▶ No.349823
Anora is a way better film. Conclave is run of the mill liberal identity politics shit.
▶ No.349828>>349832
The Bad Faith of Conclave
By Armond White
Turning the pope's election into a trans referendum
Hidden within the fake pomp and banal compositions of Conclave is a litany of left-wing nostrums, spoken by fictitious characters during the election of a new pope. Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, a British clergyman who is the dean of the College of Cardinals at the Vatican. He must conduct the unicameral voting while dealing with his own crisis of conscience - reflecting the modish religious skepticism that inspires director Edward Berger and screenwriter Peter Straughan in their adaptation of the Robert Harris novel. No sentient viewer should be shocked by the twist ending that confirms the wildest, weirdest progressive sexual fantasy.
Conclave's dramatic mechanism inquires into the quasi-democratic secrecies of government, much like the closed-door sessions of the U.S. Congress. (One frustrated cardinal complains, "I feel as if I'm at some American political convention.")
In the absence of political filmmaking that you can take seriously (or that can be trusted to be impartial), Conclave won Britain's BAFTA Award for Best Film and has been enthusiastically received by the U.S. Academy Awards, validating our current disbelief in governing institutions (the film was also included in Obama's latest culture decree for its appeal to his own chicanery).
But instead of examining the breakdown of parliamentary procedure (an analogy to the ongoing corrupted judicial processes of lawfare), the film falls back on standard left-wing alarms. (The angriest cardinal frets, "I'd be the Richard Nixon of popes.") Conclave reduces philosophical and spiritual issues to the cheapest and most banal melodrama. (Volker Bertelmann's cornball suspense music evokes the trite, blasphemous thrillers The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons.)
Director Berger picks up where those potboilers left off. If this passes for "classical filmmaking" in a film culture that has abandoned aesthetics along with reason, it doesn't convince me. Walter Salles's I'm Still Here was measured and politically subtle, but Conclave crosses the Rubicon of credibility, and Berger's staging of the climactic confrontation between conservative and liberal candidates is laughably flat-footed. None of the simplistic characterizations - Fiennes's soft-eyed piety (his voice throbbing with Gielgud delicacy to convey dedication to judiciousness), Stanley Tucci's hammy anger to show righteous progressivism, John Lithgow's display of arrogant villainy - prepare for the absurd climax that caters to the sentimental agenda of most Focus Features releases since Brokeback Mountain.
The dead pope "had his own doubts toward the end," we learn. "Never about God. What he had lost faith in was the church." But this gimcrack airport-novel intrigue includes a deus ex machina cardinal, Vincent Benitez (Carlos Diehz), conveniently created in pectore - in secret - from Afghanistan but of Mexican heritage (but why not Ukrainian?). The giveaway begins with conservative Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto, so great in Marco Bellocchio's My Mother's Smile but strident here, away from Bellocchio's complex virtuoso ambivalence). And there's no ethical or hermeneutic debate in Straughan's script, although Fiennes's Cardinal Thomas Lawrence is named after Thomas More (A Man for All Seasons) yet displays none of screenwriter Robert Bolt's sophistication - that impressive gift for aphorism tempered by the discipline to stick to the rigor of credible, dramatic speech.
Berger's Vatican caper lacks the tact and sensitivity in François Ozon's superb By the Grace of God, even quickly dispensing the repentance of a disgraced African cardinal (Lucian Msamati).
Next, Cardinal Lawrence pinpoints "this moment of great uncertainty in the history of the church." Then, a later speech declares that "diversity is the strength of the church," and another mentions institutional guilt owing to "genocidal sexual violence during the First World War." Pushing all Millennial buttons.
Conclave condenses its irreligious view when a cynical cardinal wishes that "God grant us a pope who doubts." Benitez, the film's Bergolio-style peasant-cardinal, justifies reform, declaring, "The church is not tradition. The Church is not the past. The Church is what we do next." That lecture is too close to Bergolio's sanctimony, which is awfully close to Vladimir Lenin's "What Is to Be Done?"
This only passes for thoughtfulness because film culture has abandoned its former Christian deference apparent in films from The Bells of St. Mary's to The Shoes of the Fisherman, which were made when Hollywood still respected the church. Even The Nun's Story, an agnostic's film but one of Fred Zinnemann's finest, was respectful. Modern agnosticism is contained in Cardinal Lawrence's epigram "Our faith is a living thing because it walks hand in hand with doubt."
Conclave reflects Europe's lost monarchy and the global lack of political faith. As if extolling radical agnosticism, the film concludes by discussing the role of women in the church and an intersex cardinal's laparoscopic hysterectomy before finally tossing its bad faith to a hermaphrodite pope. When film culture beds down with godlessness, the ludicrous result is Conclave.
▶ No.349830>>349831>>349832
Blame Greta?
by Armond White
Tracing Hollywood's cultural decline from Anora to Barbie, Thunberg to Gerwig.
Who's to blame for the cultural fiasco evinced by the Academy Awards ceremony? Not one movie of the ten nominated for Best Picture was any good, and the winner - Sean Baker's Anora - was merely the low-down crowd-pleaser of a very small crowd. Very few people saw the foul-mouthed, sexually explicit indie, and those who liked it fell for Baker's vulgar depiction of corrupt immigrants (the travails of a Russian-American hooker played by Mikey Madison) and spiritual degradation (said hooker's greed and alienation from her own emotions).
Anora herself personifies the state of contemporary immorality and Millennial Hollywood - endorsed by Baker's farcical approach to society-wide iniquity, a last-gasp vision of Biden's America. Ignorant reviewers have called it a Cinderella story, but Baker and Madison were more honest in their acceptance speeches when they both paid tribute to "the sex-worker community."
That euphemism for prostitution represents a change in cultural standards, some would say the degradation of traditional ethics about women and men and social roles. This connects Anora to the new trend in morals and behavior that transgressive hipster Baker shares with dilettante Barbie director Greta Gerwig and that she disseminated during her tenure as president of last year's Cannes Film Festival Jury. That's when Anora made its international premiere, winning the Cannes festival's Palm d'Or.
Gerwig's choices last spring had a negative impact on film culture throughout the year, concluding this week when Gerwig's selection of Anora was rubber-stamped as also the Academy's Best Motion Picture of the Year.
Consider how other Cannes winners shadowed 2024 film culture. There was a clear and obvious feminist slant to all of Gerwig's prize-winners: All We Imagine as Light (Grand Prix), Emilia Pérez (Jury Prize and Best Actress), and The Substance (Best Screenplay), plus the International Film Critics Award (FIPRESCI) and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury to The Seed of the Sacred Fig.
These choices set the stage for film culture's dissipation, which was undeniably on display at the Oscars with its red-carpet parade by a community of tabloid celebrity "sex workers." It's evident now that Gerwig's judgments were not just personal preferences; they illustrated a current set of Barbie-fied social resolutions that deserve serious contemplation.
"If American democracy can survive ten years of Greta Thunberg scolding," as Vice President Vance quipped to the audience at the Munich Security Conference, we can - with similar good humor - scrutinize how the other Greta's position of influence affects our survival.
Gerwig, at age 41, represents film culture's new feminist vanguard; her renown is an extension of the media celebration that established the international activism of Thunberg, now 22. Their resemblance is not mere "sisterhood," but a comparable callowness was evident when Gerwig took the stage at Cannes to announce her Jury duty.
"I hardly know what to say," she began. "I love the cinema, and this is holy to me. Art is sacred, and films are sacred, and I can't believe I'm getting the opportunity for the next ten days in this house of worship. I am floored right now, and I can't wait to share these films with you."
This inarticulate-Yankee fumbling was not an auspicious commencement. Like schoolgirl climate-activist-plant Thunberg, Gerwig seemed a Hollywood-feminist plant who took advantage of her prominence at Cannes to favor the feminist agenda that would go on to disorder the past year's film culture.
A kind of philosophical chaos became apparent starting when Gerwig and the jury at Cannes broke categorical norms to award the Best Actress prize to the four lead performers in the transgender musical Emilia Pérez: Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, and the male actor Karla Sophía Gascón, né Carlos. That decision bore rotten fruit when the Oscars similarly used Gascon to break its own categorical norms. There was no fanfare - indeed no announcement or change in Oscar rules - but a firestorm of controversy resulted, followed by the Academy's cowardly, pusillanimous silence on the issue.
Anora doesn't enlarge our compassion as Midnight Cowboy did when that X-rated feature won the Best Picture Oscar in 1969; instead, Anora sentimentalizes the self-contradictions of feminism. Greta's stealth revolution may look natural, but the change is weak and dishonest. It may seem that no one is to blame, but the simple fact is, no one in the community of reprobates takes responsibility. This is how an institution fractures, a culture declines, and Hollywood's love for hookers and thieves degrades itself.
▶ No.349831
>>349830bitch ass uncle Tom.
▶ No.349832>>349863
>>349830>>349828Based chad & honorary aryan.
▶ No.349838
>>349820 (OP)I want to put my penis in that butt
▶ No.349844
>>349820 (OP)the bitch in the bunny ears has a great ass and legs.
▶ No.349846>>349851
>>349842Good. Boomers who still have their heads up Reagan's ass need to be taken out back and shot already.
▶ No.349853>>349854
>>349851Great, another smary, gay neonazi incel bait cartoon whose radical idea is vote for the Orange zogbot.
▶ No.349863>>349864
>>349832>honorary aryan.I want him to fuck your wife
▶ No.349866>>349869
>>349862Obama was a good president.
▶ No.349869
YouTube embed. Click thumbnail to play.
>>349866Yikes you neon*zi
▶ No.349880>>349884
>>349871He'll reach lower lows yet, too.
▶ No.349884>>349886>>349889>>349894
>>349880I remember he used to dick suck Dup two years ago to "piss off" the "nazis", I few months ago I told someone on telegram "start to pretend to love Trump on /dup/ and you'll see Nuzach going around hating him just to be a pathetic contrarian."
He is really easy to be manipulated. Soon the anons will ruining his Obama simpposting too.
▶ No.349886
>>349884obama and diddy should be sharing a jail cell with lube
▶ No.349887
good. fuck jews.
▶ No.349895
>>349894As stated, you *will* hit lower lows. This is inevitable.
▶ No.349912
>>349894Yes, Nuzach is always butthurt, the only solution for him is suicide.