaning.”

That means that the terrorists were the good guys, and those fighting the terrorists were the real terrorists. This sounded like a film that the Sundance audience would love, but it was attacked “on social media for the fact that the film calls the men ‘terrorists’ and because Smaker herself is not Muslim.” Also, “some Muslim critics noted that the use of the word ‘Jihad’ in the film’s title misappropriates the term despite its wider meaning in Islam.” Variety adds that the film’s critics trotted out a familiar Leftist trope, claiming that the film was “potentially endangering the film’s subjects,” while also “reinforcing stereotypes of Muslims as terrorists.”

https://www.city-journal.org/hbo-sex-diaries-is-a-cynical-misfire

The emergence of the visionary and provocative television of the 1990s and 2000s, the period that gave us The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show, owed a great deal to HBO, whose narrowcast distribution model and welcome appetite for risk helped make such programming possible. More recently, the premium network has found distinction with Show Me A Hero, True Detective, and Chernobyl. Sex Diaries, however, HBO’s new series of 30-minute documentaries about the sex lives of Brooklyn hipsters on the make, is a much more cynical enterprise.

Sex Diaries is derived from a popular New York magazine column of the same name, which ran from 2007 to 2013. Anonymous New Yorkers wrote in to describe their sexual activity (or lack of same) in a given week; columnist Rachel Kramer Bussel, a former NYU Law student and the editor of sex-themed anthologies like Big Book of Orgasms, Vol. 2 and Crowded House: Threesome and Group Sex Erotica, curated and edited the submissions. Kramer Bussel aimed to capture a representative sample of New Yorkers, both gay and straight, from the very sexually active to the more solitary, from vanilla to kink. Inevitably, the television series leans more heavily into less mainstream lifestyles, from polyamory to latex fetishism to trans sex. What provided a frisson a mere decade ago now seems tame, even banal.

The show is bad—extraordinarily bad, in fact, both hollow in conception and, unusually for HBO, badly made—but there is always plenty of bad television to go around. What irks is that HBO is trying to pass off this trash as avant garde. Is it brave and provocative in 2023 to show people engaging in threesomes or in leather bondage, or using Tindr or Grindr to find the assignations that will briefly shore up their sense of self? At the leading edge of opinion in a large U.S. city, the really brave thing would be to suggest that we should impose some limits on our desires. Who besides church leaders is willing to come out in favor of sexual continence and fidelity to a partner? Who would dare to suggest that someone who has sex with many nameless partners is putting their soul at risk? Most of us would much rather be derided as libertines than risk looking like a square.

The series’ first subject, “James,” a British-born female bartender, is rarely clothed, and she looks exceptionally good naked. This was a promising start. And yet, by the episode’s seventh minute—I made a note—I was losing interest, because there’s simply nothing else going on. The producers have no interest in letting us know who James is, aside from her being an exhibitionist.

Episode three gives us a very overweight black woman living in Coney Island. She’s engaged in polyamorous relationships with people she meets out of town. She acknowledges that sex is more fraught for her because of her race and her body size. Something interesting is beginning here—she is trying to tell us something about her inner life—and then the camera just moves on.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-sexplanation/

A Sexplanation is an 81-minute, 2021 documentary that recommends rejection of a perceived, specifically American and Judeo-Christian mishandling of sex. The documentary recommends a shame-free and judgment-free approach to sex for American schoolchildren. The documentary stars 36-year-old Alex Liu, a gay Chinese-American. Liu co-wrote the script, and co-produced the film.

Liu’s biography states that his work “explores taboo topics like sex and drugs in order to broaden our understanding of science, morality, and how to negotiate a meaningful life. He’s developed two YouTube channels focused on sex and drug education, totaling over five million views.” Liu’s work has appeared on NOVA scienceNOW, CNN Health, and NPR.

A Sexplanation enjoys a 100% professional critics’ score at RottenTomatoes. The L.A. Times called the film “admirable” and “entertaining.” Other reviews are equally laudatory: “illuminating and funny”; “educates while entertaining”; “full of wisdom”; “timely and hilarious; a big brain event”; “a sex-positive breath of fresh air and an encouragement that we can break the cycles of shame … and finally move enthusiastically toward the enjoyment of pleasure, intimacy, and a healthier sexuality.” “This is a film that the whole family can watch … to get over the shame of who we are … Alex Liu can save us all!”

The New York Times selected A Sexplanation as a “Critics’ pick” and called the film “insightful.” A Sexplanation is “suitable to be shown in a classroom.”

A Sexplanation immediately begins with its America-bashing premise. “Sex. In America, an obsession. In other parts of the world, a fact,” reads a text on the screen. The quote is attributed to Marlene Dietrich.

America is “a country raised to fear sex,” Liu intones. Because of America, Liu has been so terrified that he considered taking his own life. “I love dick. The way they look, the way they feel, the way they taste,” he says, holding up what appears to be a chocolate-covered ice cream treat in the size and shape of a penis and testicles. He takes a bite, and then says he wants to “blame my mommy and my daddy” for his psychological problems.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/wokeness-killed-comedy-so-badly-the-office-couldnt-be-made-today/

Don’t take it from me.

It’s one thing when Mel Brooks says that Blazing Saddles couldn’t be made today. But we’re not talking about 70s or 80s comedies being made two generations later. The Office ran from 2005 to 2013. It went off the air less than a decade ago and it was such a linchpin of programming that Peacock’s only real power play was taking it off Netflix and trying to build a streaming service around it.

Nevertheless.

Mindy Kaling, who played Kelly Kapoor on the hit show The Office, told Good Morning America that the show couldn’t be made in the current climate and that the characters would all be “canceled.”

Asked about what her character would be up to now, she told the hosts, “I think she probably would have quit Dunder Mifflin to be an influencer, and then probably been canceled, almost immediately.”

“Actually, most of the characters on that show probably would be canceled by now,” she added, referencing the rise of cancel culture.

She explained that the show that launched her career “is so inappropriate now,” further telling the hosts that “we probably couldn’t make [it] now.”

“Tastes have changed, and honestly, what offends people has changed so much now. And so, I think that actually, it’s one of the reasons why the show is popular because people feel like there’s something kind of fearless about it or taboo that it talks about on the show,” Kaling said.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/a-movie-for-the-post-metoo-moment

Todd Field’s new, immensely ambitious film Tár begins with a neat trick: it puts the credits at the beginning. Like a film from the golden age of cinema, Tár runs its list of primary contributors upfront. I’m sure the internet is filled with theories about this stylistic choice. Me, I figure that the point is to underline that the film is about artistic creation, not as an abstraction but as an actual, corporeal, human activity. What better way to highlight the fact that art is made by (fallible, unsteady, selfish) humans than to put the humans that made the film first? One way or another, Tár is the first movie I can remember where the catering department is credited before the first line of dialogue.

Tár is the story of Lydia Tár, a brilliant conductor and composer played by a riveting Cate Blanchett. Lydia is celebrated, almost to the point of absurdity—she’s got an EGOT, she guest teaches at Juilliard, her tony Berlin apartment is festooned with awards, her upcoming book is called “Tár on Tár.” 

The first thing Tár gets right (and this is essential) is capturing the world of elite orchestral music. This is a movie that is very at home with gourmet musical tastes, and I will say up front that you have to have a stomach for a particular artistic world that many people find unbearably pretentious—there is certainly some critique of that culture to be found in the film, but the movie also luxuriates in the complexities of classical music and the people who create it at the highest levels. I frequently wished I knew a little bit more about the ins and outs of symphony orchestras while watching the film. There’s a lot of talk about adagios and Mahler. 

But Tár is ultimately a kind of cancellation story, a #MeToo tale. Lydia stands accused of misconduct—misconduct, namely sexual grooming, that is gradually revealed to us in bits and pieces as we settle into her life.

Lydia has, at times, been in the position to mentor younger people, such as in the previously mentioned classes at Juilliard—during a guest lecture she reams a self-proclaimed “BIPOC pangender” student who refuses to play Bach, given that he was a misogynist and a dead white guy—and as she is an immensely celebrated artiste in the chosen profession of these people, she holds power over them.

The questions Tár poses is, one, whether she’s guilty of abusing that position, and two, whether her obvious artistic genius complicates the question of her guilt.

http://All Hail Peter Morgan! It’s high time for a miniseries about the highly imaginative creator of Netflix’s “The Crown.”  By Bruce Bawer

All hail the creative genius of Peter Morgan, who realized years ago just how big a market there was for movies, plays, and TV series about the House of Windsor. 

After a middling early career as a TV and film writer, Morgan hit pay dirt in 2006 with the movie “The Queen,” which garnered Oscar nominations for his screenplay as well as for best picture and nabbed Helen Mirren the best actress nod as Queen Elizabeth II. 

In 2013 came “The Audience,” Morgan’s West End and Broadway play consisting entirely of meetings between Queen Elizabeth II—again played by Mirren—and every last one of her prime ministers up to that date. 

Along the way, Morgan worked on other projects, including the play and movie “Frost/Nixon” and the Freddie Mercury biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But like a moth to a flame, he kept returning to Buckingham Palace. In 2016 came his chef d’oeuvre, “The Crown”—the high-budget Netflix series that follows Queen Elizabeth II throughout her reign. 

“The Crown” is fun to watch, of course, and gorgeous to look at. But from the beginning it’s been criticized for taking outrageous liberties with the facts. Some of its most engaging sequences have turned out to be total fiction. For example, Elizabeth and Jackie Kennedy escaping from a posh reception at Buckingham Palace to bond cozily over the Queen’s dogs. Or Princess Margaret exchanging dirty limericks with LBJ at a White House dinner. 

Almost every scene involving Margaret Thatcher is not just pure invention but borderline calumny. Which isn’t surprising, given Morgan’s partiality to Tony Blair, who not only was the hero of “The Queen” but also was at the center of Morgan’s films “The Deal” (2003), and “The Special Relationship” (2010). 

The fifth season of “The Crown,” covering the 1990s, will debut on November 9—two months and a day after the Queen shuffled off this mortal coil. But Morgan and friends aren’t letting  her death cramp their style: the fabrications in this round of “The Crown” are reportedly more plentiful than ever. We’ll see Prince Charles intriguing against his mother and Prince Philip pressuring her to make nice with his mistress. Shades of “Richard III”! And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, apparently. 

No surprise, then, that there’s more outrage than ever about “The Crown’s” high hooey quotient. In a November 4 article at the BBC website, for example, one Hugh Montgomery posed what he described as “the big question of the moment,” namely: “should The Crown and its creator Peter Morgan be playing so fast-and-loose with the facts?” Morgan has already replied to that: five years ago, defending the liberties he’d taken thus far with the details of the Queen’s life, he said, “I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on the information we have about her.” 

Well, given that sanction, I’ve come up with a TV project of my own: a miniseries about the life of Peter Morgan. Don’t think for a second that he doesn’t merit such treatment. After all, his oeuvre has had a huge worldwide impact. He’s played a major role in reshaping the reputations of several leading royals and prime ministers.