RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://leavingcamovie.com/

“Leaving California: The Untold Story” is a feature-length documentary that portrays California’s growing challenges, causing an unprecedented mass exodus. Siyamak Khorrami, television host of California Insider and editor of The Epoch Times Southern California, takes viewers on an intimate journey of love, loss, tragedy, and hope as California residents face the prospect of leaving their beloved state. About 700,000 people moved out of the state within the last two years.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/robert-spencer/2023/06/07/the-wokeification-of-movies-begins-as-the-french-connection-goes-under-the-knife-n1701374

Leftist publishers have recently taken it upon themselves to rewrite the works of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and Agatha Christie to bring them into line with contemporary woke sensibilities, and now movies are starting to get the same treatment. The first to go under the knife has been William Friedkin’s gritty 1971 flick The French Connection, in which Gene Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a tough, cynical cop of a kind that wouldn’t last five minutes on any big-city police force today. At one point in the movie (exactly ten minutes and five seconds in, if you want to check), Doyle dares to utter the forbidden word of all forbidden words, the racial epithet that can end careers and destroy lives in the blink of an eye. We see early on in the film that Popeye is not exactly cuddly, or even fully likeable. But if you get a new copy of the movie, you won’t see that at all. The Most Offensive of All Words has been removed without a trace.

Jeff Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere wrote Sunday, “The absence of this sequence can be confirmed by anyone who streams the Criterion Channel’s version of the Oscar-winning feature. The messed-with sequence begins at the 9:42 mark, during the film’s first act. Gene Hackman’s Popeye Doyle enters the brightly-lighted main lobby of the police station. He drops off paperwork, puts on his overcoat, walks over to the main door and flexes his hand. Roy Scheider’s Cloudy follows but at exactly 10:05 a passage that used to be part of the film is no longer there.”

The missing piece is “a bit between Doyle and Cloudy, who’s nursing a wounded arm after being stabbed by a drug dealer. Doyle: ‘You dumb guinea.’ Cloudy: ‘How the hell did I know he had a knife?’ Doyle: ‘Never trust a [ethnic slur].’ Cloudy: ‘He coulda been white.’ Doyle: ‘Never trust anyone.’” To avoid wounding the fragile sensibilities of contemporary wokesters, who are much more likely to be watching some new movie about transgender superheroes defeating MAGA-hat-wearing bigots, this small section doesn’t appear in new copies of the film. Wells notes, “It is presumed that the sequence was removed by Disney, which bought the film’s original owner, 20th Century Fox, on 3.20.19, and not The Criterion Channel.”

The woke censors are evil, but they’re not stupid. They know that few people are going to be upset by the removal of the magic life-destroying word from a fifty-year-old movie. Most people won’t notice at all, except for a handful of movie geeks who love to memorize scenes and repeat lines from them in every conceivable situation. Most who do notice will not dare to say anything about the edit. They don’t want to appear to be or be portrayed as someone who would go around saying That Word or approve of its use.

Indeed, excising the dreaded word to end all words from The French Connection is as canny a move as tearing down Confederate statues. Few will enunciate the slightest dissent; everyone knows that those who object will be targeted and destroyed as racists. That’s a neat way to co-opt opposition, but the issues in play here are much larger than just Popeye Doyle’s use of a bad word. The worst aspect of this whole thing is that the Criterion Channel’s presentation of The French Connection gives no hint that it has been edited and that viewers aren’t seeing the actual film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1972. The door has thus been opened to any and all films being edited to suit the sensibilities of today’s cultural arbiters, without any notice that it is being done at all.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fbi-true-series-but-whats-the-other-half-of-it/

A new series on Roku’s Paramount + Channel titled FBI True caught my attention and aroused my curiosity. It was put together by a retired FBI Agent, Anne Beagan who has founded her own production company, in concert with one Craig Turk. It features real agents talking about real cases, and is hosted by one of two retired agents, either Cindy Coppola or Kristy Kottis. The film footage is real, not reenacted

Two episodes in the Paramount TV series specifically caught my attention, one being the episode titled “Boston Marathon Manhunt;” the other being the “San Bernadino Mass Shooting.”

The location of these interviews is the Arts & Crafts Beer Parlor in downtown Manhattan. The opening introduction for each series goes something like this, in part, “In the FBI we make a lot of headlines. We understand why people want to tell stories about us. But they don’t know the half of it.”

I have watched several episodes and overall, in my opinion, it is a pretty good series. I enjoyed watching some of my retired colleagues talking about cases they worked on.

I would agree with the above quoted introduction narrative that my prior employer is certainly making a lot of headlines these days, of course not to the Bureau’s credit. Many of my active duty colleagues are apparently violating their oaths of office by aiding and abetting the Communist enemy within, having become the enforcement arm of an anti-American political party, here and here. But I digress.

Now, let us explore the real other “half of it” regarding these two TV episodes, probably unknown by many concerning the Marxist/Muslim Brotherhood enemy within.

I attribute my knowledge of Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood to one Phil Haney,  deceased, (and others), a patriot and a founding member of the U. S. Department of Homeland Security,  author of “See Something Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the  Government’s Submission to Jihad,” here.

I interviewed Phil for two days in 2019, prior to his 2020 demise. One can watch and listen to Haney here, and here, as he expounds on the Boston Marathon Jihad attack as well as the Jihadi attack in San Bernadino.

Predictably neither the words Islam or Jihad are mentioned in the respective TV episodes. The closest one comes is when retired Los Angeles Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Stephen Woolery comments that the San Bernadino shooters were “devout.” Devout what?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/05/emnefariousem__the_most_interestingly_subversive_antiwoke_movie_you_havent_seen_or_heard_about_.html

As a fan of horror films whose wife doesn’t share my affection for them, I’m encouraged to watch movies when I travel on business if I ever get a free evening.  Tuesday night was just such a night, and there were options.

First, there was a 7:40 showing of Evil Dead Rise.  I enjoy most things of the Evil Dead franchise, so I figured this would be the option.  But I also noticed there was another intriguing movie playing at this particular Southern California movie theater that I’d never heard about, called Nefarious, at 7:20. 

I checked out the trailer. 

Sean Patrick Flanery (of whom I’m a fan and grew up watching, of Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Suicide Kings, and Boondock Saints fame) plays a death row inmate, found guilty of multiple murders, and who prison officials assume is acting so erratically and manipulatively that he must be seeking a stay of execution by means of insanity.  Specifically, he claims to be a demon possessing the body of the convict.  A psychiatrist, who harbors demons of his own, is tasked with determining the convict’s level of sanity or insanity, putting his life or death squarely in the psychiatrist’s hands.

It looked interesting enough, so I did this silly thing that I often like to do while weighing which movie I should go see and looked at Rotten Tomatoes. 

Evil Dead Rise is at a solid 84% critic rating.  Promising. 

Then I looked at Nefarious on Rotten Tomatoes.  A dismal 33% critic rating…but it somehow maintained a 97% audience rating. 

That piqued my interest.  What could possibly be going on with this movie that almost every non-critic who decided to weigh in on it says it’s great, but two thirds of critics hate it?

In my dotage  I confess that I often binge on crime series and movies on the tube. To my great amusement, I just noted that streaming movies come with trigger warnings:

The content may have, we are informed- ‘foul language, violence, sexual content, and smoking.”

Yikes! Explicit smoking????!!!!!

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.