RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/culture/ed-driscoll/2020/06/26/mr-jones-walter-duranty-n580824

Having linked at Instapundit to a couple of reviews of the new film about the journalist who first went on the record about the Soviet Union’s terror famine in Ukraine in 1933, titled Mr. Jones, I bit the bullet and purchased it from Amazon Prime Video. I wanted to like this film so, so much, given that it focuses on a subject that Hollywood moviemakers have avoided for decades. And while Mr. Jones has many excellent moments, it also has several scenes that ultimately work against it as a film.

But it’s a very noble failure. The man in the title is real-life Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935), played by James Norton. But he’s really not what makes Mr. Jones so important a film. That person is the now infamous Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ man in Moscow, Stalin’s stenographer, played by Peter Sarsgaard. Previously, Sarsgaard co-starred in another film about a leftwing fabulist run amok, Shattered Glass, playing the editor of the New Republic’s Stephen Glass.

In 1932, Duranty won a Pulitzer for his lies that, as Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1919, the Soviet Union and its capital-C-Communism was “the future, and it worked.”

It didn’t. And the Times, which apparently now sees the Soviet Union as some sort of extended experiment in free love under Premier Austin Powers, has yet to return the Pulitzer.

http://politicalmavens.com/index.php/topic/politics/

This is a film based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell based on Shirley Jackson and Stanley Edgar Hyman, two famous American writers who were married to each other. The key word here is ‘novel’ but the viewer doesn’t know that this is not biographical and this presents serious ethical questions with the liberties taken as various behaviors are ascribed to these individuals without our ability to distinguish between authorial fantasy from reality.

The film hits many current popular marks: male philandering, abusiveness, narcissism along with female insecurity, emotional distress, lesbianism and dependency on drugs and alcohol. The plot concerns a young couple coming to Bennington College for the husband to assist Professor Hyman. They agree to have his pregnant wife do the cooking and housework for the Hymans in exchange for their room and board. At first, this seems like a doubly good idea, allowing the husband to try for a job in the English department the following semester by impressing Hyman and for the couple to save their money for their expected child. They are both unaware of how psychologically damaged Shirley is, spending all her time indoors, drinking, sleeping and writing. Her mood swings are so wide that she seems tri-polar and as abusive as her husband. Of course this becomes apparent as soon as they move in yet the young wife is willing to put up with the situation and becomes infatuated by Shirley, eventually in a sexual manner.

An additional plot point is Shirley’s novel in progress about a young woman who disappeared from the town without being found. This offers more nuances concerning the perils of marriage, friendship and extra-curricular relationships. One of the pivotal scenes recalls Thelma and Louise as Shirley and Rose (the young wife and mother) stand at the edge of a precipice – a device too corny and contrived to be effective. The main reason to see this movie is the performance of Elizabeth Moss, an actress who is capable of making you read her most subtle thoughts without histrionics – a true artist or perhaps magician. The second reason is to remind you to re-read “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, one of the great short stories of the 20th century

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/05/remembering_the_hillthomas_story.html

On Monday night, our local PBS station showed “Created Equal…..Clarence Thomas in his own words.”    

It was a great documentary and I learned a few things about his early days and marriage.  

Like some of you, I recall the day that President Bush nominated him.  I happened to be with my father that day and he seemed very happy with the choice.  He told me that Thomas would make a great justice because he faced a lot of adverisity coming up in life.  (On a personal note, “overcoming adversity” was a theme that my late father would always go back to. It made people tougher and better, he would say)

Then came Anita Hill and the documentary became very intense.  It was interesting to watch then Senator Joe Biden and the late Senator Ted Kennedy sitting next to him.  Am I the only person watching who thought that Biden made a fool of himself talking about “natural law”?  Clarence Thomas couldn’t understand what he was saying either.

Two things really struck me about the documentary:

First, Justice Thomas reminded his opponents that the “Tarring and feathering” would eventually come back to get them.  He must have been thinking about now candidate for president Joe Biden who faces a 1993 sexual misconduct allegation a lot more credible than Anita Hill’s.  I wonder if Mrs. Biden understands the pain that Mrs. Thomas went through?  

Second, the media and the Democrats had no trouble believing Hill.  You can see in the documentary how they all lined up to support a woman who had absolutely no proof of anything.  It all looked so eerily similar to the effort to get Judge Brett Kavanaugh.  

The film Created Equal: Clarence Thomas In His Own Words will be broadcast nationally on PBS on Monday, May 18 at 9 PM ET (check local listings). I was Associate Producer and Consulting Editor on this engrossing, two-hour documentary.
 
Few know much more about Justice Thomas than a few headlines and the recollections of his contentious confirmation battle with Anita Hill. In the film, Justice Thomas tells his entire life’s story, looking directly at the camera, speaking frankly to the audience. Unscripted and without narration, the documentary takes the viewer through this complex and often painful life, dealing with race, faith, power, jurisprudence, and personal resilience.
 
To see the trailer go to my website lisashreve.com and scroll down to the lower right. Lisa Shreve

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/05/television-review-becoming-what-does-michelle-obama-have-to-complain-about/

Michelle Obama has had a blessed American life, but she’s all about her grievances in her Netflix documentary.

There’s a curious joy deficit in Michelle Obama’s video memoir Becoming, the Netflix documentary produced by her and her husband. As she glides from one beautiful space to another, surrounded by beautiful and famous people, with beautiful daughters and a beautiful bank account and much else to be grateful for, the viewer keeps waiting for her Flounder moment: Oh, boy, is this great!

Instead, the tone is mostly dour, pained, even somber. I suspect (and hope!) that, off-camera, the Obamas are a bit more full of joie de vivre than Michelle Obama is in this film, which is largely a litany of complaint. She says she felt so much pressure to be perfect for eight years in the White House that when it was over she let the dam burst by crying for half an hour (half an hour?) when she and her husband departed on Air Force One. She talks about the various times she feels she was targeted by racism, exaggerating what actually happened. She walks us through her press coverage, which she finds indescribably unfair and hurtful.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/05/05/hillary-on-hulu/

It is ironic that the former secretary of state fought for much of her life trying to prove that being a woman didn’t hold her back, but when it came to running for president she couldn’t forget the fact herself.

After two failed presidential runs, many Americans might expect Hillary Clinton to fade gracefully into the background, her political life now history. With her recent public endorsement of Joe Biden and the release of a highly glamorized documentary series, however, Hillary is trying to claw her way back into the limelight. For what ends, we don’t yet know.

“Hillary,” the four-part documentary created by Nanette Burstein and aired on Hulu attempts to put Hillary Clinton into context for a generation that did not grow up with her as their First Lady. Collective memories are short—when many today think of Hillary Clinton they picture her 2016 run for president, her time as Secretary of State, or maybe her 2008 run for the Democratic nomination, but the documentary puts Hillary in the context of over 50 years of cultural transformation. Each episode pivots back and forth from the presumed end of Hillary Clinton’s political career to the beginning. It weaves a narrative of a woman who was “too right too soon,” and who stood up for women’s rights when most women saw their options as limited.

The documentary features segments of more than 2,000 hours of behind-the-scenes campaign footage, some of the 35 hours Burstein spent interviewing Hillary, as well as interviews from Hillary’s friends, family, supporters, friendly journalists, and campaign staff. Missing are interviews of any Hillary opponents or critics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/battering-norman-borlaug-11587769611?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

It seems to be an iron law of modern life: Be successful at what you do, and sooner or later you will be labeled an enemy of the people. The latest target of this treatment is the late Norman Borlaug, who is featured in a new PBS documentary called “The Man Who Tried to Feed the World: A Tale of Good Deeds and Unintended Consequences.”

Borlaug was an Iowa-born agronomist who is rightly regarded as the father of the Green Revolution. By producing disease-resistant strains of wheat, and later rice, Borlaug dramatically increased the yields that farmers—especially those in Third World nations—could extract from the land.

As the film does acknowledge, feeding the world without Borlaug’s innovations would be difficult. Readers of a certain age will recall the laments in the 1960s that humanity’s expanding population, especially in the developing world, would lead to mass starvation. Famines were not uncommon in those years in India, China and elsewhere, and Borlaug helped to make them rare and almost solely the result of bad governance. In 1970 Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Now comes PBS to rewrite history, going light on the lives saved and heavy on the “unintended consequences.” These include everything from diminished water supplies and depleted soil to increased urbanization in Mexico and a “broken society” in India.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bad-education-review-a-scandal-with-smarts-11587674969?mod=opinion_reviews_pos2

The rise and fall of Frank Tassone as told in HBO’s blackly comedic “Bad Education” is mostly about his fall and hinges, ever so Greekly, on his own hubris. Early on, Frank, the wildly popular, handsome and successful superintendent of the Roslyn, N.Y., school system on Long Island, is interviewed about an overly ambitious building project by a student journalist, who gets her quote and prepares to go. “It’s just a puff piece,” explains Rachel Bhargava (Geraldine Viswanathan), but Frank stops her in her tracks. “It’s only a puff piece if you let it be a puff piece,” he admonishes. “A real journalist can turn any assignment into a story.” What you feel then is just a tremor, but the foundation of Frank’s meticulously fabricated life is beginning to turn to sand.

Which it famously did. Frank Tassone and his assistant, Pam Gluckin—played with an actorly joy by Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney, directed by Cory Finley—were eventually indicted and convicted in an $11.2-million embezzlement scheme that involved houses in the Hamptons, vacations, plastic surgery, more vacations and Frank’s Park Avenue apartment. It was certainly the biggest crime of its kind that Roslyn had ever seen and made quite the impression on screenwriter Mike Makowsky, who was a student in Roslyn when Frank was indicted in 2004. Mr. Makowsky’s storytelling isn’t just true-crime. It’s true-human.