RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2023/04/26/steven-spielberg-slams-woke-edits-to-hollywood-classics-including-his-own-n1690392

“I never should have done that,” to E.T. The Extraterrestrial, Oscar-winning movie director Steven Spielberg told the Time 100 summit earlier this week. He was referring to politically correct digital edits he made for the movie’s 20th anniversary re-release.

In one of the original edit’s most chilling moments, kids are seen making their escape with E.T. on bicycles, pursued by armed federal agents with an interest in the alien creature. Back in 2002, Spielberg used digital effects to replace agents’ pistols and rifles with harmless — and silly-looking — walkie-talkies. A scene of genuine drama was turned into a mood-destroying giggle in order to please “modern sensibilities.” That’s a move Spielberg now regrets, and more recent home video releases have the original scenes restored.

“No film should be revised based on the lenses we now are either voluntarily or being forced to peer through,” Spielberg explained.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/04/emsuper_mario_brothersem_is_super_according_to_most_people.html

Weirdness and deviancy may make headlines — maybe because they are weird and deviant — but most Americans — indeed most people — want to relax and enjoy with friends and family a bit of fantasy to which they can relate.  Perhaps that is why the opening of Super Mario Bros. Movie has smashed box-office records. 

‘Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Box Office: All the Records Smashed on Opening Weekend

It’s-a blockbuster! “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” an animated adventure based on the classic video game, crushed the competition with its jaw-dropping $204.6 million domestic and $377 million global debut over the long Easter weekend.

Those results far exceeded expectations and even surpassed the starts of recent installments in Universal’s biggest franchises, like “Jurassic World Dominion” ($145 million domestically) and “Fast and Furious 9” ($70 million). So, expect a sequel to be announced faster than you can say “Let’s-a go!”

“The box office just kept growing and growing,” marvels Jim Orr, Universal’s president of domestic distribution. “It’s a tremendous worldwide debut, and the movie has a clear runway.”

And not only families with youngsters showed up, this non-niche movie was resonating with males and females, young and old, who grew up with Mario, Luigi, and other inhabitants of the fantastical Mushroom Kingdom.

So, a movie about loving minority brothers — okay, ethnic Italian-Americans with mustaches and dark hair named Mario and Luigi — and their fantastical adventures based on a video game, is relatable not only to Americans of all ages, economic, social and other categories but also to people around the world.  Interestingly, while the professional movie reviewers humpfed.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/02/emtremed_and_feathered.html

The announcement of the Academy Award nominees is usually a day of mourning for conservatives, mindful as we are of the dictum that ‘politics is downstream from culture’ and American culture has taken a decidedly leftist, ever more frightening turn in recent years, with Hollywood leading the charge. Yet this year we have something to cheer about from one of the odds-on favorites for the night’s biggest awards: Best Actress and Best Picture.

The movie I speak of is Tàr. And no, Tàr is not the latest cinematic installment of the Jurassic Park theme ride, but a serious movie about a paragon of traditional western culture — the conductor of one of the world’s leading orchestras, the Berlin Philharmonic — played to pitch perfect perfection by Kate Blanchett as the fictional but biographically realistic Lydia Tàr.

Right from the movie’s outset, we see some solid jabs landed by the redoubtable Blanchett cum Tàr. Interviewed by the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, she blithely refuses to take the proffered bait of feminist victimhood, telling him that she had no complaints about the trajectory of her career and that the ‘Pauline’ awakening toward the acceptance of female conductors proceeded apace. And this was just the warmup for the real fireworks that follows when Blanchett leads a class for aspiring conductors at the fabled Julliard School of Music.

https://newsblaze.com/entertainment/movie-reviews/schachten-justice_189712/

Schächten Film Review; punishment out of justice or revenge?

On January 29, 2023, just after January 27, The International Holocaust Remembrance Day, commemorating the liberation of the Nazi Death Camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Los Angeles, California, premier screening of the full feature film ‘Schächten’, (Schächten in Hebrew is shechita, meaning to slaughter) took place.

Schächten Trailer

With Thomas Roth, Austrian Director/Writer and film star Jeff Wilbusch, Israeli-German actor, attending, the Los Angeles premier was under the patronages of Hilary Helstein, director of the LA Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF), Neil Friedman of Menemsha Films, and the co-presenting partners, Austria Consul General, Mr. Michael Postl and the Federal Republic of Germany Consul General, Mr. Stefan Schneider.

The film, a drama, thriller, crime story, 110 minutes long, in German with English subtitles, with an authentic well-acted screenplay, has been well received in Austria, where the main plot takes place, and is currently doing its worldwide premier screening rounds.

https://reason.com/2023/01/31/hulus-1619-project-docuseries-peddles-false-history/

The New York Times’ 1619 Project selected Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, as a filming location for its new Hulu docuseries. In doing so, creator Nikole Hannah-Jones sought to bolster her project’s most troublesome claim—the assertion that British overtures toward emancipation impelled the American colonists into revolution, ultimately securing an independent United States.

In the past three years, the Times has grappled with the fallout from Hannah-Jones’ assertion, including the revelation that it ignored its own fact-checker’s warnings against printing the charge. The Times tempered its language to apply to “some of” the colonists, only to see it reasserted by Hannah-Jones in her public commentaries. Later, a related line about the Project’s goal of replacing 1776 with a “true founding” of 1619 disappeared without notice from the Times’ website. The newspaper found itself in a balancing act between its writer’s uncompromising positions and the need to preserve credibility as it made a Pulitzer Prize bid with the series. But Hannah-Jones was not ready to abandon the claim at the center of her lead essay, and the first episode of the Hulu series makes that abundantly clear.

The scene opens in Williamsburg on the grounds of its reconstructed colonial Governor’s Palace, where Hannah-Jones joins University of South Carolina professor Woody Holton—one of a handful of heterodox historians who defended the 1619 Project’s original narrative. As the cameras pan across streets filled with historical re-enactors and tourists in front of restored colonial buildings, the pair take another stab at resurrecting the 1619 Project’s narrative about the American Revolution. The evidence that a British threat to slavery impelled Virginians—or perhaps “the colonists” at large, in Hannah-Jones’ imprecise phrasing—to revolt may be found in the November 1775 decree of John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore, Virginia’s last Royalist governor. Facing the collapse of British rule, Dunmore announced that any enslaved male from a household in rebellion would be granted freedom in exchange for military service on the British side.

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.