My movie review of "Conclave"
I don't want to say that I finally watched "Conclave" in case the Pope kicks the bucket and then I'd like to have an informed opinion about what's going on, but, yeah, I finally watched "Conclave."
From my new movie review in Taki’s Magazine:
Steve Sailer
February 25, 2025Conclave is a (non-action) thriller set inside the Sistine Chapel during the election of a new pope, starring veteran acting luminaries Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, and John Lithgow as cardinals conspiring to sit on the throne of Saint Peter while still laboring to appear less ambitious than they really are. It’s the kind of solid mid-budget drama for grown-ups that Hollywood used to make frequently, but it now seems so remarkable that it has a serious shot at winning the Best Picture Oscar.
The movie, which is primarily in English, but also in Italian, Spanish, and Latin, is a straightforward adaptation by German director Edward Berger (Deutschland 83 and the latest All Quiet on the Western Front) of Robert Harris’ 2016 novel. There was an old saying that mid-century Hollywood films were movies about Protestants made by Jews for Catholics. Conclave is a return to the brief era of films such as The Exorcist about Catholics.
A former Fleet Street journalist turned author of well-researched political fiction in the tradition of Frederick Forsyth (The Day of the Jackal), Harris has had quite a few of his upper-middlebrow page-turners filmed. Perhaps the most notable was Roman Polanski’s 2010 thriller The Ghost Writer, with Ewan McGregor as a hack hired to compose the memoirs of a former Labour prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), modeled on Harris’ ex-friend Tony Blair, who, Harris asserted, sold out the United Kingdom’s national interest to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq.
Harris is a sort of left-of-center English patriot in the vein of George Orwell, a notorious bigot against Irish Catholics (e.g., the final boss in 1984 is named O’Brien), but he works harder than Orwell to be sympathetic to Catholic politicians like the cardinals (although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).
Read the whole thing there.
“Hundreds of entertainers jumped at the chance to go to The Vatican to meet The Pope. To be fair most of them thought it was an invite to one of Diddy’s parties.” - ricky gervais.
SPOILER ALERT: the "new" pope in the film is a hermaphrodite.
Yeah, big shocker. So edgy. Left wing propaganda/ normalization of freakdom.
Given that the Jesuit Pope Francis is maybe on his death bed right now -- and might die before the Oscars---this movie winning could be the timeliest of all timely awards. When does voting for the Oscars close?
Also, this is the second or third "we must keep young right-wing radicals out of the papacy and let Boomer commie popes keep us on the road to utopia" movie/TV show in this century. The Tom Hanks film "Angels & Demons" had this theme, where a young radical right-wing "anti-science" priest is murdering and committing terrorism to get himself elected Pope (don't ask, its based on a Dan Brown novel).
Meanwhile, the Jude Law TV series "The Young Pope" painted a situation where a conniving radical right-wing young pope plays rope-a-dope to get himself elected by pretending to be weak and easily pushed around. Once in power, however, he immediately lays the hammer down and starts reforming the Church back to the pre-Vatican II "badness." Its more nuanced (Law's character is portrayed sympathetically about half the time) but the overall message is that traditionalism is bad and evil.
The Left truly fears losing the papacy to a young right winger.