RUTHFULLY YOURS

Tickling Giants is a 111-minute, 2017 documentary that tells the story of “Egypt’s Jon Stewart.” Tickling Giants is produced, written and directed by Sara Taksler. She’s a relative unknown who does a technically excellent job, earning her 100% fresh rating at RottenTomatoes.

Bassem Youssef is a cardiothoracic surgeon with movie-star looks and charisma. In 2011, when he was 37, he began broadcasting satirical commentary on the Arab Spring. He produced videos in the laundry room of his apartment and posted them on YouTube. He hoped for a few thousand hits. He reached millions of viewers.

Youssef graduated to TV. An estimated forty million viewers watched his show – the largest ratings in Egyptian TV history. Jon Stewart had around two million viewers per show. Tickling Giants’ account of Youssef’s career is captivating and inspirational, occasionally funny and often quite sad. It was shot mostly in Cairo. Unless I blinked and missed it, you never see a pyramid, but, rather, street scenes, traffic, the Nile, and protests in Tahrir Square. Tickling Giants depicts appreciative Egyptian audiences gathering in outdoor cafes to laugh at Youssef’s show on big-screen TVs.

Youssef satirized Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hosni Mubarak, Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian army and Egypt’s current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Youssef faced tighter and tighter restrictions on what he could say. He and his staff faced greater and greater personal threats. Thugs, possibly paid by the government, chanted “Death to Youssef” outside his studio. An imam discussed whether it would be permissible to kill Youssef. The imam counseled, “Not yet.” Youssef’s collaborator, Tarek, had to abandon Egypt. Tarek’s father and brother were arrested and held for months without any reason. Youssef himself eventually was forced out of Egypt. Tickling Giants ends with Youssef in exile, giving talks in support of free speech at prestigious awards ceremonies in Western nations. He now lives in the US with his wife and children.

Youssef’s show had a large staff of creative, young, dynamos. The scenes of these idealists gazing out the window of their offices at the thugs calling for their deaths, and the arrival of armed troops to form a cordon in front of their studio, reminded me of life in Poland in 1989. The year that Soviet-imposed Polish communism breathed its last, I participated in demonstrations organized by the Orange Alternative, a group that undermined the authorities through humor. We held a rally celebrating the Red Army. Young Polish rebels gave elaborate, satirical speeches expressing “gratitude” for being “liberated” by the Russians.

As fine as Tickling Giants is, and as much as I could identify with its revolutionary spirit, I kept seeing the empty spaces where the censor’s X-Acto knife had sliced out key elements of the Arab Spring story.

In 2011, the year Youssef’s show launched, journalist Lara Logan was beaten and sexually assaulted by hundreds of men in Tahrir Square. They called her a Jew. She is not Jewish. The assailants used their cellphones to record their assault.

That same year, the otherwise anonymous “Girl in the Blue Bra” was dragged across pavement, beaten with batons, and kicked by Egyptian military. After they stripped off her abaya, one soldier stepped directly on her breasts, clothed only in a blue bra. Her abused image traveled round the world. Hillary Clinton decried “the systematic degradation of Egyptian women.”

Tahrir Square is inextricably linked with taharrush. Men encircle women, sexually assault them, and video-record the assaults. Al Akhbar describes taharrush as a “prominent feature” of life in Egypt, and reports that Egyptian women as well as men tend to blame the victim. President Sisi visited a taharrush victim in the hospital. The Guardian, a liberal newspaper, ran an article entitled, “80 Sexual Assaults in One Day – The Other Story Of Tahrir Square.” During New Year’s celebrations in 2015-16, Muslim men committed mass sexual assaults in Europe. Maajid Nawaz and others pointed to Tahrir Square as the possible petri dish of this contagion.

In Tickling Giants, the protestors are all right-thinking idealists, engaged in a communal effort as wholesome as an Amish barn-raising. Women are prominent as onscreen spokespersons.

Meryl Streep learned a painful lesson about falling out of favor with her liberal admirers in Hollywood last year: the left eats its own.

She paid dearly for playing the dumb card when confronted about her silence on routinely collaborating with the worst serial sexual predator among the titans in Hollywood, Harvey Weinstein. “One thing can be clarified,” Ms. Streep assured her fellow thespians who were launching the “#MeToo” campaign calling out sexual predators on social media. “Not everyone knew,” she asserts. “I did not know about his having meetings in his hotel room, his bathroom, or other inappropriate coercive acts.”

Living in a bubble does have its disadvantages for the three-time Oscar-winner. Ms. Streep’s sanitary use of the words “inappropriate coercive acts” falls hopelessly short of touching on the outrage experienced by the legions of women who suffered blatant sexual assault or violent rape by the now world-famous serial abuser.

Unfortunately, Streep kept going off script, digging herself into a deeper hole as she attempted to explain herself to her colleagues. She referred to the dozens of sexual misconduct allegations against Weinstein as an “example of disrespect” to her fellow actors during a women’s conference in Boston. “No Meryl, it’s a [f——] crime,” wrote Rose McGowan, the actress who heads the “#MeToo” campaign on social media. “You are such a lie,” McGowan added, referencing the elder thespian’s claim of ignorance of Weinstein’s 30-year sexual rampage stretching across several states in the U.S., encompassing at least two countries in Europe, and impacting the lives of dozens of victims and possibly hundreds of bystanders.

The full weight of the liberal left came down to bear on Streep at the end of 2017. Humiliation is a major form of protest in the progressive community, oftentimes mercilessly targeting victims deemed un-P.C. In this case, Streep wasn’t mocked with a “pussy hat” campaign, but her likeness appeared on hundreds of posters with two words symbolically covering up her eyesight, “She Knew,” which were posted throughout the Los Angeles area (i.e., the center of Tinseltown). Repackaging the truth in attacking President Trump never hurt Streep’s professional standing, but now she’s being held accountable for her words by liberals who are diverting from the same groupthink narrative.

When Upstairs, Downstairs became an international hit, British television producers assumed that they could quickly come up with another dramatized exposé of country-house life. Wrong again. It took the BBC—in a joint-production venture with Netflix—four decades to create Downton Abbey, a series in which the butler and the cook were every bit as engaging as Lord and Lady Downton.

Now the Brits have another smash—but this one marks a significant departure from its predecessors. In The Crown, what happens below stairs stays below stairs. This drama is all about the current Queen Elizabeth, from the time of her childhood, through initiation into the roiled world of royal worldlings, to her difficult marriage, to her troubled middle age and ultimately, after she learns to connect with the British public, her serene senior years.

In Parts I and II, Elizabeth (deftly played by Claire Foy) watches her odious, Nazi-sympathizing uncle, King Edward VIII (Alex Jennings, in a tour de force performance), abdicate the throne to wed a commoner. Then she witnesses her stuttering, publicity-shy father (Jared Harris) take over (The King’s Speech built an epic drama on these shortcomings). Alas, before his elder daughter is ready to wear the crown, King George VI dies of lung cancer.

The new queen is so innocent that the staff, out of earshot, refer to her as Shirley Temple. The naivete is not to last. Elizabeth’s new husband Prince Philip (Matt Smith) assumes the responsibility of her sexual education. But the political and social schooling is led by Winston Churchill (John Lithgow), the lion at sunset. The prime minister is determined that this young lady absorb the basics of regal propriety, diplomatic lingo, and British back-bench maneuvering. She starts out abysmally ignorant of all three.

Sir Winston is a shrewd tutor, but he is also infirm. As Elizabeth grows, she learns to lean on her courtiers. Soon she finds a way to show nothing in her face, to express little in her speeches, and to exert control while seeming to be above the considerations of politics and the Great Game of a shrinking empire. But this mastery of form demands a mask of remoteness lacking human sympathy. Elizabeth alienates Prince Philip, turning him into a distant consort who would rather make merry than make tours. She refuses to allow her sister, Princess Margaret (Vanessa Kirby) to wed the man she loves because RAF hero Peter Townsend (Ben Miles) is divorced and therefore anathema to the Church of England, which Elizabeth nominally heads. Of greater significance, she takes an unseen hand in national policy, chews out the occasional prime minister, and makes sure to kick the ailing Anthony Eden (Jeremy Northam) when he’s down.

The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk.

The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost the confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.

Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.

About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.

Churchill’s greatest problem was not just saving the British army but confronting the reality that, with the German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.

The Soviet Union had all but joined Hitler’s Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August 1939.

The United States was determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in Darkest Hour by Churchill’s sad phone call with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while in fact he can do nothing.

Within days of Churchill’s taking office, all of what is now the European Union either would be in Hitler’s hands or could be considered pro-Nazi “neutral.”

Darkest Hour gets its title from the understandable depression that had spread throughout the British government. Members of Churchill’s new war cabinet wanted to sue for peace. Chamberlain and senior conservative politician Edward Wood both considered Churchill unhinged for believing Britain could survive.

Both appeasers dreamed that thuggish Italian dictator Benito Mussolini might be persuaded to beg Hitler to call off his planned invasion of Great Britain. They dreamed Mussolini could save a shred of English dignity through an arranged British surrender.

I always yearned to find an appropriate occasion to use the phrase “luxe et volupte” and after seeing The Phantom Thread, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, I have found it. From the scene of a chiseled, sleek Daniel Day Lewis performing his morning ablutions and carefully dressing himself, to the extraordinary mise en scene of his homes, his staff, his elegant sister, his breakfast menu and finally, his exquisite couture, we are in a world of voluptuous beauty As Reynolds Woodcock, the celebrated go-to dress designer for royalty and the super-rich, Lewis’ movements are disciplined and exact His female staff are all attired in white coats and their workspace is as sanitized as a hospital, their stitching as precise as a surgeon’s. Plot develops when Woodcock goes to his country house, stopping to eat and finding himself engaged by the young waitress serving him. Alma is fresh-faced and reticent, a far cry from the world of high fashion, but strangely, he is entranced by her and in short order, invites her to live in his house and work as his model and muse.

Alma is a cipher about whom we know very little but we see her rise to his expectations and do her best to adjust to his bi-polar moods and demands. He is an artist – a man accustomed to having everyone around him yield to his every whim – a narcissist who can be mean-spirited and abusive. He is also handsome, dashing, creative, reckless in his driving but exacting in his beautiful designs and their execution. Alma watches quietly in a mostly compliant manner until we see a sudden change in her when she introduces herself to the Belgian princess who has come for a wedding dress. She says simply “My name is Alma – I live here” and we understand that she has begun to assert herself and feel the legitimacy of her own needs and desires. The more she demands recognition, the more resistance she gets from Woodcock who has always been the sole ruler of his roost.

At one point, after an argument, Woodcock falls ill and Alma takes care of him gently but with great authority. She counters the will of his sister and eventually succeeds in nursing him back to health, reversing their roles of dependency in a very significant way To say more about the plot would be a spoiler but this is a movie that should be seen for the dynamic performances by its three stars, its psychological insights, its understanding of the parameters of art and emotion, its beautiful cinematography and enveloping score blending classical and popular music of the 50’s to match the romanticism of the subject. The phantom thread refers to a secrret message sewn into the lining of each dress, much as the innermost secrets of people’s needs and illusions are not easily seen or deciphered yet remain intrinsic to their core. How eccentrically these get balanced between two very unusual people is the fulcrum for this stunning and momentous film. Best one of 2017

If the download statistics don’t lie, many Quadrant readers will be among those occupying at least part of the Christmas/New Year break with binge streamings of the hit Netflix series professing to recount Queen Elizabeth’s life, times and reign. And it does, too, sort of.

Over Christmastide, the phenomenon that is Netflix’s The Crown will divert many a family – monarchist and republican alike – ten episodes of our Sovereign’s life from 1956 to 1963. In Series One (1947 – 1955), the quality of the script, the brilliance of the actors, the perfection of the period, the exquisiteness of the sets, the acuity of the cameramen, combined to produce a tour de force. The effect was to make us think we were really there as the Princesses were told that their beloved Papa had become George VI; as the dashing Duke of Edinburgh saved his Princess Bride from a rogue elephant in Kenya (untrue); as Queen Mary received her errant, eldest son with such froideur (surely true); as Philip was told his children would be Windsors (undeniable). It all seemed so authentic that we now feel we KNOW what happened behind those Palace walls.

The apparent authenticity of The Crown is so delicious. It is also so insidious. We shall never really know. We have to remember this is in fact a magnificent imperial soap. In his review of the series, The Crown: Truth & Fiction (Zuleika, 50pp), the historian Hugo Vickers, while welcoming its great job in reminding a younger generation that the Queen and Prince Philip were once young themselves, he warns that ‘Fiction should help us understand the truth, not pervert it.’ As Peter Morgan, creator of the series, told The Australian, ‘I’ve done my best to stick to the facts as I have them. I think there’s room to creatively imagine, based on information we have about Her (The Queen).’ Tellingly, he went on to say, when asked if The Queen had seen Series One, ‘I have no idea and I don’t want to know…. I live in hope that she hasn’t seen it, never watches it and doesn’t give it the slightest thought.’

I was interested to learn in The Times obit of Lady Charteris, (the widow of Martin Charteris, Private Secretary to Elizabeth as Princess and Queen), who died, aged 97, in March this year, ‘She was fascinated by Series One of The Crown on Netflix, in which she was portrayed by Jo Herbert, with the actor Harry Hadden-Paton playing her husband. She liked to watch it with the Duchess of Grafton — the mistress of the robes and an old friend.’ To have been there, a fly on the wall as they watched, to see them laugh and scoff; nod and sigh.

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features filmmaker Michael Hansen, whose new film is Killing Europe.

Michael discusses his new film and its focus on Europe’s Suicide in the Face of Islam. He also shares the Left’s totalitarian effort to drown his film.

Don’t miss it! http://jamieglazov.com/2017/12/18/glazov-gang-killing-europe/

And make sure to watch Dr. Charles Jacobs discuss Saudi Curriculum in American High Schools, where he unveils the meaning of “Jihad” in Newton:

The seventh season of Showtime’s Homeland series had to reinvent itself after Donald Trump was elected president, which makes the escapist CIA world they created even more bizarre.

The series has always had a problem reconciling the decidedly liberal political beliefs of its main characters with the very unliberal machinations of the CIA. This tension has always been one of the selling points of the show – especially in the early years when the series’s hero, Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis), held by al-Qaeda as a prisoner for years, turned out to be a sleeper agents sent by the terrorists, until he wasn’t. The complex relationship between bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) and Brody – and Brody’s subsequent heroism in Iran – was fascinating to watch.

Since then, the series has had a lot less success in remaining coherent. Nevertheless, as escapist entertainment, it is extremely well done, with fine acting, good writing, and interesting plots.

Last season, the show featured a very liberal female president who was reluctant to believe the CIA assessment of the Iranian nuclear program. As it turns out, her suspicions were well founded. A rogue faction of the CIA working with a rogue faction of Mossad tried to cook the books on Iranian intelligence in order to get the Hillary stand-in to attack Iran. The plan failed because Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin), who supported the idea of bombing Iran, kept digging to unmask the conspiracy.

But the election of Trump presented a dilemma for the show. To solve the problem of turning a liberal president into a tyrant, the writers ended the season last year with an assassination attempt that drove her semi-mad.

Entertainment:

The upcoming season of the espionage thriller has a rogue Mathison trying to take down criminals in the government under the tyrannical administration of President Keene (Elizabeth Marvel), who has arrested 200 members of the intelligence community after barely surviving an assassination plot in the season 6 finale.

Also targeting Keene: The show’s Alex Jones-like conspiracy character Brett O’Keefe (Jake Weber) who was first introduced last season. “The founding fathers foresaw the dark day when we would face a president like her,” warns O’Keefe as he aims a pistol at a poster of the president’s face. “Anyone who takes a stand for what they believe, people are gonna say they’re crazy. They’ve been calling me that for years.”

Call it a case of unfortunate timing, but there are three scenes of Churchill, as played by Gary Oldman, behaving in a way that we are now calling sexual harassment of an employee. The first shows his young, pretty secretary (Lily James) ushered into his bedroom where he dictates to her from his bed; upon finishing, he throws back the covers and tosses his bare legs up in the air as he propels himself out – the camera moves to her shocked reaction. The second has him dictating to her in what looks like a dressing room – we see his bare legs exiting the bathroom as he announces that he is coming out of his shower in a state of nature – she hurries away. The third has him taking a seat next to her at her desk and staring at her intensely; after a few moments she squirms uncomfortably and asks if anything is wrong – he states that he is just looking at her.

There have been three Churchills released within a few months of each other – John Lithgow in The Crown, Brian Cox in Churchill and now Oldman who has received the most praise. He is the least recognizable, having been outfitted in major prosthetic get-ups and ample padding and he plays the man as louche, drunk and unforgivably cantankerous. Although there may be biographical justification for some of this, it is played so broadly and noisily that we see too little of the calm, controlled statesman and heroic leader whom many consider the outstanding figure of the twentieth century. I can only assume that this is what director Joe Wright had in mind since Oldman has proven to be a talented actor in the past and the one-dimensional portrayal he gives us here may be due to editorial decisions in the cutting room. Both Darkest Hour and Churchill show Winston as an outlier challenging the conventional political and military advice for the evacuation at Dunkirk and the landing in Normandy. Both show his stubborness, his persuasiveness and his ability to summon his talent for oratory to instill enormous courage in his constituents Of the three, only Lithgow achieves the dignity that is missing from the other two characterizations.

Darkest Hour offers the most disturbing portrayal of a man subject to depression, addicted to alcohol and tobacco and temperamentally unable or unwilling to control his outbursts. The film reminds us of his parentage – Winston’s father died of tertiary syphillis and his beautiful mother was undoubtedly “too much loved.” The decibel level of this movie is high, Oldman’s performance is histrionic in the extreme and we leave the theater wondering how to forgive him his excesses when they have filled the screen for more than two hours. Though it’s worth seeing Darkest Hour for its historic content, I prefer the more controlled performance by Brian Cox and urge you to see Churchill to and judge for yourself.

A full year after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, the left is still trying to comprehend – as Hillary Clinton titled her post-mortem book – what happened. How did the matriarch of the Clinton crime syndicate – er, political dynasty, riding the promise of an historic victory as the country’s first female president, lose the White House to a brash, unpolished, shoot-from-the-hip reality TV mogul with no political experience? For that matter, how did the upstart Trump, whom the media and his competitors dismissed early on as an unserious candidate and fraudulent conservative, emerge as the party nominee from a field of seventeen established Republican politicians to challenge Hillary in the first place?

The answer lies in filmmaker Joel Gilbert’s latest documentary, Trump: the Art of the Insult, the title of which is an obvious nod to Trump’s 1987 business advice book, The Art of the Deal. Gilbert’s previous work includes Dreams From My Real Father, which presents the case that Barack Obama’s real father was Communist propagandist Frank Marshall Davis, and There’s No Place Like Utopia, in which Gilbert sets off across the country in search of the Progressive dream.

In his newest work, the filmmaker has compiled an hour and a half of campaign and interview footage of Donald Trump using a verbal flamethrower to lay waste to the media landscape, to the other Republican presidential candidates, and to Democrat opponents Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, on his way to a stunning election victory.

The film includes no commentary or narration – Gilbert simply lets Trump speak for himself. And speak he does. Trump has no politician’s filter, as one interviewer says of him, which freed him to hurl insults relentlessly at targets unaccustomed to dealing with an opponent on that level of discourse. Trump went after competitors who were used to polite, orderly policy debates, and instead of engaging them on that level, pegged them with demeaning nicknames and called them schmuck, idiot, stupid, nuts, nut job, doofus, loser, clueless, incompetent, and lacking enough charisma to intimidate other world leaders. The implication was that Trump was everything they were not – especially a winner.