RUTHFULLY YOURS

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. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/netflix-obama-propaganda/

Netflix is paying Barack and Michelle Obama millions of dollars to produce shows for them.

The latest Obama documentary series is “The G Word.” “G” for government.

As Netflix documentaries go, this one is remarkably stupid. It’s big-government propaganda.

Obama begins by claiming that he does his own income taxes, saying, “It’s actually easy.”

I think he’s joking, but it’s not clear.

“I’m amazing at them,” Obama continues hours later. “You can be, too, if you use the helpful tools found at IRS.gov.”

But that’s just silly. It’s so complex that millions of us pay to get help.

Obama’s series is hosted by silly comedian Adam Conover. Conover, correctly, calls himself “an idiot.”

He uses his time with the former president of the United States to make lame jokes and, at one point, to make sandwiches. He compliments Obama on how well he cuts the bread. It’s not funny.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/10/a_story_of_jewish_partisan_resistance_during_world_war_ii.html

When the Nazis were gunning down Jews of the Eastern Polish town of Lenin into trenches, an officer pulled 17-year-old Faye Schulman (then called Faigel Lazebnik) aside. He’d seen her working at a studio earlier. So, he ordered her to take vanity pictures of him and other Nazis; he also told her to develop the negatives of the photos the Nazis had taken of the massacre. Almost 2,000 Jews were shot dead in Lenin. Several others were beaten, stripped naked, and sent to “work” camps in boxcars. Despite being terrified, the teenager secretly made extra copies of the photos to document the war crimes for future testimony.

Camera in hand, she later escaped to the forests and joined a group of Russian resistance fighters to avenge the death of her parents and six brothers and sisters. The group made her the resident “nurse”, hoping she may have picked up some skills from a brother-in-law who was a doctor. She assisted the group’s ‘doctor,’ actually a veterinarian. They’d dress wounds with cloth sterilized by boiling. But she was also an unemotional fighter who learned to use a rifle and stalk the forests in her leopard-fur coat. During a raid for food and weapons, she urged fellow fighters to burn her childhood home so that the Nazis wouldn’t be able to use it.

Her focus, though, remained on building evidence. She was so resolute about documenting Nazi atrocities and the partisans’ activities that she learned to develop photographs under a blanket. “I want people to know there was resistance. Jews did not go like sheep to the slaughter,” Schulman, who died last year in Toronto, aged 101, would say. Her more than 100 photographs of the massacre and her partisan years – and her life itself – are proof of that.

Four Winters: A Story of Jewish Partisan Resistance and Bravery in WW2, a documentary film written, produced, and directed by Julia Mintz, presents Schulman’s story, along with that of seven other teenaged fighters like her who lived in the forests of Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine, waging guerrilla warfare against the Nazis. It took Mintz over a decade to track down these fighters – in their 80s and 90s – for interviews and gather photographs and film footage.

The film intersperses photos of their youth with intimate present-day conversations about their exploits as resistance fighters. In the documentary, they speak of their transformation from innocents to ruthless partisans fighting the Nazis who murdered their families. Their singular focus was on seeing the Nazis defeated and staying alive. It’s a remarkable tale of the courage and diehard persistence of ad hoc resistance regiments that badgered the Nazi killing machine.

From 1941, when Germany violated the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invaded Poland, to the very end of the war, some 25,000 Jews escaped ghettos and death camps to fight the Nazis. Some joined non-Jewish resistance fighters, some joined or formed all-Jewish groups. They learned to shoot, survive in the woods, withstand constant hunger, and handle medical problems.

A video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is played during a hearing by the House Select Committee to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol in Washington.

The Jan. 6 hearings have been prime political fodder for months, and they continue to get the late-night comedy treatment, this week serving as the cold open for “Saturday Night Live.”

Kenan Thompson opened the show presiding as Jan. 6 committee chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson during the closing statements of the hearings, calling the attack at the U.S. Capitol one of the most “dramatic and consequential moments in our nation’s history.”

“So to fight back, we assembled a team of monotone nerds to do a PowerPoint,” Thompson says.

Heidi Gardner as Rep. Liz Cheney jokes across the aisle: “Whether you’re a Republican who’s not watching or a Democrat who’s nodding so hard your head is falling off, one person is responsible for this insurrection: Donald Trump. And one person will suffer the consequences: me.”

Cheney (Gardner), daughter of the former vice president in the George W. Bush administration, brings up her political power-player father. “You might be wondering what makes me so tough. And I ask you, who was your dad? Is it Dick Cheney?”

She adds: “I guess you could say I have big Dick Cheney energy.”

Earlier this week during the real hearing, the committee showed footage of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence conferring on the state of the Capitol. Saturday’s episode of the sketch comedy series showed its own clips from the video, with Chloe Fineman’s Pelosi on the phone with Pence.

https://www.commonsense.news/p/why-bros-bombed?utm_source=email

The algorithm knows I’m a man and gay, so I’m often served news about Britney, bodybuilding videos, and, more recently, nonstop ads for the Universal movie Bros, written by Billy Eichner. 

The film’s poster features two men groping each other’s jeans-ed butts. At this year’s VMAs, Eichner took the stage to urge audiences to see his movie, gushing that the film “is making history as the first gay romcom ever made by a major studio and the first where every role is played by an openly LGBTQ actor.” Headlines called Bros “hilarious,” “history-making” and “groundbreaking.”

So when I settled into the theater last Sunday evening with a friend (and a bag of heavily buttered popcorn) as the trailer for the Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance with Somebody, played, I was ready to be wowed.  

The film follows Eichner’s character, Bobby, a mouthy podcaster opening up an LGBTQ museum (cringe) and his relationship with Aaron, a chiseled lawyer with a penchant for group sex portrayed by Luke Macfarlane. (I won’t complain.) The two meet-cute in a nightclub and then must navigate the complex world of gay relationships, commitment issues and insecurities.

There are moments when Bros is funny—a self-deprecating lampoon of gay life. But mostly it’s a preachy, self-indulgent dumpster fire. At one point, Bobby harangues Aaron’s mother about the need to teach her second-grade students about queer history. The two long hours are replete with partisan finger-wagging, lamentations about erasure, and performative apologies from Bobby for being a “cis white guy.” Half of this alleged comedy is devoted to Bobby’s cranky monologues.