Category Archives: Film

To Sir Sidney With Love: Lessons For The Educational Idiocracy

Art, Britain, Celebrity, Education, Film, Human Accomplishment, Kids, Relationships

British, and so subtle,  To Sir, With Love (1967) was my favorite role played by Sidney Poitier, RIP. And what an object lesson it is for America’s disgraceful unionized teachers in the age of COVID.

Mr. Mark Thackeray, “an out-of-work engineer who turns to teaching in London’s tough East End,” loved his students, yet he disciplined them; taught them self-respect, a love of learning, a work ethic and a proportional sense of fun, not the degenerate sense of abandon that now infuses our progressive schools.

“Sir’s” lesson: Never give up on The Kids, but knock ’em into shape.

Teacher was to be addressed as “Sir” because the use of honorifics and proper names, not invented pronouns, is important in an ordered society. It denotes not only a healthy hierarchy and a respect for a figure of authority, but for each other. Thus Pegg is not “Babs” (we have to wonder what such a traditional educator would say of naming  a child North, or Londyn, a black name).

After transforming one class into responsible, self-respecting adults ready to face life; Thackeray is offered an engineering job—something better than working with London’s tough, truant East End kids. But following their poignant farewell to him; he is overwhelmed with love for the kids and a sense of his real vocation. He shreds the promotion, realizing the next intake needs him just as much as the first. He has found his calling.

Once there were teachers.

Lulu at her best:

Not YouToo, Sharon Stone

Celebrity, Feminism, Film, Gender, Hollywood, Human Accomplishment

You can’t fake the neck, which usually shows a woman’s age. Sharon Stone is still gorgeous.

She’s a good actress, too, whose greatest role was in “Casino,” “as Ginger, the moll to Robert DeNiro’s casino mogul in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 Las Vegas crime epic.” She outperformed the leading man.

But now, Ms. Stone is threatening to spoil it all by turning on a scene she nailed so well in “Basic Instinct.”

A scene featuring Stone suggestively crossing and uncrossing her legs [sans panties] during a police interrogation garnered much attention and has even been spoofed in more than a few projects.

(CNN)

A woman once so powerful in her beauty expects us to believe she was helpless in that power and beauty. Nonsense. Don’t peter out like the whining MeToo fems, Sharon Stone.

*Image courtesy Hola

NEW COLUMN: A Christmas Story Before Nerf Guns Became a No-No

Christianity, Comedy & Humor, Family, Feminism, Film, Founding Fathers, Kids, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim

NEW COLUMN, “A Christmas Story Before Nerf Guns Became a No-No,” is on American Greatness.

An excerpt:

Described by a critic as “one of those rare movies you can say is perfect in every way,” “A Christmas Story,” directed by Bob Clark, debuted in 1983. Set in the 1940s, the film depicts a series of family vignettes through the eyes of 9-year-old Ralphie Parker, who yearns for that gift of all gifts: The Daisy Red Ryder BB gun.

This was boyhood before the Nerf gun and “bang-bang you’re dead” were banned; family life prior to “One Dad Two Dads Brown Dad Blue Dads,” and Christmas before Saint Nicholas was denounced for his whiteness, and “Merry Christmas” condemned for its exclusiveness.

If children could choose the family into which they were born, most would opt for the kind depicted in “A Christmas Story,” where mom is a happy homemaker, dad a devoted working stiff, and between them, they have zero repertoire of progressive psychobabble to rub together.

Although clearly adored, Ralphie is not encouraged to share his feelings at every turn. Nor is he, in the spirit of gender-neutral parenting, circa 2020, urged to act out like a girl if he’s feeling … girlie.

Instead, Ralphie is taught restraint and self-control. And horrors: The little boy even has his mouth washed out with soap and water for uttering the “F” expletive. “My personal preference was for Lux,” reveals Ralphie, “but I found Palmolive had a nice piquant, after-dinner flavor—heady but with just a touch of mellow smoothness.” Ralphie is, of course, guilt-tripped with stories about starving Biafrans when he refuses to finish his food.

The parenting practiced so successfully by Mr. and Mrs. Parker fails every progressive commandment. By today’s standards, the delightful, un-precocious protagonist of “A Christmas Story” would be doomed to a lifetime on the therapist’s chaise lounge—and certainly to daily doses of Ritalin …

NEW COLUMN, “A Christmas Story Before Nerf Guns Became a No-No,” is on American Greatness.

Merry Christmas.

UPDATED (8/8): Some Movies That Weather The Storms Of Time

Aesthetics, America, Art, Film, Technology

Movies this viewer can watch again and again every few years: “The Perfect Storm”: I keep hoping George Clooney will scale the Wave, as well as the film about the 50 Year Wave: “Point Break.” Jaws (1 & 2): great. Special effects were better then than today’s digital, computer-generated crap.

As to my kind of feelgood movies: Let us ready the great “Death Wish” series, featuring Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey the avenger. That crime-riddled reality is upon us again, in the USA.

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A true American movie classic, where values are solid, is “October Sky,” which “tells the story of four [striving] boys in a poverty-stricken corner of Appalachia.” Mining has always been the saddest story of male heroism.

Tell me about your favorites in the Comments Section below. We all agree that “Gone With the Wind” stands unbeaten—it also serves up better history than offered by court historian Doris Kearns Goodwin.

UPDATED (7/31):The Perfect Storm Swallows Sailors

UPDATED (8/8):