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Ukrainian Soldiers Kidnap Two Female Doctors And Shove Sticks Into Their Vaginas. They Then Fill The Women’s Vaginas With Plaster And Brutally Murder ...

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The horrors of the war that has been ongoing for years in Ukraine continue to build up. Shoebat.com spoke with Elena Yefereva, a journalist who has been investigating the conflict in Donbas for the past eight years. She told us of some details on the political and ideological roots of the tensions between Russians and Ukrainian nationalists. She also told us of a recent event that was absolutely gruesome: Ukrainian soldiers — members of the Azov Battalion — kidnapped two female doctors, raped them with sticks, and filled every orifice of their bodies with plaster, brutally murdering them:
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source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2022/04/30/ukrainian-soldiers-kidnap-two-female-doctors-and-shove-sticks-into-their-vaginas-they-then-fill-the-womens-vaginas-with-plaster-and-brutally-murder-them/">https://shoebat.com/2022/04/30/ukrainian-soldiers-kidnap-two-female-doctors-and-shove-sticks-into-their-vaginas-they-then-fill-the-womens-vaginas-with-plaster-and-brutally-murder-them/</a>

armageddon Ukrainian Soldiers Kidnap Two Female Doctors And Shove Sticks Into Their Vaginas. They Then Fill The Women’s Vaginas With Plaster And Brutally Murder ...

The horrors of the war that has been ongoing for years in Ukraine continue to build up. Shoebat.com spoke with Elena Yefereva, a journalist...

The West’s Support For Ukraine Is A Demonstration Of How So Many People Supported Hitler

armageddon The West’s Support For Ukraine Is A Demonstration Of How So Many People Supported Hitler

People wonder, How could have so many people supported Hitler? Look no further than the West’s support for Ukraine to find your answer: [e...

Can Sri Lanka dig itself out of a $50 billion debt?

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After a month of intense civilian-led protests over Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to appoint a new council on Friday to lead the formation of an interim government. The resolution would create a coalition made up of all parties in Parliament and would remove the grip of the Rajapaksa family dynasty currently ruling the country. At issue is the country’s economic future which is in shambles after defaulting on payments on its mountain of foreign loans — estimated to be worth $50 billion — <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-international-monetary-fund-sri-lanka-foreign-debt-f48b3cfb388c3a11af5d2d8a3d1a4391">for the first time</a> since the country gained independence from the British in 1948.
Signs of Sri Lanka’s impending economic crisis became increasingly apparent over the last two years of the Covid-19 pandemic as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/world/asia/sri-lanka-economic-crisis.html">food prices soared and power blackouts</a> increased in frequency. Sri Lanka currently has about $7 billion in total debt due this year.
Many attribute Sri Lanka’s economic crisis to the mishandling of its finances by successive governments through mounting foreign debt and continued infrastructure investments. The Rajapaksa administration also implemented <a href="https://apnews.com/article/b6b96849ebe74c8dbeac461ff8418c28">sweeping tax cuts in 2019</a>, slashing the value added tax (VAT) rate — the tax applied to imports and domestic supplies — from 15 percent to eight percent which contributed to a decrease in the country’s revenue.
The president’s older brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, is expected to be removed as prime minister as part of an agreement brokered by former President Maithripala Sirisena, who defected with dozens of other members of the incumbent president’s governing party in April in protest of the Rajapaksas’ poor governing.
But the country’s power struggle may have sown discord between the two brothers which could exacerbate its political impasse. On Friday, the Associated Press <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-biden-cabinet-sri-lanka-maithripala-sirisena-bc8ed130537eb090b9bc648b1b470d76">reported</a> a spokesperson for the prime minister did not immediately confirm the elder Rajapaksa’s removal, saying that any such decisions would be announced by the prime minister in due time.
<h3>The country continued to mount foreign debt without sufficient revenue</h3>
A big part of Sri Lanka’s economic woes is its ballooning foreign debt, namely to fund its aggressive turn to infrastructure development under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, the elder Rajapaksa sibling and two-time prime minister. With its finances already bleeding, Sri Lanka took out major investment loans from state-owned Chinese banks to fund its infrastructure projects including a controversial port development in the Hambantota district.
The Sri Lankan government justified the Hambantota project as a way to grow its economy as a bustling trade hub comparable to Singapore. However, the project was riddled with corruption and stalled, and Sri Lanka eventually <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html">handed over the port’s control</a> to China as collateral after it was unable to pay back its loans.
Over the last decade, Sri Lanka amassed <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lanka-port.html">a debt of $5 billion to China</a> alone, making up a large portion of its overall foreign debt, according to the BBC. Sri Lanka’s bloated debt to China and the Hambantota project failure are often held up as an example of the “debtbook diplomacy” that China has pursued in the last couple of decades.
Some believe China has expanded that monetary diplomacy approach through its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure project involving Chinese investment in infrastructure developments in parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe that is later repaid, as part of China’s bid to increase global influence as a growing economic power. About 139 out of 146 of the world’s countries, including Sri Lanka, have signed on to China’s BRI project. While an infrastructure project on such a global scale may provide some economic benefits to the participating countries, the BRI has inevitably become a strategic way for China to gain political leverage with economically vulnerable countries across the Asia-Pacific region. At least 16 countries involved in the BRI project have been saddled with billions of dollars of debt which China then has leveraged, according to an <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/warning-sounded-over-chinas-debtbook-diplomacy">independent analysis</a> by Harvard’s Kennedy School for the US State Department.
About <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/india-tries-to-pry-sri-lanka-loose-from-chinas-embrace.html">22 percent of Sri Lanka’s debt</a> is owed to bilateral creditors — institutional investors from foreign governments — according to CNBC. Neighboring India has sought to grow its bilateral cooperation with Sri Lanka partly as an attempt to secure its influence in South Asia over China. India recently gave Sri Lanka a $1.5 billion credit line to tide over the country’s fuel crisis in addition to another $2.4 billion through a currency swap and loan deferment since January.
As the country amassed foreign debt, its tourism sector — previously <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/sri-lanka-tourism-plummets-after-bombings/4904347.html">a $44 billion industry</a> and a primary revenue source for the island — took successive hits. In 2019, tourism suffered after <a href="https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2019/04/world/sri-lanka-attacks/">a series of church bombings</a> that killed nearly 300 people, including some foreign nationals.
The next year, the Covid-19 pandemic halted tourism and other major sectors, spurring a global economic downturn. Although Sri Lanka saw some increase in its number of foreign visitors last year, the ongoing pandemic combined with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — both nations <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/4/6/crisis-hit-sri-lanka-is-hosting-thousands-of-stranded-ukrainians">leading sources of tourism</a> for Sri Lanka before the conflict — continued to slow the industry’s recovery.
<h3>A worsening crisis triggered mass protests</h3>
The country’s issues escalated in March when the Sri Lankan government <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220330-10-hour-power-cuts-in-sri-lanka-as-crisis-worsens">announced</a> a 13-hour daily power cut as a way to save energy amid the ongoing crisis. Without sufficient power, many were unable to do their jobs as the economic crisis continued, prompting mass unrest. Thousands of Sri Lankans took to the streets in the weeks following the power cut to protest the country’s growing crisis.
On April 1, President Rajapaksa declared an emergency as growing unrest saw protesters clash with police. The entire Sri Lankan government Cabinet <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/04/04/1090753152/sri-lanka-offers-resignations-as-public-anger-grows-over-economic-crisis">resigned in protest</a> not long after the emergency law was implemented, causing Rajapaksa to revoke the law. Among those who resigned was Sports Minister Namal Rajapaksa, another member of the Rajapaksa family and the president’s nephew.
With growing political unrest and no resolution in sight, Rajapaksa’s rivals began calls for a no-confidence vote against his administration.
“We are confident we have the numbers and we will bring the motion at the appropriate time,” opposition lawmaker Harsha de Silva <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/18/sri-lankan-opposition-to-table-no-confidence-vote-against-government-.html">told</a> CNBC. Hoping to placate critics, President Rajapaksa sought to form a new unity coalition under his leadership but failed to gain support. In April, the government also announced it would temporarily suspend foreign debt payments, marking the first time Sri Lanka had defaulted on foreign loans since its independence.
Experts had been warning of a potential dire situation around the country’s finances for some time. When the country defaulted, the government had been <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/business-61145854">negotiating a bailout plan</a> with the International Monetary Fund, which had assessed its accumulated debt as unsustainable.
“The government intends to pursue its discussions with the IMF as expeditiously as possible with a view to formulating and presenting to the country’s creditors a comprehensive plan for restoring Sri Lanka’s external public debt to a fully sustainable position,” the Finance Ministry said in a <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-international-monetary-fund-sri-lanka-foreign-debt-f48b3cfb388c3a11af5d2d8a3d1a4391">statement</a>.
In a meeting with Cabinet officials a week later, President Rajapaksa <a href="https://apnews.com/article/business-biden-cabinet-sri-lanka-mahinda-rajapaksa-c85718a88d4ff03d2a72f969eb595afa">acknowledged</a> his government’s role in the country’s declining economy. Specifically, the president said the government should have approached the IMF earlier for support in tackling its unruly foreign debt and that they should have avoided the ban on imported chemical fertilizers which was meant to preserve Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange holdings but instead hurt its agricultural production.
“During the last two and a half years we have had vast challenges. The Covid-19 pandemic, as well as the debt burden, and some mistakes on our part,” Rajapaksa said.
Now, Sri Lanka’s future rests on whether the president’s proposed government changes will placate his growing opposition long enough for a solution to come through from the IMF. The Sri Lankan head of finance, Nandalal Weerasinghe, has stated that such a hoped-for deal could <a href="https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220429-crisis-hit-sri-lanka-says-imf-bailout-three-months-away">still be months away</a>, however.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/2022/4/30/23050242/sri-lanka-50-billion-debt-protests-loan-default-china-india-imf">https://www.vox.com/2022/4/30/23050242/sri-lanka-50-billion-debt-protests-loan-default-china-india-imf</a>

vox Can Sri Lanka dig itself out of a $50 billion debt?

After a month of intense civilian-led protests over Sri Lanka’s deteriorating economy, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa agreed to appoint a new...

The Great Resignation is becoming a “great midlife crisis”

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With prices soaring and <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/26/economy/inflation-recession-economy-deutsche-bank/index.html">analysts predicting</a> a recession on the horizon, it might not seem like the best time to quit your job. But that’s not keeping American workers, especially older, more tenured ones, from doing so.
Higher-paid workers are increasingly quitting their jobs, as the Great Resignation — also known as the Great Reshuffle — enters its second year. Earlier in the pandemic, the trend was led by younger, less-tenured workers in low-paying industries like retail, food service, and health care. Now, the main growth in quit rates is coming from older, more tenured workers in higher-paid industries like finance, tech, and other knowledge worker fields, according to data from two separate human resources and analytics companies. These workers say they are searching for less tangible benefits like meaning and flexibility.
That changing composition of who is quitting paints an increasingly complicated picture of the state of work in America and suggests that while quit rates have decreased slightly from their highs last year, the phenomenon is not going away just yet.
“The Great Resignation is almost like a train, where it’s built all this momentum and it’s hard to slow down, but certain workers are getting off the train and new workers are coming on,” said Luke Pardue, an economist at <a href="https://gusto.com/">Gusto</a>, which provides payroll, benefits, and human resource management software to small- and medium-sized businesses.
Rates of quits are always highest among younger workers — those who tend to be less invested in their jobs and whose lives are less stable. This was true during the early stages of the pandemic when these workers quit their jobs amid heightened demand to eke out better wages and conditions elsewhere (though those gains are <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22977654/future-of-work-restaurants-retail-hospitality">unlikely to be permanent</a>). But those quit rates have been declining. Data from Gusto, which typically works with companies that have around 25 employees, shows that the average tenure of people who quit has grown in every age group and in nearly every industry. In other words, older people who’ve worked at a job longer are also quitting.
A similar change is happening at bigger companies, according to data from people analytics provider <a href="https://www.visier.com/">Visier</a>.
Between the first quarter of 2021 and 2022, the greatest growth in resignations was among people aged 40 to 60 and those with a tenure of more than 10 years, a Visier dataset from companies with over 1,000 employees shows. Older and more tenured people are especially likely to be quitting in knowledge worker industries like finance and tech.
Their reasons are myriad.
“Don’t look for one thing that’s driving the Great Resignation,” Ian Cook, Visier’s vice president of people analytics, told Recode. “It’s actually made up from a combination of different patterns and will continue to change as the labor market changes and as the economic recovery changes.”
Among the more financially stable set, quits are being driven by everything from a desire to continue working remotely to a greater search for meaning to simply having the means to do so.
Columbia Business School professor Adam Galinsky calls this iteration of the Great Resignation the “great midlife crisis.”
“At the midpoint of life, we become aware of our own mortality, and it allows us to reflect on what really matters to us,” said Galinsky. The pandemic has amplified that effect. “A global pandemic obviously makes people reflect on their own mortality in terms of being afraid of dying themselves or having a loved one or family and colleagues pass away.”
Importantly, the people who quit to hold out for the jobs they want or forgo work entirely are usually the ones with the financial means to do so.
Galinsky, who is currently on sabbatical in Hawaii, says he’s seen it among his peers and among other high-earning knowledge workers now working from his island getaway. He mentioned a Bloomberg employee who quit after the finance publication called workers back to the office and who now works on a pasta truck.
Such workers, either due to savings or a spouse’s income, have the freedom to look for other work, including <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22651953/americans-gig-independent-workers-benefits-vacation-health-care-inequality">gig work</a> or <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/22884040/more-americans-starting-own-business-entrepreneur">starting their own business</a>. A Gusto survey of new businesses shows that they’ve shifted from e-commerce startups earlier in the pandemic to more professional services, like, say, an accountant starting her own firm rather than working for someone else.
Many of these workers, especially those who are older and more stable in their careers, now have the perspective to consider what they really want out of their lives and work.
After more than two years of successfully working from home, many knowledge workers are loath to come back to the office, and some are jumping ship if they feel they have to do so. That makes sense. Data from Slack’s <a href="https://futureforum.com/">ongoing survey</a> of 10,000 knowledge workers <a href="https://futureforum.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Future-Forum-Pulse-Report-April-2022.pdf">just found</a> that with a third of them now back in the office five days a week, their work-related stress and anxiety has reached its highest level since the survey began in 2020.
Growth in knowledge worker quits also might just simply be a case of people copying one another.
“Workers who have this experience, that switched a job, that became more flexible, talk about it and how they had a great experience, and that leads their neighbor or their friend to do the same,” Pardue said.
They’re also quitting because there are a lot of jobs out there for them. The number of business and professional services job openings is at a record high, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. According to job site Indeed, the number of high-paid job postings has not cooled as much as postings for low-paid jobs (postings for both remain above pre-pandemic levels).
So while the future might look grim, the present looks just fine for these workers, who are confident in the current tight job market. As Galinsky put it, “People believe less in global warming on days it snows.”
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/recode/23042785/the-great-resignation-older-tenured-higher-paid">https://www.vox.com/recode/23042785/the-great-resignation-older-tenured-higher-paid</a>

vox The Great Resignation is becoming a “great midlife crisis”

With prices soaring and analysts predicting a recession on the horizon, it might not seem like the best time to quit your job. But that’s ...

Senator Demands Biden Scrap Creepy ‘Disinformation’ Unit; “Dissolve This Monstrosity Immediately”

Following news that The Department of Homeland Security’s new <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/28/dhs-disinformation-unit-headed-by-woman-who-said-hunter-biden-laptop-story-was-disinformation/">‘disinformation governance board’</a> will be headed by a woman who says free speech makes her ‘shudder’ and who falsely labeled the Hunter Biden laptop story disinformation, Republicans called for the body to be scrapped, labelling it a ‘monstrosity’.
Heading the opposition to what has been compared to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984, Senator Josh Hawley wrote to DHS Secretary Mayorkas noting “I confess, I at first thought this announcement was satire.”
“Surely no American Administration would ever use the power of Government to sit in judgement on the First Amendment speech of its own citizens,” Hawley continued.
“Sadly,” he added, “I was mistaken. Rather than protecting our border or the American homeland, you have chosen to make policing Americans’ speech your priority. This new board is almost certainly unconstitutional and should be dissolved immediately.”
“It can only be assumed that the sole purpose of this new Disinformation Governance Board will be to marshal the power of the federal government to censor conservative and dissenting speech,” the Senator concluded, urging “This is dangerous and un-American.”
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The Administration that activated the FBI against parents at school board meetings now has created a government Disinformation Board to monitor all Americans’ speech. It’s a disgrace. Joe Biden & Secretary Mayorkas: dissolve this monstrosity immediately <a href="https://t.co/hSnMpREizI">pic.twitter.com/hSnMpREizI</a>
— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) <a href="https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1519645712635645953?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 28, 2022</a></blockquote>
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House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also responded to the development, describing it as “Orwellian.”
“Leave it to Democrats to think free speech is the problem and more government is the solution,” McCarthy told <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/gop-leader-kevin-mccarthy-torches-biden-over-admins-new-orwellian-disinformation-governance-board">The Daily Wire</a>.
“The notion that the same party that spent four years promoting the Russia collusion hoax, suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, and equated parents to domestic terrorists believes it has the credibility to tell Americans what is true is laughable,” he added.
Referring to Nina Jankowicz, the Congressman added that “it is telling that the person who would run Biden’s Orwellian Disinformation Governance Board is a political activist who has a long history of falling for and spreading disinformation.”
“It is easy to imagine this person abusing the term ‘disinformation’ to suppress facts and spin away inconvenient truths about the administration’s many failures, including their failures to secure the border,” McCarthy further urged, adding “The idea that the federal government should control speech sounds uncomfortably close to the Thought Police. Biden must immediately abandon his plan to create a modern-day Ministry of Truth.”
Representative Jim Jordan also hit out at the move, telling Mayorkas “You put out a bulletin two months ago, a big fancy bulletin here, red, white and blue. You said that misleading narratives, mis-, dis-, and mal-information, MDM, as you call it, misleading narratives undermine the trust in government. I was just wondering, when the head of the CDC, Miss Walensky, said that the vaccinated can’t get the virus, did that undermine trust in government?”
Jordan continued, “When the highest paid official in our government, the smartest man on the planet, Dr. Fauci, when he said the virus didn’t come from a lab, did that undermine trust in government? And will that be something that this governing board will look at?”
“How about when 51 former intel officials told us that the Hunter Biden story was–had all the earmarks of Russian misinformation? Will that be something that this governance board that you just formed, will you be looking into that?” Jordan also asked:
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Soon to be Twitter owner Elon Musk also responded to the creation of the disinformation unit, labelling the move “discomforting.”
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source <a href="https://summit.news/2022/04/29/senator-demands-biden-scrap-creepy-disinformation-unit-dissolve-this-monstrosity-immediately/">https://summit.news/2022/04/29/senator-demands-biden-scrap-creepy-disinformation-unit-dissolve-this-monstrosity-immediately/</a>

revolution summit Senator Demands Biden Scrap Creepy ‘Disinformation’ Unit; “Dissolve This Monstrosity Immediately”

Following news that The Department of Homeland Security’s new ‘disinformation governance board’ will be headed by a woman who says free spe...

The Offer is a TV show about how great movies are

Midway through the pilot episode of The Offer, future Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) is sitting in a movie theater with his girlfriend, gaping at the audience around him, who are gasping at the famously shocking concluding moments of Planet of the Apes. It’s 1968, and Ruddy is fresh off Hogan’s Heroes, the TV show he co-created. But TV bores him. He wants more. He wants the big screen.
“It’s not just about the ending, it’s about the experience of it,” he tells his girlfriend. Waxing enthusiastic about the collective emotion of movie theaters, he concludes that you “can’t get that experience in television. You’re just sitting in your living room, looking at a fucking box.”
Now, of course, to actually watch this scene, you have to look at that same effing box, or maybe your laptop or your phone, all visible at that moment through a thick scrim of irony. But The Offer, a show that’s less about how one of the greatest big-screen films in history was made than how it almost wasn’t made, seems comfortable with the contradiction. Throughout its 10-episode runtime — available, with even more irony, only on the Paramount+ streaming service — various characters trot onscreen to extol daring cinema and denigrate television and brainless movies. Legendary Paramount head of production Robert Evans (played in an absolutely virtuosic turn by Matthew Goode) gives a couple of lengthy speeches about the magic of cinema. Ruddy tells a group of FBI agents that “TV’s too limiting. You can’t do real stories on TV.”
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<figcaption>Matthew Goode as Paramount head of production Robert Evans in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Which means it’s almost as interesting as an artifact of our time, when movies and TV are in flux, as it is as a story about 1970s Hollywood. I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t fascinated by Hollywood minutiae really watching The Offer, which isn’t to say they shouldn’t try. It’s uneven, but a handful of solid performances anchor it — Juno Temple (as Ruddy’s plucky assistant Bettye McCartt), and Dan Fogler (who makes a surprisingly good Francis Ford Coppola), and the go-for-broke Goode — with a fine showing by Teller, as Ruddy is the ostensible center of the show.
In fact, the title credits declare that the show is based on Ruddy’s memories of making The Godfather, which is an uncommon credit to see. Most writing on the movie’s legendary production, from newspaper profiles to books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, has focused on Coppola’s role in driving the project forward. But while Coppola gets plenty of screen time here, it’s Ruddy who’s our main character. The pilot (perhaps the weakest of the episodes) cruises through several years inside of an hour, apparently in an attempt to explain why Ruddy got involved in the Paramount circus to begin with.
The net effect can at times tip over into listening to an old Hollywood hand tell mildly unbelievable war stories for 10 hours, though much of what appears in The Offer sticks, in broad outlines, to the tales others have told. Ruddy got pulled into making The Godfather as a low-budget specialist at Paramount, even though his most recent picture, the 1970 Robert Redford biker flick Little Fauss and Big Halsy, was a bit of a flop. Paramount had acquired rights before publication to Mario Puzo’s novel The Godfather, but didn’t really want to make it, fearing that it would fail like so many other recent mobster films; once the book became a runaway bestseller, Evans realized they’d better do it.
But the experience for everyone seems to have been somewhere between herding cats and cosplaying Sisyphus. Everything was a debacle. Casting Marlon Brando (considered both a legend and a has-been) and Al Pacino (considered an absolute nobody) seemed impossible. Wrangling locations — not to mention Coppola himself — was a headache. Tangling with executives at Paramount parent company Gulf and Western, irate crew members fed up with their no-name director, and the literal mafia were enough to test the patience of a saint, let alone a movie producer.
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<figcaption>Miles Teller and Juno Temple in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Furthermore, The Offer paints production of The Godfather as a trying time that ultimately created a band of brothers — not without interpersonal friction, but in that everybody came to respect one another and be proud of the work they did. The reality is a bit messier. For instance, Evans and Coppola were so profoundly angry at one another by the end of the post-production process that Coppola initially tried to get them to hire Martin Scorsese to direct The Godfather: Part II. Years later, he was still brooding, sending a letter to Evans in the early ’80s about how angry he was that Evans had taken credit for the film’s final form. (Evans framed the letter and hung it in his bathroom.)
Other examples like this abound, if you dig into Godfather history, and even a quick look at Ruddy’s own public work history shows how much personal myth-making is involved. (The show portrays him as just a computer programmer for a defense contractor who kind of stumbled into show business, but he in fact worked for Warner Bros. before he became a programmer; he left when Marlon Brando’s father hired him to produce Wild Seed, not when he landed Hogan’s Heroes, as the show suggests.)
But, artistic license is hard to fault, especially when it’s the nitpicking details of the producer’s career. The overarching sense you get from The Offer is that it is remarkable that any movie is ever successful or good or, indeed, even gets made. If you see a movie that’s good, you’re watching a miracle.
Which might be why The Offer’s greatest service is to remind us that The Godfather is, really, that good. (And so is at least one of its sequels; judge for yourself, as all three are also streaming on Paramount+.) It pushed boundaries artistically, narratively, and technically, and viewers responded, making it the biggest movie in history upon its release. Something about its story, which shifted from Puzo’s juicy potboiler to something far more insightful and allegorical about America, resonates deeply. Get lucky enough to catch it on a big screen, and it feels as exciting as it must have at the film’s premiere.
The show knows, and doesn’t get in the way. It does that, in part, by not trying to be nearly as good as its predecessor, with its daring lighting and cinematography, its uniformly outstanding performances, and its sense of epic scale. When it does pay self-conscious homage to Coppola’s film, it’s in winking references (you’ll get a line about a cannoli in the first couple of minutes). There are several different sequences that cut violence scenes together with more domestic ones, in tribute to the famous assassination-and-baptism scene in the film. But you don’t feel the episodes’ directors stretching beyond the somewhat goofy limits of the show, and that’s probably to its credit.
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<figcaption>On the set of The Godfather ... in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Yet it does seem oddly self-aware that it’s a TV show bent on promoting cinema (and, in particular, this instance of cinema). All that aforementioned ragging on TV and effusing about the magic of the movies seems purposeful, and reaches levels we usually only hear on stage at the Oscars.
Of course, the 1970s were a different time for both film and TV. Hollywood was riding a strange fault line, existing in a brief and often-valorized pocket of time in which visionaries like Coppola and Scorsese and Peter Bogdanovich and Robert Altman and Warren Beatty and Paul Schrader and a host of others were running the show, making the most exciting movies. There was a lot wrong with that time — only certain sorts of white guys got to talk executives into making their films — but there was something right, too, with exciting and daring movies showing eager audiences what movies could do. “We can’t chase after what the audience wants to see,” Evans says in one triumphant scene late in the show. “We need to show it what it needs to see.”
Meanwhile, TV was still largely working within formulas; storytelling innovations that we now take for granted were far off. That’s not to say it wasn’t great in its own way, or that incredible artists weren’t working in the medium. But the barrier between film and TV talents was much higher and more rigid.
Yet we’re in a totally different media landscape now, and Paramount itself is, like every major entertainment company, trying to figure out what it is going to be. Just two months ago, the movie studio’s parent company, created in 2019 when Viacom merged with CBS, rebranded itself as Paramount Global, after its most prestigious property. Paramount+ itself was first launched in 2014 as CBS All Access and renamed in March 2021. And like every company, they’re trying to figure out the right balance between traditional TV, streaming shows, and big-screen movies that eventually migrate back over to the streaming service. Nobody knows how this will all shake out, but the jitters in Hollywood right now are at a high that rivals the jitters back in Robert Evans’s day.
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<figcaption>Matthew Goode and Miles Teller as Robert Evans and Al Ruddy in The Offer.</figcaption>
<cite>Paramount</cite></figure>
Which is why diving back into its history to reinforce the brand probably makes sense. As the movie rewrites and refines bits of Godfather history, it spins and smooths out its film’s legend, declaring by the end that the film is widely considered “the best” movie in history. That’s debatable (if you’re speaking of Hollywood, at least, then Citizen Kane would like a word), though there’s no doubt it’s one of them. But as Charlie Bluhdorn (Burn Gorman), president of Gulf and Western and gadfly presence on the set, confides to Evans late in the show, he loves historical movies because they allow you to rewrite history. “Maybe that’s how we can deal with the horror,” he suggests, and while it’s not exactly horror The Offer rewrites, you can kind of see the point. The legend you put on screen is, eventually, more important to the average person than whatever the history books say — both a useful observation and, depending on your perspective, a terrifying one.
And that could be why The Offer’s villains aren’t really the various mobsters and entertainers (cough cough Frank Sinatra) who tried to block The Godfather’s production a half-century ago. They’re the executives who are more interested in chasing what they already know the audience wants than taking a chance on a movie like, well, The Godfather.
The Offer serves up a legend, too. It’s the story of a time in America when movies were king, when the big screen was something to yearn for, when risk might bring reward, when the collective experience was worth breaking your budget and your heart over. That Paramount has chosen to retell that story with a little bit of finessing and artistic license in a time when big-screen movies are hurting badly, when studios are chasing what they think the audience wants to see whether they need to see it or not, feels like a poke in someone’s eye. By the end, I kind of wondered whether it was their own.
The first three episodes of The Offer began streaming on Paramount+ on April 28. The remaining episodes will release on successive Thursdays through June 16.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/23047143/offer-godfather-paramount-review">https://www.vox.com/23047143/offer-godfather-paramount-review</a>

vox The Offer is a TV show about how great movies are

Midway through the pilot episode of The Offer , future Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) is sitting in a movie theater with...