Irena's Vow 2023 Film Review

 

Irena's Vow

A new film dramatizes the life of an almost unbelievable heroine

Irena's Vow is a 2023 film dramatizing the World War II heroism of a young Polish nursing student, Irena Gut. Irena's Vow is a two-hour, color film. It was shot in Poland. The film is in English. It received a limited US release in April, 2024. Irena's Vow has an 86% professional reviewer rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 93% fan reviewer rating. Veteran reviewer Rex Reed calls Irena's Vow "One of the most astounding holocaust stories." He says, "It’s true, if fantastic." The film is "anchored by the powerful, heartfelt performance of Sophie Nelisse as an innocent girl whose integrity and resolve turns her into a woman of maturity and strength." Roman Haller, a Holocaust survivor, says, "It is a very great film. I expected a good film, but it is even more than I expected. … I saw my mother. I saw my father. I saw Irena … She was like a mother to me … I want to tell you there were people like that."

Dr. Glenn R. Schiraldi wrote the 2007 book, World War II Survivors: Lessons in Resilience. He devoted a chapter to Irena Gut Opdyke. She was, he writes, "a diminutive, elegant woman with warm, radiant blue eyes and delicate features. She is one of the kindest, most loving women I have encountered. She reminds one of Mother Teresa. As she spoke, I often found myself choking back tears."

Dan Gordon is a veteran screenwriter and also a former captain in the Israeli Defense Forces. Gordon says, "About 25 years ago, I was driving to my home in Los Angeles and listening to the radio. I heard a woman, Irene Gut Opdyke, telling her story. When I got home, I sat in the car in the driveway for another hour and a half, because I couldn’t stop listening." He worked for years to get the film made.

Director Louise Archambault is a French Canadian. When she first viewed the script, she says, her reaction was "Wow. What an amazing woman. If that script had been fiction, I would have refused it" because no one would believe it. But, "I fell in love with that character." Irena's story is "relevant. We want to tell that story today in 2024." Even though many films have been made about WW II, we haven't seen, Archambault says, WW II from the eyes of a young Polish Catholic girl forced by Nazis to work for them. Approximately 1.5 million Poles were forced to work for Nazi Germany, often under slave labor conditions and at the cost of their health and their lives.

Because Archambault had a relatively meager budget of five million dollars and only twenty-nine days for shooting, she developed an intimate, rather than epic style. Irena's Vow isn't Saving Private Ryan; the deaths we see are of individuals; they are murdered in a sickeningly intimate way. Yes, there is horror in the story, but there is also genuine "love, hope, and light." Archambault benefited from filming Polish actors, with a Polish crew, in Poland. They all know the history, she said; their grandparents lived it. They brought their personal experiences to the film. Also, "I put my energy on character, on human behavior."

Events in Poland contributed to the set's atmosphere. Refugees from Ukraine were arriving with their belongings in their hands and on their backs. "Every day we were reminded that war was going on next door." There was a "big van" with "big guys" on the set necessary for insurance purposes. "If shooting starts here" – shooting with bullets not with cameras – "we need to get everyone out of here."

Given how good this movie is, and how remarkable Irena's story is, one has to wonder why the film has received so little publicity and such a limited release. I have my suspicions as to what cultural trends may have sidelined Irena's Vow. More on that, below.

On Seeing Gone with the Wind in a theater for the fifth time

 

On Watching Gone with the Wind in a Theater for the Fifth Time

 

Gone with the Wind is universal art misunderstood by elite book burners

 

On April 7, I attended an eighty-fifth anniversary theatrical showing of Gone with the Wind. In recent weeks, I've been through an earthquake, seen a solar eclipse, and spent hours in church for Easter. Even so, watching GWTW for the fifth time in a theater was a religious experience.

 

Manohla Dargis, the New York Times chief film critic, interrupts her April 12 review of a new movie to restate her righteous indignation against an unrelated film. Gone with the Wind, she insists, is a "monument to white supremacy and the myth of the Southern Lost Cause."

 

Yes, both the book and the film are racist. No, GWTW's racism is not the works' alpha and omega. And, no, GWTW is not the only flawed work of art. Have you heard any rap lyrics lately? Rather, GWTW addresses universal themes. Audiences from diverse ethnicities and social classes recognize these themes and even just the film's soundtrack reduces listeners to tears. GWTW brings the power of myth to a universal experience: growing up, leaving childhood innocence, and entering a world that isn't invested in your survival, and that can engineer relentless freight trains full of misery and steer them right at you. It's about who survives the collision, how, and why, and at what cost. "Hardships make or break people," as Rhett Butler says.

"One Way Back" by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Book Review

 

"One Way Back" is a good book. It's not just a "celebrity memoir." Even if author Dr. Christine Blasey Ford were not famous, this book would be worth reading. It's well-written and like any good book it causes the reader to feel, to think, and to understand the human race a bit better. "One Way Back" is also brief and an easy read. The sentences are short and the vocabulary is basic.
 
"One Way Back" is no less beautiful for its ease of reading. Ford uses surfing as her overarching metaphor. Surfing is dangerous but it is also, for the surfer, like life itself. Yes, it entails risk, but in undertaking that risk the surfer enhances the experience of being alive. The book's title, "One Way Back," is a reference to surfing. The surfer paddles out into the ocean, and must ride the wave the ocean presents. There's only one way back to shore – riding the wave that life hands you.

 

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford was not famous before summer, 2018. US President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the SCOTUS. Ford contacted her elected officials to report that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her at an informal high school gathering when she was 15 and he was 17. Ford passed a lie detector test administered by a former FBI agent. Ford was asked to testify before the Senate, and she did. In initial reactions, even FOX news, and, indeed, even Donald Trump himself assessed Ford as credible.

 

Later, the White House devised a strategy whereby Brett Kavanaugh would perform an opera similar to the one presented by the similarly accused Clarence Thomas. Thomas claimed he was a victim of a "high tech lynching." Kavanaugh said, "This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election … revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups." What Kavanaugh said here was not true. Kavanaugh spoke other untruths, see, for example, his untrue comments about "boof," about "Devil's Triangle," and about how much he drank and what parties he attended. He spoke these untruths while under oath.

 

Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her family have been subjected to murderous harassment ever since. She has had to shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars in security fees. For the past six years, people have been actively threatening to kill her and her children. Even animals are subjected to this rage. Dead animals have been thrown onto her property. Brett Kavanaugh has a lifetime ride on the SCOTUS, a position as close to royalty as America awards.

 

"One Way Back" is a quiet book. Dr. Ford records these events, but quietly. She never adopts the histrionic, fever pitch screech of Kavanaugh in his testimony, revealing temperament so totally unworthy of a judge that Saturday Night Live parodied it in one of their most popular routines.

 

Rather we get an account of a woman who apparently never wanted the spotlight, but who marched – or surfed – into it when she thought doing so was her civic duty.

 

I liked this book, but I didn't feel that I could ever get close to Dr. Ford. She is very unlike me. Her father was a self-made man. He was successful enough that he managed to send his three children to exclusive prep schools and to see them go on to advanced degrees and successful careers.

 

Young Christine didn't have to work. She went to an exclusive prep school and spent her extracurricular hours swimming and diving. It seems that her dad bankrolled her advanced education that included time spent in Hawaii. With that foundation, Dr. Ford became a successful professor and employee at two California universities. She is happily married and her sons followed her into the water and she spent her summers standing by as they received training at the beach.

 

Dr. Ford is frank about how she differs from others. She is a very sensitive person and she sometimes feels shy and out of place with others' values. Reading about her decision to come forward, I felt as if I were reading about Dr. Ford being put through a food processor. So many different people gave her so much different advice. Testify, don't testify, protect yourself above all, do your civic duty above all, align yourself with this or that person … it must have been hell for her. Through it all, she was true to her own sense of civic duty. And for that unhinged, hateful misogynists defame her and encourage really bad people to continue to threaten her life and the life of her children.

 

Ford's misogynist enemies lie about her. Many of those lies have found their way into influential publications. "One Way Back" corrects those lies. Read the book.

 

Finally – Thank you Dr. Ford.

 

 

One Life and Nicky's Family: Two Films Dramatize WW II Rescue of Refugees from Prague

 

One Life and Nicky's Family
Two films depict the rescue of over six hundred children from Nazis

 

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.

The War on Children by Robby and Landon Starbuck: Movie Review

 

The War on Children by Robby and Landon Starbuck
A new documentary takes on too much and offers simplistic solutions

 

The War on Children is a documentary addressing various social trends that damage children. The War on Children premiered on Twitter in February, 2024. War is two hours, twenty minutes long. The War on Children cites the following trends that damage children: child trafficking, trans extremism, online pornography, Marxist domination of public education, greedy corporations, and water pollution. The documentary recommends the following solutions: parents spending more time with their children in outdoor activities, limiting children's internet access, attendance at Christian churches, men reclaiming their masculinity, and voting Republican.

 

War was produced and directed by 36-year-old Robby Starbuck, aka Robert Starbuck Newsome. In 2022, Starbuck ran unsuccessfully as a Republican for a Tennessee congressional seat. Before that, he was, according to his Vimeo bio, a video and film director. Interestingly, that bio states his preferred pronouns as "he/him." The bio says he has worked with the celebrities "Akon, Smashing Pumpkins, Sarah Bareilles, Metric, Megadeth, Snoop Dogg, Machine Gun Kelly & Yellowcard." Starbuck identifies as Cuban-American.

 

War also features Starbuck's wife, Landon Starbuck, and their three children. On her website, Landon Starbuck says, "I'm passionate about faith, family, freedom, truth and justice … I speak, write, make music and advocate to protect all children. I left the music industry as a Billboard charting artist to focus on fighting child trafficking … I started my own non-profit combatting child abuse, exploitation and trafficking in 2021 … All glory goes to God. I love Jesus [and] my family." 

 

I follow movie news but I had heard nothing about The War on Children. I also follow Andrew Gutmann. In 2021, Gutmann received national attention when he published a protest against Woke education at Brearley, a private K-12 school for girls in Manhattan that charges $61,500 in annual tuition. Gutmann's letter is here; a 2024 update is here. Gutmann recommended The War on Children, and Gutmann's recommendation made War a must-see film for me.

 

I watched The War on Children on Twitter, straight through, twice. Though I share many of the filmmaker's concerns, the film did not work for me. Both times, after watching it, I felt agitated, depressed, and powerless. War shares much in common with Matt Walsh's 2022 documentary, What Is a Woman? I review What Is a Woman? here. What Is a Woman? worked for me in ways that The War on Children did not.

Cabrini 2024 Movie Review. Cabrini the film is as beautiful, and as provocative, as Cabrini the woman

 

Cabrini 2024
Cabrini the film is as beautiful, and as provocative, as Cabrini the woman

On Friday, March 8 – "International Women's Day" – I stepped out into sunshine and felt as if I'd just taken a spiritual shower. My soul tingled as cleansing droplets pelted through. I was refreshed and renewed. I was walking on air. I was ready to cope with the challenges that my life in Paterson presents to me, from the garbage in the streets to the noisy car stereos blasting rap. I resolved to be a better person. And, yes, I felt all of those things because I had just seen Cabrini.

Cabrini is a 2024 biopic of the Italian American nun, Sister Frances Xavier Cabrini (1850-1917). In 1946, Cabrini became the first US citizen to be canonized. Cabrini accomplished this in spite of having been dealt an inauspicious hand in life. Her parents were Italian farmers. She was one of the youngest of many brothers and sisters – sources list between ten and thirteen siblings. Only four of her siblings survived beyond adolescence. Worldwide, youngest daughters of large, agricultural families have low status and relatively low survival rates. On top of that, Cabrini was born two months premature. She was afflicted with smallpox, malaria, and tuberculosis, which compromised her lungs for life.

When she was a child, Cabrini made paper boats, outfitted them with violet flowers, and launched them on the water. These were her early, imaginary "missions." She yearned to preach Christ in China. Because of her physical frailty, three orders of nuns refused to accept her. She founded her own order.

A cardinal dismissed her ambitions, reminding her that there had never been an independent order of missionary women.

Cabrini replied, "If the mission of announcing the lord’s Resurrection to his apostles had been entrusted to Mary Magdalene, it would seem a very good thing to confide to other women an evangelizing mission."

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest: Three Excellent New Films

 

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest:
Three great films best seen in a theater

 

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.

 

The Boys in the Boat, The Peasants, and The Zone of Interest are three very different films, but they are all innovative, in different ways. Peasants is so innovative another movie like it may never be made again. Zone rewrote how the Holocaust will be treated in film, and how it will be understood. Boys is rebellious, counter-cultural filmmaking in ways I'll detail below. All three films have much to say about our current politico-cultural landscape. Each addresses community. Each, given their visual and auditory artistry and impact, should be seen in a theater.

Alan Dundes on the Qur'an

Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur'an by Alan Dundes
"The most renowned folklorist of his time" tackles the Qur'an

I'll bet that everyone who knew him has a favorite Alan Dundes story. Here's a couple of mine. To understand both, you have to know that Dundes was larger than life in many ways, including physically. I somehow don't want to apply the adjective "fat" to him, although, yes, he was. Some called him "a tank," others, "a rhino." He was so formal and so formidable that I resort to an old-fashioned word, "portly."

I only ever saw him in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie. And he knew everything about his field. Students would line up in chairs along the back of his office wall. They would approach, timidly, one by one. They would burble about their family's traditional Persian Nawruz celebration, or a Yiddish joke, or a Peruvian children's game, that is, material that they had stored in their mind's attic among their most intimate and cherished memories, and that they thought belonged to them alone, and Dundes would immediately provide the student with numerous citations to scholarly articles addressing the very obscure factoid they thought they'd never fully understand. After their encounter with Dundes, they walked out of his office into an expanded world, a world of meaning and wonder in which they were playing a vital part every time they told that half-remembered joke, every time they played that childhood game. You aren't alone, the scholarship Dundes introduced students to said. There are others who told the same joke, played the same games. There is a meaning to all this; there is a story; it is dense and rich and everlasting.

So, yes, Dundes was big. And he was funny as hell. Hundreds of students registered for his classes, which were held in an auditorium. He was up there on stage making us laugh, and then inviting us to eye-opening, even outrageous interpretations of every day events. He'd weave in something as ordinary as a traffic sign, cite some Freud, tell a joke, and before you knew it your mind was pinging around like an explorer's finger on a globe and you had the sense that life is a wonderful mystery and this guy possessed many of the clues.

One day he introduced a particularly complex lecture. You had to hang on every word to grok the unfolding revelation. When he finished, many of us thought we were in the presence of the smartest guy on a campus with many Nobel Laureates.

At that moment, a young blonde asked a stupid question. Her question suggested to us that she hadn't really been listening to the lecture, and that she didn't care that she was revealing that she hadn't been listening to the lecture. Her question insulted, and deflated, Dundes. Impatient, aware of his own worth Dundes sniffed, "That was a stupid question."

We all gasped. A minute before we had been surfing with him a wave of joyful discovery. Her cluelessness, and his dismissal, crashed us onto a jetty's boulders.

Dundes, dark and massive, paced a few steps; the auditorium was so hushed we could hear the stage floorboards creak beneath him. Dundes wasn't just arrogant. He was also charming. His bonhomie returned. He stopped and turned to the young lady. "I'm sorry," he said to her, in his most tender, grandfatherly aural caress. "I shouldn't have said that. There's no such thing as a stupid question."

We exhaled.

Dundes paced to the edge of the stage. He swung his bulk around dramatically and shouted, "But that came pretty damn close!"

We exploded in laughter.

One of the regrets of my life is that I found it hard to interact with Dundes, and he found it hard to interact with me. I'm blue collar. I swept floors and swabbed toilets before and after his lectures to work my way through Berkeley grad school. His father was a lawyer; mine, a coal miner. He went to Yale, I, as he reminded me with typical bluntness, got my BA at an "undistinguished state school." Dundes told a dumb Polak joke in class. I went to his office and we yelled at each other. I operated on the assumption that he hated me; it was only after I finished that I learned from someone else that he had "pulled strings he didn't know existed" to get me funding. Ironically, we shared a common ancestral homeland: Poland.

My second story took place more than a decade later, in 2005. I had my PhD, had published work that I assessed was as good as the standard Dundes' superb oeuvre had set for me, and, given that we were now thousands of miles apart and communicating via email, I found it easier to talk to him. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might someday ask permission to address him by his first name. I sent him an email asking for prayer for my academic career. He responded in an email that enveloped me in a completely new atmosphere. I no longer felt that I was one of a handful of students lining the back of his office wall, awaiting my brief encounter with the great man. He spoke to me as if I were his equal, even his intimate. He spoke about faith. I was overwhelmed. Suddenly I had to relearn how to interact with him. I devoted quiet time to contemplating how to respond to this new Prof. Dundes. And then a friend phoned me and said that he thought that the New York Times obituary for Alan Dundes had been too short. Dundes had collapsed and died of a heart attack while teaching a class he had once taught me, and so many others. To the last, I never got to say all of what I wanted to say to him, in the way that I yearned to say it.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes. Book Review.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
Coleman Hughes is a charismatic spokesman for good ideas

 

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America was published on February 6, 2024, by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Thesis was established in spring, 2023 in order to publish "urgent idea-driven nonfiction by thought leaders, journalists, and experts with a strong point of view." The book is 235 pages long, inclusive of appendices, notes, and index. The pages are small. The font is not. The book is a quick read.

 

The End of Race Politics has been very positively blurbed by the intellectual celebrities Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, John McWhorter, and Glenn Loury. The average rating of its sixty-four Amazon reviews is 4.8 out of five stars.

 

Author Coleman Hughes was born in 1996. He grew up in the chic suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, home of Stephen Colbert, Christina Ricci, and other celebrities. He graduated from Columbia in 2020 with a degree in philosophy. He has previously worked for the Manhattan Institute and as an editor at its City Journal. Hughes hosts a YouTube channel. He is an atheist, he is handsome, he speaks in a calm and methodical way, and he is black.

 

The End of Race Politics argues against ideas promoted by prominent race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Hughes argues for a colorblind society, the triumph of merit over Affirmative Action, and uplift for black people starting with rigorous charter schools. Hughes harnesses social science research to buttress his points.

 

For decades, I've been reading work that pushes back against leftist approaches to race. Almost twenty-five years ago, I read Hating Whitey by David Horowitz. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. I'm purposely using the "scales fell from my eyes" cliché because my experience was cliched. I was a graduate student at the time, who had spent most of my life on school campuses and in left-wing organizations. Horowitz was speaking truths that were buried, and silent, deep inside me. Truths that I didn't think anyone was allowed to say. Truths that, once I saw them in print, changed me forever.

 

I went on to read authors dubbed "black conservatives." Shelby Steele's fever-pitch outrage encased, like a stiletto in a velvet-lined box, in Steele's elegant prose, rendered him my "most quoted" black conservative author. Jason L. Riley's deployment of key statistics; Larry Elder's in-your-face boldness; John McWhorter's fearless integrity; Glenn Loury's firehose of facts; Thomas Sowell's wide-ranging consideration of middleman minority theory; and Candace Owens' outrageous willingness to state what we all know to be true, that George Floyd was a lousy role model: all these authors and all their gifts produced page-turning works and must-watch videos. I remember individual pages from their work where I encountered something I'd never known before, or was invited to put ideas together in a way that I never had before.

 

The End of Race Politics was not, for this reader, that kind of work. It is, though, the ideal book for a certain kind of reader. Hughes' style is calm and methodical. He's like Mr. Rogers without the personal warmth. Unlike Steele, he does not recount personal stories that engender rage or sorrow. Steele yearned to be a batboy as a youth but was denied because his skin color excluded him from segregated ballparks. Steele describes white academics robbing him of his own accomplishments. "You didn't get to where you are today because of your own efforts," white liberals insisted to Steele. "You are where you are today because of white liberal benefaction." There's none of that kind of engaging and instructive anecdote in Hughes' book. The book is, for the most part, impersonal and dry. Ideas are clearly if unexcitingly expressed in simple, unadorned prose that should be transparent even to high school readers.

The Zone of Interest 2023: Movie Review

 

The Zone of Interest 2023
A Masterpiece from a TV Commercial Director

 

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.

 

I recommend Zone to every thinking adult. I say "thinking" because a subset of viewers are not getting this movie. There are some negative fan reviews online. These say that the film is "boring." "Nothing happens," they complain. "There is no plot." Bless their hearts.

 

Thinking adults are capable of observing. "To observe" implies an increase in cognitive activity from "to watch." If you know how to observe, you will get Zone.

 

Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, winner of four Academy Awards, said, that Zone is "probably the most important film of this century, both from the standpoint of his cinematic approach and the complexity of its theme." And if you are thinking, "Oh, this movie sounds too artsy-fartsy. I like more direct fare," don't let that stop you. Glazer got his start in that most democratic of forms, the TV commercial, where he depicted drinking a Guiness beer as tantamount to being a white stallion emerging from ocean surf. Glazer knows how to create images that penetrate to your lizard brain. He wields that magic here, not to sell beer, but to bring you closer to yourself, your own lowest fears and highest prayers.

 

In the article, below, I will summarize the plot, and then discuss the filmmaker, his approach, and the history he addresses. 

Freud's Last Session: A new film misses the real Freud, the real Lewis, the real Atheism, and the real Christianity

 

Freud's Last Session
A new film misses the real Freud, the real Lewis, the real Atheism, and the real Christianity

 

Freud's Last Session was released on December 22, 2023, by Sony Pictures Classics. The two-hour film depicts a fictional 1939 debate between an 83-year-old Sigmund Freud and a 40-year-old C. S. Lewis, the Oxford literature "don," or university teacher, who would go on to write the bestselling children's book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Sir Anthony Hopkins stars as Freud. Matthew Goode plays Lewis.

 

Freud's Last Session is not a bad film, but it's not a particularly good one, either. And the film doesn't accurately represent either Freud's atheism or Lewis' faith. The film depicts Freud as an intellectual giant who positions science against faith. Lewis, in contrast, is reduced to sputtering in the face of the great man. In real life, as opposed to reel life, Freud's atheism rested, not on science, but on his own arrogance and ethnocentric bigotry. In this, Freud is a perfect, if anachronistic, exemplar of today's New Atheists.

Empire of God How the Byzantines Saved Civilization by Robert Spencer Book Review

 

 

Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization
Robert Spencer invites the reader to a fascinating, forgotten world

Empire of God was published by Bombardier Books in November, 2023. The book is 400 pages and includes twenty-one pages of black-and-white illustrations. There are extensive footnotes but unfortunately no index.

Spencer is fully deserving of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Those who tell the truth about Islam risk their lives. Witness the fates of Theo Van Gogh, Salman Rushdie, Samuel Paty, Molly Norris, Hitoshi Igarashi, and a former teacher at Batley Grammar School. We are not allowed to know this teacher's name. Muslims forced him to run for his life and disappear. His erasure, we shall learn, has happened not just to individuals, but to entire civilizations.

Even Pope Benedict XVI felt it necessary to back-pedal after, in a university lecture, merely quoting Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos. In 1391 this emperor observed, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." After the papal lecture, Muslims attacked churches in Israel, Gaza, and Iraq. In Somalia, Muslims murdered Sister Leonella Sgorbati, who worked at a children's hospital. In Iraq, they beheaded Father Ameer Iskander, a priest.

In spite of Islam's suppression of free speech, free inquiry, and the human conscience, Spencer goes where others dare not go. If I were queen, I would offer a tax benefit to any citizen who mastered three essential Spencer books: The Critical Qur'an, The History of Jihad, and Did Muhammad Exist? I'm not queen, but everyone – Muslims most of all – should read these books.

Nowadays, unsupported claims of "genocide" are tossed around as propaganda tools and exchange goods. Empire of God, draws attention to an actual biological and cultural genocide: the religiously-mandated Islamic erasure of the Byzantine Empire, its faith, its language, its awe-inspiring monuments, and its people.

Spencer was baptized as a Melkite Greek Catholic. "Melkite Greek Catholics," he explains, "are an Eastern church very similar to the orthodox churches but in communion with Rome …  my family is from what is now Turkey … My grandparents shortly after World War I were offered the choice of conversion to Islam or exile from the land where they had lived for many hundreds of years … they came to the United States … Their experiences involved some violence and some killings of some of the family members … [But] they spoke in a uniformly positive fashion about life over there and made me become quite fascinated with it such that I took the first opportunity I could when I went to college to read the Koran and to begin studying Islamic theology and history."

Is God Real? By Lee Strobel. Book Review.

 Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life by Lee Strobel

A bestselling author's new book offers a tantalizing taste of reasonable support for belief in the divine.

Is God Real? Exploring the Ultimate Question of Life was published by Zondervan in October, 2023. The book has 256 pages, inclusive of twenty-seven pages of notes, fourteen pages of study questions, and an eight-page bibliography. Author Lee Strobel holds a BA from the University of Missouri and a Master of Studies in Law from Yale. Strobel was an investigative journalist for fourteen years. He won a public service award for his coverage of the Ford Pinto crash trial.

About forty years ago, Strobel's life dramatically changed direction. His wife converted to Christianity. Strobel was an atheist and he did not approve of his wife's new path. He determined to use his investigative skills to prove Christianity wrong. Instead, he discovered that there is evidence to support Christianity. At age 29 he converted, left journalism, and became an apologetics author. Several of Strobel's forty-plus books are best-sellers. In total, his publications have sold fourteen million copies.

It's easy to see why Strobel's books sell so well. His writing is smooth and easy to read. Though Strobel's work could be understood by the average reader, he tackles life's big questions. In a typical Strobel book, he provides a brief sketch of his own reasons for wanting to explore a given spiritual quandary. He then travels to a university campus to present his confusion and curiosity to a world-class expert. Strobel interrogates these men who have devoted their lives to the material he is researching. Strobel, ever the investigative journalist, asks the kind of questions we would ask if we were in those elite settings. Strobel records these conversations in question-and-answer format.

In books like The Case for Christ, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Faith, and The Case for Heaven, Strobel includes extensive bibliographies that direct the reader to further resources. For example, in Is God Real? Strobel's bibliography directs the reader not just to popular publications of Christian presses like Zondervan, but also to hefty tomes published by scholarly and secular houses like Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Cornell University Press, Michigan State University Press, and HarperOne.

Anyone But You 2023 Movie Review

"Anyone but You" has gotten bad reviews. I hesitated to see it, but see it I did, and I'm glad I did. I loved it. I laughed out loud throughout the film. I was touched by the central relationship. I enjoyed the Australian scenery and the light and breezy tone of the film. The leads are gorgeous and they scamper about in minimal, or no, clothing.
 
Even so, there's very little sex and you could watch this movie with a mother or a daughter. Glen Powell radiates bemused charm. Subtle quotes and a few comic bits scattered throughout the film allude to Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing."
 

The whole cast seems to be having a good time. Dermot Mulroney, as the father of the bride, is very funny in his intense commitment. GaTa and Bryan Brown are adorable as heavy handed and all too obvious plotters.

 

"Anyone but You" begins with a very believable dilemma. Bea (Sydney Sweeney) needs to use a bathroom in a coffee shop. Ben (Glen Powell) rescues her by pretending that they are together, so she can occupy his place at the front of the line, and gain quick access to the bathroom key. They click and spend the night together, but it's purely platonic. A misunderstanding ensues, and they end up hating each other. They are invited to a destination wedding in Australia, and the other guests, just like in "Much Ado about Nothing," conspire to get them together.

 

I cared about their relationship from that opening scene. I laughed at the physical comedy and the hijinks. I was touched by their easily bruised egos and fear of intimacy. There's a highly unlikely scene where they fall into water and are rescued, and Bea soothes Ben by singing a song she knows he likes. Bea's tender care for Ben touched me.

 

Romantic comedy / travelogue films like this are not supposed to be realistic except in the broadest sense. We all fear intimacy when we sense that we are vulnerable to someone who is not as taken with us as we are with them. We all have to feel our way and take risks to find the right person.

 

Is the movie realistic in that we have perfect bodies like this movie's stars? Or live in super slick apartments and do morning ab crunches on spotless Australian beaches? No. That part is pure escapist entertainment, and I loved it.

 

What could have been better? Ben is a great guy, and the plot gives Bea ample reasons to fall in love with him. Bea is a bit more complicated. She comes across, in Sydney Sweeney's performance, as depressed and lost. Sweeney, as Bea, doesn't smile much and she doesn't have a north star. She doesn't know what she wants to do with her life. If these two get together, this viewer worried that Ben would have to devote his life to cheering Bea up.

 

Bea's mother was a meddling PITA and I wished the  movie had delivered a pie in her face, or something. Claudia and Halley, the couple whose destination wedding Bea and Ben attend, are undeveloped and uninteresting. The movie's ending is forced and overdone.

 

Maybe this film deserves more of a seven out of ten stars than eight out of ten stars, but it was just what I needed on a dark winter's day, so I'm giving it eight, and also to make up for the totally mean-spirted negative reviews from Grinches who can't appreciate the light hearted fun, charm, and physical beauty "Anyone but You" serves up in ample supply.

American Fiction 2023 Movie Review

 

American Fiction 2023
 
A new film indicts white powerbrokers' exploitation of black literature

 

American Fiction is a comedy-drama film. It premiered in September, 2023, at the Toronto International Film Festival where it won the People's Choice Award. American Fiction opened wide on December 22, 2023. It stars Jeffrey Wright, Tracee Ellis Ross, Issa Rae, Sterling K. Brown, and Leslie Uggams. Wright is Thelonious "Monk" Ellison, a novelist and college professor; the other characters are his family and colleagues.

 

American Fiction is directed by Cord Jefferson. Jefferson is a former journalist. He moved on to writing for TV, including for The Good Place. He is the recipient of an Emmy for writing, and an NAACP Image Award. American Fiction is his directorial debut. Cord Jefferson also wrote the screenplay for American Fiction.

 

Professor Thelonious "Monk" Ellison's novels are literary works that aspire to universal themes – that is, Monk intends his books to be appreciated by any reader, of any ethnicity. Monk reworks ancient Greek mythology into modern tales. Monk's novels are not selling well, so he pens what he thinks the market wants from a black author, that is a book titled My Pafology, a fake memoir that depicts the criminal career of Stagg R. Leigh, a killer and fugitive from justice. Comically stupid and venal white publishers, literary judges, and filmmakers embrace My Pafology. This is because, as one black character says, "White people think they want the truth, but they don't. They just want to feel absolved."

 

Paula Baderman (Miriam Shor), a shallow, flaky, but shrewdly acquisitive white publishing executive at a prestigious publishing house, offers Monk a $700,000 advance for My Pafology. Her colleague, John Bosco (Michael Cyril Creighton), also white, is a stereotypical effeminate gay man. He quivers with childish delight over My Pafology.

 

White judges determining the next winner of a prestigious literary award tap My Pafology. White author Jon Daniel Sigmarsen (Bates Wilder) is a rough-hewn, blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth type and he appreciates the "realness" of My Pafology. Wiley (Adam Brody), a young white filmmaker, is busy with his latest project, Plantation Annihilation. In this film, a white couple (the male will be played by Ryan Reynolds) moves to a Southern Plantation, where they are murdered by the vengeful ghosts of slaves. Wiley meets with Monk. He embraces Monk – whom he believes to be the criminal Stagg R. Leigh – in a mock black-hoodlum-style hug. Wiley salivates over what he imagines to be the details of Monk's criminal career. Wiley assumes that Monk is on the run for committing a murder. An ambulance stops outside the restaurant where they are meeting and Monk, worried about the health of a family member, runs out of the restaurant. Wiley is delighted, because he assumes that Stagg R. Leigh, the hoodlum on the run, left the restaurant because he heard what he thought was a police siren. My Pafology's success proves that white powerbrokers in publishing and entertainment are all racists who oppress black people by choosing to promote novels and films that depict black people as urban criminals who speak non-Standard English and have non-traditional names.

 

American Fiction is based on Erasure, a 2001 novel by Percival Everett. Everett is an award-winning writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. Like Monk, the main character of American Fiction, Everett has reworked ancient Greek myths into his novels. Everett's novels focus on race. For example, I Am Not Sidney Poitier depicts the race-related misfortunes of a character who is literally named "Not Sidney Poitier."

 

Prof. Everett has accumulated some interesting online reviews on his teaching from his former students including the following. "We did not have any assignments other than a journal which was turned in at the end of the year. Every class consisted of him saying hello and then turning on a western movie … ordered pizza for us for quite a few times during class … Take this class if you want an easy A (very close to zero responsibilities all semester.) Really, he wants to be friends with you …  He took all of us to brunch once instead of having class. I mean, movies during class, no homework, no paper, no exams."

 

American Fiction has received rhapsodic reviews from professional reviewers and fans alike. On January 1, 2024, American Fiction has a 92% professional reviewer score and a 96% audience score at Rotten Tomatoes. Salon's D. Watkins writes, "This brilliant film not only destroys the single Black narrative, it obliterates it – and puts pressure on every single film dealing with race that will come after." Jonathan W. Gray at The New Republic says "An unflinching and seriously funny examination of how the alchemy of race operates throughout the USA's culture industry." Peter Travers at ABC News insists, "Cord Jefferson’s slashingly funny satire of Black literary stereotyping is one of the best and boldest American comedies in years with a dynamite performance by an Oscar-ready Jeffrey Wright. You won't look at race on screen in the same way again." The Washington Post's Ann Hornaday named American Fiction the year's best film.

 

Fan reviews at the Internet Movie Database are similarly enthusiastic, but even fans who award American Fiction high scores introduce a note of disappointment. One review that awards the film 8 out of 10 stars says, "American Fiction has a great premise … But it somehow didn't completely land for me … it was the domestic drama part of the film that didn't completely work for me. The movie spends a lot of time on all the ways that Jeffrey Wright feels overwhelmed by his life's responsibilities, and it sags in some of these parts, and makes the movie feel a little bit like a slog. And I don't know that I ever completely believed the character played by Sterling K. Brown."

 

I saw the trailer for American Fiction about a month ago and I immediately knew I had to see the film. In the trailer, Jeffrey Wright, in suit and tie, enters an elegant meeting room. Onstage the beautiful Issa Rae, playing novelist Sintara Golden, is being interviewed by a worshipful white woman. The white interviewer asks Golden how she came to write her bestseller, We's Lives In Da Ghetto. Golden replies in perfect Standard English. "Too few books were about my people. Where are our stories? Where's our representation?" As Golden speaks, audience members nod heavily. The worshipful white interviewer begs, "Would you give us the pleasure of reading an excerpt?"

 

Golden reads, switching from Standard English to Ebonics. "'Yo, Sheronda. Girl you be pregnant again?' 'If I is, Ray Ray is gonna be a real father this time.'"

 

The awe-struck audience rises for a standing ovation.

 

Given this trailer, I thought that American Fiction would be a fearless satire of the marketing of urban underclass lifestyles and values. I thought it would be funny. I thought it would take risks. I thought it would be a challenge for both black and white audiences to watch. I thought it would be something really new. I was disappointed on all counts. American Fiction is one of those movies about which one can truly say that if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the best parts of the movie. Had I not intended to write a review, I would have walked out of American Fiction. American Fiction is, to this viewer, inept, cowardly, and shallow. It committed the cardinal sin of any artwork. It bored me.