RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-life-and-nickys-family/

The 2023 biopic One Life concludes with a very moving scene. An elderly man is surprised by a televised celebration of heroic deeds he performed when he was young. I could not resist the scene’s power. I cried. I made sniffling sounds. I didn’t even try to apply the emotional brakes.

If only the rest of the movie were as good as that final scene.

One Life dramatizes the life of Sir Nicholas George Winton MBE. When he was 29 years old, Winton participated in an effort to save Jewish children from oncoming Nazis. His heroism warrants an uplifting, inspirational, unforgettable film. I was worried when I saw that One Life would be released in the US on March 15. Early March is part of the “dump months” when movies that haven’t tested well are released.

One Life is not a bad movie. It’s just not good enough. I’d give it a six out of ten, but, given that the subject matter is so important and so appealing, I will nudge that up to a seven. Nicky Winton deserves an eleven out of ten.

As I left the theater, I asked, “Who was Nicholas Winton? Why did he perform these heroic acts? How did he perform them?” One Life didn’t answer those questions for me. I spent hours reading about Winton. I stumbled across a movie I’d never heard of before. Nicky’s Family is a 2011, English language, Czech and Slovak documentary. It is currently streaming for free. Nicky’s Family moved me deeply, answered my questions, and worked for me.

Nicholas Winton (1909 – 2015) was born in London. His parents were German Jewish immigrants named Wertheim. During World War I, they encountered anti-German prejudice. In an effort to assimilate, they converted to Christianity and changed their last name to Wortham. After the war, they changed back to Wertheim, but eventually switched to Winton. Nicholas was baptized in the Church of England. At the elite Stowe school, young Nicholas attended chapel regularly and chose to be confirmed as a Christian. Later he self-identified as an agnostic and a socialist.

Winton’s father was a successful banker. The three Winton children grew up in a twenty-room mansion in West Hampstead. At Stowe school, young Winton made connections that lasted for years, including with charismatic Stowe headmaster, J. F. Roxburgh. Roxburgh said that his goal, as an educator, was to produce young men who were “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck.” Winton fenced at Stowe and he would eventually be accepted to his nation’s Olympic team. He would never compete, though, as World War II canceled the games. After Stowe, Winton fenced at Salle Bertrand in London. There he fenced against British aristocrat, politician, and antisemite Oswald Mosley. Hitler attended Mosley’s second wedding.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made-part-2/

I jumped the gun near the end of my review of the first three episodes of Netflix’s documentary series Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. As I wrote in “The Worst Cold War Documentary Ever Made,” the series did not address the Korean War, the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, the Berlin Crisis of 1958, a brief Chinese–Taiwanese war, or the global communist guerrilla insurgency. But the series’ coverage of the 1950s did not end with episode three, as I suspected it had. The series pivoted in episode four to the so-called missile gap and Fidel Castro’s 1959 Cuban revolution, introducing both phenomena to establish the backdrop against which the Cuban Missile Crisis took place. Unfortunately, the film did so only to promote further the narrative that it had established in its first three episodes, which are organized around the notion that the United States was the foremost belligerent in the Cold War.

“The Russians were not on a crash program to build missiles,” the Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg said of the discovery unlocked by the launch of America’s first spy satellites. The Soviets were “not trying to be superior,” which meant that they “weren’t trying to dominate the world militarily.” Nefariously enough, American policymakers declined to internalize the conclusion that was so intuitive to Ellsberg. That was motivated reasoning designed to perpetuate the “fraudulent belief” that the Soviets represented a military threat to the West only because it was “very profitable.”

With this, Turning Point’s audience is treated to a Marxian theory of everything that explains the Cold War as an outgrowth of the fact that the American economy was “increasingly oriented around defense, and security, and nuclear weapons,” in the author Audra Wolfe’s formulation. “It’s sort of in everyone’s interests to keep building toward this world-ending moment because it’s good business,” the journalist Garrett Graff posits. Indeed, the arms race was a game, and “both sides played it,” said author Scott Anderson, by which he meant Democrats and Republicans, not the Americans and the Soviets.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/03/the-worst-cold-war-documentary-ever-made/

The new Netflix series Turning Point pushes revisionist history that might as well have been lifted straight from Howard Zinn’s fevered imagination.

Netflix’s new documentary series, Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War, opens with a captivating premise: Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest in Ukraine has imposed on the West unenviable conditions akin to those that pertained during the Cold War. Indeed, the series posits that Putin’s war cannot be understood without a study of the rivalry between the superpowers. But that pretense is swiftly abandoned. The series’ real purpose is to push a revisionist history that manages to render the Soviet Union a bit player in a Cold War narrative that might as well have been lifted from Howard Zinn’s fevered imagination. Though this could not have been the documentarians’ intention, the series might even convince some viewers that Putin has a point.

Within the first few minutes of episode one, the audience is confronted with the documentary’s true objective. “We were so good. We were the country that finally was so virtuous, in addition to being powerful,” says Overthrow author Stephen Kinzer in a blithe summary of the post-war American ethos. “And it was logical that we would then be threatened by a hostile, evil force that wanted nothing but destruction and nihilism.” The documentary then sets out to prove these two presumptions wrong.

According to the series, the Cold War begins not with Winston Churchill’s observation in Fulton, Mo., that an “Iron Curtain” had descended across the European continent but with the atomic bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These were not the first civilians wantonly murdered by the United States through nuclear warfare, of course. The first casualties were American citizens, who were poisoned by their proximity to the Trinty test and lied to about their condition by the U.S. government.

That digression aside, the film maintains that racialized caricatures of the Japanese made the atomic bombings that ended the Second World War thinkable. It was an unnecessary act of violence aimed not at ending the war — the Japanese were willing to negotiate, and the U.S. wasn’t really seeking “unconditional” surrender as advertised — but at keeping the Soviets from invading Japan. “We didn’t need to use the bomb. Japan would have surrendered. We didn’t need a land invasion in order to be victorious,” one of the documentary’s interviewees postulates.

It’s a tidy narrative, but it elides the extent to which industrial war-making facilities in Japan, unlike in Germany, were interspersed within residential areas. Harry Truman’s advisers did seek relatively intact urban targets to demonstrate the weapon’s power, but neither city subject to atomic bombing was purely civilian. Hiroshima hosted the 2nd Army Headquarters, the command in charge of the defense of southern Japan (where Operation Olympic would have begun). Likewise, Nagasaki was home to manufacturing facilities producing ordnance, naval assets, and weapons platforms.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-boys-in-the-boat-the-peasants-and-the-zone-of-interest/

Friend, I beg of you. Go to a theater and see three great movies sometime soon: The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest.

Leopold Staff, a Polish poet who survived the Nazi occupation of Warsaw, said that “Even more than bread we now need poetry, in a time when it seems that it is not needed at all.” Movies are democratic. They are accessible and they are communal. It’s fashionable to declare one’s superiority by sneering at popular culture. It’s harder to sneer when you remember that Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fearless counter-jihadi, was inspired by Nancy Drew novels, and that Top Gun and Saving Private Ryan drove military recruitment. Politics is downstream from culture. The culture we support with our ticket-buying dollars is as important as the candidates we support with our votes.

We get something from publicly watching a movie together with our fellow citizens. The Major and the Minor is a 1942 screwball comedy. I’d watched it a couple of times at home, alone, on a small TV screen before seeing it for the first time in a jam-packed, Greenwich Village art house theater. In that crowd of rollicking laughter, I suddenly realized what a very naughty movie The Major and the Minor is. Its double entendres had flown right over my head. While watching Gone with the Wind, a loud and spontaneous sigh erupted when the camera zoomed in on Rhett Butler’s handsome face (see here). Gathering in the ladies room after a movie like that is a genre of psychotherapy. While washing your hands you ask complete strangers, “Do you think Scarlett and Rhett ever got back together?” You comfort and enlighten each other and the world is warmer, more connected, less lonely and tense. Mel Gibson’s The Passion depicts Christ’s torture, crucifixion, and death in grisly detail. Three Muslim guys took seats directly behind me. They were joking sarcastically. Clearly, they were in the theater to mock. After the film ended, I turned around to check on them. One was doubled over, distraught. His companions were rubbing his back and speaking softly to him.

The loss of public movie-going erodes not just community, but also art. Ali’s well is a famous, eight-minute scene in Lawrence of Arabia. Most of what we see is a completely flat, lifeless, tan desert landscape against a blue sky unbroken by any cloud. Two men draw water from a desert well. A tiny dot appears on the horizon. Slowly we realize that that dot is a man approaching on a camel. He shoots one of the men to death. As we wait, and wait, and wait for the approaching man  to arrive, we experience a fraction of the desert: the emptiness, the boredom, the terror, the sudden and irrational violence, the value system so very different from our own. That scene could never move us in the same way on a small screen. And, when we are watching alone on a small screen, we can fast forward through the parts we don’t like, like, say, the grim depictions of the Holocaust in Schindler’s List.

My students, trained on media that rushes and delivers jolts of violence and sex aimed at the lizard brain’s reward-squirting mechanisms, lack the ability to sit through a scene like Ali’s well. They also have trouble sitting through a complex lecture on current events, or a long story of personal struggle told by a friend. Movies, like all art, have the potential to train us to be our best selves.

This movie punctures the political correctness that heaps praise on  Black novels and films, even when they are trash.

Monk as the chief protagonist is named, devises an outlandish book of his own, under a pseudonym and false claim that he is a convict. Critics rave in hilarious scenes of White hypocrisy and condescension. rsk

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2024-2-19-please-watch-and-share-juice-power-politics-and-the-grid-by-robert-bryce

Most of what Robert Bryce covers in his new documentary Juice won’t be news to you if you’re a regular reader of this blog. However, it is exactly the tool we need to bring everyone else into the fold.

It’s gripping, well produced, and covers a ton of ground in short, extremely digestible, 20 minute episodes. In 5 parts (so about an hour and a half total), Bryce and director/producer Tyson Culver cover: how the energy market developed; where we are now; the politics and profits driving decisions; why solar/wind energy will never work; and hope for a possible nuclear renaissance. And they do it all without ever getting too technical for the average viewer.

The first three episodes should be required viewing for everyone, in my opinion, and provide a thorough overview of the grid, the players, and the politics. The last two episodes are very focused on nuclear as our best option for reliable, carbon-free energy, which comes off as hopeful and solution oriented, but may be much further from realization than Bryce optimistically portrays.

If you read this blog, I can safely assume you already know a lot about energy and why current government policies towards energy are absurd at best and dangerous at worst. But it’s just as likely that you have several people in your life who struggle to understand your obsession with energy policy or can’t see why it’s so important, so fundamental to modern society, and on the cusp of turning into the biggest political issue of our time.

You can start with the first episode, linked here, and then send it to someone you think could be convinced.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-zone-of-interest-2023/

Friend, please do something for me. Put this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this movie with others.

The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You may feel, “The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it would be too much like homework. I’d prefer the latest superhero movie.”

You may be thinking, “Another Holocaust film. They’re just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can’t we have movies about other atrocities? And I don’t like watching people being tortured.”

First, there is no torture, and almost no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn’t cry while watching Zone. Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.

Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden’s poem “Shield of Achilles,” which uses Jesus’ crucifixion and Achilles’ shield to discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden’s poem and Zone say as much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films directly addressing those topics.

https://www.danielgreenfield.org/2024/02/mrs-gates-and-mrs-jobs-make-racism-movie.html

Origin, the movie, claims to be about the origin of racism in America, but its own origin story lies with the Ford Foundation, Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Steve Jobs, the Apple guru, and Pivotal Ventures, the nonprofit started up by Melinda French Gates after she dumped Bill Gates, which provided much of the money needed to fund the $38 million smear of the United States.

What kind of movie would two wealthy woke white women fund? A pop history take on racism.

Origin is based on Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, another one of those 2020 books about a racial reckoning of the kind that Mrs. Jobs and Mrs. Gates would have encountered in book clubs and while browsing The Atlantic (Mrs. Jobs owns it) or Slate (Bill Gates used to.)

Isabel Wilkerson, the protagonist of book and film, is another one of those critical race theory ‘public intellectuals’ with a media platform, a former New York Times bureau chief, who stars in it because it follows her deep thoughts about race which unroll with the depth and sophistication of a college freshman browsing Wikipedia while pulling an all-nighter to turn in a midterm paper.

Like Between the World and Me by Ta Nehisi Coates or Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist, Caste tried to pretend that its familiar and simplistic premise, (‘America is racist’) had some kind of depth by inappropriately linking it to other people’s historical experiences, the Holocaust and the caste system in India, while filtering it all through Wilkerson’s deep thoughts.

Trayvon Martin, Wilkerson’s personal life and Nazis goose stepping through Berlin all get mixed up in some intersectional tangle of narrative oppressions in both book and movie. Wilkerson taking plane trips to Germany or India allows her to bag up and appropriate two very different sets of histories to bolster her own feelings of oppression as a New York Times bestselling author.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/leftists-civil-war-fantasies/

I’m really confused about the new movie trailer for the leftist insurgency fantasy flick “Civil War” because it seems to think that the military guy who is hassling journalists with his M4 is the bad guy. I must have got that wrong. Clearly, whoever is opposed to the regime media is the hero, right? Maybe his weird, red Elton John glasses are supposed to signal to me that he’s evil, but I’m just not seeing it. At one point, one of the reporters tells him they are Americans and he asks, “What kind of American?” Frankly, that seems like a pretty good question.

After all, I was told by the desiccated, corrupt, old pervert who Alex Garland – the guy who made this piece of crap movie – a undoubtedly supported, there are a two kinds of Americans. There are good, upstanding, woke Americans who buy into all the communist garbage, and there are normal people who he calls “MAGA extremists” who are bad and scary insurrectionists and hate our democracy and are also racist and transphobic and everything else that is bad. They also cause inflation and climate change. These people should be shamed, persecuted and hounded from society, disenfranchised, disarmed, and, according to this movie, shot. So, the “What kind of American are you?” thing is not going to shock us because it is already happening, and here’s the punchline – if you’re reading this, you’re probably the bad kind of American, according to the Hollywood jerks and our senile, evil president.

The movie doesn’t really make clear what’s going on in its scenario, and to the extent it does, the scenario is pretty stupid. Apparently, there’s a president who likes God, so that your subtle hint that he’s the bad kind of American. He’s on his third term in office, which it meant to be an issue, which is weird because I was informed that the Constitution that bars three terms is an evil document of oppression designed by dead white male slaveholders, but apparently it’s a good thing today. Maybe I just haven’t got my daily Constitution status memo. There was nothing in the trailer about prosecuting your political enemies on trumped–up charges, but I’m assuming that’s a good thing until it stops being a good thing when applied to Democrats.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/12/20/netflix-and-the-erasure-of-history/

Trust should not be doled out easily to anyone, especially white people.”
– Excerpt from “Leave the World Behind,” released on Netflix December 8, 2023

If anyone thinks Netflix has abandoned the so-called woke programming that earned them sustained criticism back in the spring of 2022 and may have played a role in their cratering stock price at the time, their new movie should put that thought to rest. Woke, for lack of a better term, is alive and well at Netflix. Their cozy relationship with nouveau plutocrat power couple and White House alumni, Barack and Michelle Obama, and the blockbuster bomb of a movie they’ve produced together, epitomizes the culture of Netflix today. Such casual racism. “Don’t trust white people.” It’s ok when they do it. But don’t you dare.

To truly appreciate where Netflix is today, one must recall how they began. During the golden age of movie DVDs, in the late 1990s, Netflix arose as the mail-order alternative to renting videos from walk-in stores. But creative destruction never ends. Just as Netflix movies by mail drove corner movie rental stores out of business, streaming made DVDs delivered by mail obsolete.

On September 29, Netflix shipped their last DVD to subscribers and cancelled the service. And with that, one of the last, best windows into nearly a century of American culture was closed forever. At its peak around 2019, more than 100,000 movie titles were available on DVD, arriving in the familiar red envelopes. But as the subscriber base for DVDs shrank and competition from other streaming services grew, Netflix management decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

This is a rational business decision. Netflix, a content behemoth with an enterprise value that has soared to more than $170 billion, doesn’t need the headache of managing 17 DVD distribution centers tasked with shipping and receiving actual physical media. Netflix owns server farms that dispatch movies electronically, and their investment in physical assets must now prioritize production studios where the company invests literally billions in generating original content. With more than 50 percent of all video consumption in the U.S. now consisting of user generated content at zero cost to platforms like YouTube and TikTok, Netflix’s challenge is keeping their 240 million streaming subscribers, not hanging on to a dwindling cadre of 1.2 million DVD clients.

Nonetheless, losing public access to what was, by far, the greatest collection of movies ever compiled is a tragedy.