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."
I would agree with your assessment. A solidish entertaining movie until the plot twist. At which point I just turned it off. One of the advantages of watching at home I guess.
I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before I saw this, and the movie featured so many dimly lit scenes of old men sitting on beds murmuring things about the Vatican that I literally could not stay awake. I had to step out of the theatre and get some coffee, which I didn’t appreciate having to drink after 7 pm. I mean, if you’re really into Catholic ornamentation and ritual maybe you’ll have an easier time than I did, but I would suggest watching it on a really uncomfortable chair so you don’t drift off (this theatre had reclining seats…deadly).
I feel like your movie reviews are a little heavily weighted toward Saileresque conceptual analysis as opposed to the visceral experience of seeing the movie. I mean, Anora was fucking fun as hell to watch and this was kind of the definition of snooze fest but the contrast doesn’t come across
Don't we all know deep down that these church politicians are an utter waste of oxygen and space? How can you look at the current Pope and not know this?
There is good and bad in every profession. But to take a vow of celibacy as a young man and to follow through for the next seven decades does indicate a level of of seriousness lacking in people such as myself.
Your brains clearly fit nicely in a small nutshell. Maybe that's why it hasn't registered on you that I said I was an atheist and haven endorsed anything about the Jewish religion. But at least the Jews don't have anything as idiotic as a Pope. Nazis like you like Popes?
I suspect you're looking at this from a secular perspective but you might find this interesting. I read a pretty compelling article that claimed +Benedict resigned because he believed the institutional Church no longer held the Charism. IOW, he no longer believed in the institution-its people, buildings-as a spiritual entity.
I found the article striking because I watched one of +Benedict's last public appearances on TV and he was censing a tacky, overdone creche from that mobile platform they had the poor man ride around on.
In the mystical sense, there's nothing going on that requires a priest to cense a large papier mache creche. It's the sort of empty ritual that a strict theologian like +Benedict would condemn and the look on his face was just tragic.
With the collapse of the Western and Eastern empires, Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology really does not make much sense, and it's beginning to pull the theology down with it. The Moscow Patriarchate's "third Rome" ecclesiology is probably the most integral at this point.
I think institutional Christianity is in for a lot of deconstruction over the next couple of decades.
I initially thought Benedict resigned to start a precedent. He was JP II's right-hand man, and witnessed him go from an energetic pope to a bent and exhausted old man pope riddled by disease. I thought Benedict resigned in order to encourage future popes to resign when they felt age hitting.
But now I'm pretty much convinced Benedict got railroaded by the political machinations inside the church. Although far from a right-winger, Benedict was more Traditional in theology and wanted to clean up the corrupt Cardinals, and so he was opposed by both the radical left in the Church and the the thieving/sexing wing of the Cardinals. They put financial and political pressure on him to resign.
The left almost always seems to be better at politics than the right. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were conservatives but did a poor job filling up spaces for Cardinals to their liking. Francis I was a political genius in filling up the Cardinals with his own gang.
As much as I hate Mitch McConnell, he realized this and became the go-to guy for the right on judicial appointments while in the Senate, stopping many bad judges (but not all of them) and getting many Federalist Society-approved judges through.
As a nation, we owe him eternal gratitude for his stopping Merrick Garland from getting on the Supreme Court (although it may have led to Garland's Vishinksy-esque machinations as Attorney General, where he channeled his rage at being denied the seat into all sorts of prosecutorial misconduct). It not only stopped Garland, it prevented the court's balance being pushed to the D side and enabled Neil Gorsuch to take the seat.
"Gratitude"? Now THAT was a waste of a majority. Not quite as bad as Kavanaugh or ACB, but it was the sort of useless legacy GOP move McConnell should have been hung up by his thumbs for for inflicting on the country.
Looking way back, "Shoes of the Fisherman" with Anthony Quinn is an enjoyable film. High liberalism was still very strong then and Quinn plays a Russian Cardinal who had spent years in the Gulag. Quinn is elected pope by acclamation after he describes the conditions of the Gulag and admitting to killing a man. He becomes sort of a liberal Pope John Paul II and at film's end plans to sell all the Catholic wealth to feed the Chinese. How sweet!
I am not sure how "Conclave" will play and I probably won't venture into a theatre to watch. Seems to be an insider sort of film. The real Conclave the Roman Catholic Church will have shortly will be more predictable with Jorge Bergoglio, sometimes called The Pope, having stacked the College of Cardinals with his acolytes. The new Pope will be someone of the same thinking as Bergoglio but perhaps not as thoughtless or erratic. The Church will continue to decline into decrepitude, laughed at by most of the world.
The Chinese are so many and the Armenians are so few. Further, Chinese restaurants are all over the place in America. I don't know of any Armenian restaurant. I'm sure Los Angeles has a few but I haven't been to Los Angeles for forty years.
“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.
"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."
Google states that Conclave's budget was 20 million.
Anora's budget falls around 6 million.
And the Brutalist's budget is around 13 million.
All three films combined budgets don't even total 40 million, which would be about somewhat less than the marketing budget for a standard Marvel film.
By way of contrast, Chris Columbus's 1990 film Home Alone was made for around 18 million (in 1990 money) and that was considered on the modest to beginning of low end of budgets for Hollywood for the time.
Aside from all three films not having much in the way of major special effects, are the low budgets made possible because at least in the case of Conclave and the Brutalist, uh, the actors aren't paid what they used to be, back around 1990's thru the 2010's?
“The Brutalist” is a low-budget movie with two name actors who aren’t quite stars who I imagine were cast for their Oscar-friendliness (eg, Guy Pearce was in “The King’s Speech”, “The Hurt Locker” and “LA Confidential”, Adrien Brody won an Oscar for “The Pianist”). “Conclave” seems to be shot in just a couple of locations so I would imagine that most of the budget went on its cast.
My point though, is that even in 2025, it is very much possible to make a traditional film that's character development based, without all the fireworks of special effects. Name actors, or ensemble casts, apparently are very much doable. 13 million total budget for The Brutalist is very much doable. That's comparable to the budget for last yrs The Holdovers.
Here’s a list of the box office totals of all the Best Picture winners since 1964. The payoff for character dramas has gotten a lot smaller since the days when “A Beautiful Mind”, “Million Dollar Baby”, and “American Beauty” could make well over $100 million domestically. Of course, the movies aren’t as effective, either. “Conclave” has done decent business though, close to $100m worldwide, similar to the last two Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies. It also has a much older average cast age than the typical thriller. Theatrical releases seem to be bifurcating between big dumb kids’ movies and dramas aimed equally at retirees in Europe and America.
In Branaugh's 2015 Poirot movie Murder on the Orient Express had a hot young white woman (Daisy Ridley, from Star Wars) in a secret affair with ....a black guy.
DEI and race-mixing, everyone!
For reference, in the 1970s classic film version, the same roles were played by Sean Connery and an absolutely-smitten-by-him Vannesa Redgrave. (It's really fun, because Redgrave is playing it as if she's won the lottery to get Sean Connery, which, given that it's 1974 Sean Connery, was probably how most women watching would have felt).
Anyway, I hard passed on Branaugh's version as a result. It made no cultural ripple, so I'm guessing I missed something that critics loved it (DEI and race-mixing!), it made some money from the Hamilton-type crowd, but then was quickly forgotten.
Branaugh hasn't been the same since the 90s. His Shakespeare adaptations were excellent and great for H.S. students. What happened to him?
Branaugh commented around that time that he had been told no studios would agree to fund his movies with a certain amount of "diversity" in them. I thought he was trying to subtly reference this plot point in particular. My impression of him is that he would much rather stay true to the source material like he did for the Shakespeare plays he made into movies, which to my memory were all diversity free.
I just looked at his 2000s Shakespeare films, and, wow, I was wrong, Branaugh was full on DEI-race mixing in those. So he's been part of the problem since at least then. I don't remember that problem with his 90s films; as Ralph L stated, he did put Denzel in one, but it wasn't race-mixing and Denzel wasn't a DEI hire (don't know why Denzel never got to be Othello).
I'm surprised he didn't do that when he directed the first Thor movie as well, although he did make one of the main Thor-Norse God allies to be black (Heimdall), which everyone criticized at the time.
Too bad. In the 1990s, if you had to study Shakespeare for class, catching one of his 1990s Shakespeare films was a pleasant experience. Sad!
I've never watched a film more boring than "My Fair Lady." Fell asleep watching it with my girlfriend before I met my wife. "The Sound of Music" is a big bore, too. I'd rather watch re-runs of "Mr. Ed" or "Gilligan's Island."
Fun fact: My Fair Lady is why Julie Andrews won an Oscar for Mary Poppins the same year.
Andrews had been the lead in the wildly successful Broadway musical version of My Fair Lady, and had been expected to reprise the role on the big screen, but Audrey Hepburn swooped in and stole the film role from her. The angry gays rebelled and gave Andrews an Oscar for Mary Poppins while refusing to even nominate Hepburn's dynamite performance, while nonetheless giving My Fair Lady every other major award (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director).
“(although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).”
Blair was practicing as a Catholic before he became PM in 1997 and could be seen at mass with his wife and kids in central London in the mid-1990s. He had his own odd reasons for not being public about his Catholicism until after he left office, perhaps due to the Church of England’s status as official religion in the UK and not wanting to be the first Catholic PM.
Then Boris Johnson went and married Carrie Symonds in Westminster Cathedral in 2021 while PM in a Catholic ceremony. The story given at the time was that Johnson was baptised a Catholic as an infant although he never told anybody and married his first two wives in non-Catholic ceremonies.
So the question of who actually was the UK’s first Catholic PM remains very much up for debate!
Blair would go to mass with his wife and kids and even present himself for communion (until asked by the Church hierarchy to stop) but he didn’t formally convert until leaving office. Tony Blair has a happy-clappy kind of theology stemming from an Australian Anglican priest, Peter Thomson, he met when he became a practising Christian at Oxford (Blair spent some formative childhood years in Australia. After office he has been much less tethered to the UK than most-ex PMs and seems to prefer sunnier places). His wife Cherie was a cradle Catholic from Liverpool. The Blairs had another motivation for practising as Catholics during their time in office: it enabled them to send their children to what is technically a state school, the London Oratory, but in effect functions as a highly selective private school. This is extremely important for internal Labour Party politics.
Harris is married to novelist Nick Hornby’s sister. Harris and Hornby are two center-left figures who have stood somewhat against educational dumbing-down in the UK. Harris’s subject matter (WWII, Ancient Rome) seems to cleave pretty closely to an old-fashioned grammar school syllabus. Looking her up, I see his wife Gill Hornby has written a novel about status-striving mums at highly competitive Home Counties schools. I somewhat doubt their four children were educated at bog standard comprehensives, either.
“Blair would go to mass with his wife and kids and even present himself for communion (until asked by the Church hierarchy to stop) but he didn’t formally convert until leaving office.”
This is kind of semantic. You can be baptised as an Anglican like Blair but don’t need a re-baptism as an Anglican. Blair most likely underwent Catholic sacraments of communion and possibly confirmation as well. My guess is that this was well before he entered office.
I joked at the time that as Johnson’s two previous marriages and irregular private life had not stood in the way of his being married as a Catholic, he should also be elected as the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster after finishing his term as PM. There’s still time…
I can't speak for everyone, but in my circles The Talmud is something a non-catechismic Rabbi introduces to intellectually curious Westerners generally hailing from a variety of Christian backgrounds but who are too intellectually honest and spiritually sensitive not to independently pursue their deeper curiosities.
See my Underwhelming Expose of the first paragraph of the Talmud.
And spare a sigh for the millions of 8 year old boys who have to wrap this around their heads around all this between 9am and 3pm only to be freed into the warm embrace of multiplicate tables and English grammar lessons until the blessed 7pm bus arrives and they get to go home for some quality homework time.
Whenever someone frets to me that the mullahs of Iran will nuke Israel should they ever acquire a bomb, I tell them it won't happen...not on the mullahs orders anyway. In the few years after the revolution the criteria for rising in the organization were fanaticism. After a few decades all those guys are standard corporate hierarchy climbers. Their main skill is saying and doing what they need to do to get to the next level of the hierarchy (any hierarchy). True believers and fanatics cannot compete with them. I guarantee you there have been agnostics, if not atheists, in top positions in the Church and the Iranian org.
Those kind of people want to die in a nuclear conflagration waaaaay less than a proper fanatic.
"How a Plan for Reparations Became a Debt Trap for Marijuana Retailers.
New York persisted with a plan to build flagship dispensaries for people the state once prosecuted for weed offenses, even as it failed to meet its goals....
"The state inspector general’s office is investigating the program, called the Cannabis Social Equity Investment Fund. The situation exposes how an experiment in reparations that sought to lift people disproportionately harmed by prior enforcement against marijuana not only failed but also helped derail the rollout of legal cannabis in New York."
Nice catch. The "people are rotting in prison over minor drug offenses" line was always BS - most of them were criminals in other areas and a drug charge was just one way to get them behind bars. Naturally a lot of them aren't really business geniuses either, so they aren't going to be able to leverage programs like this (which sounds genuinely bad) into an independent enterprise.
The concept of reparations has a lot of flaws but the most obvious is simply this: 90 percent of the entire population simply lacks the ability to run a business or take a financial windfall and turn it into a sustainable investment that will multiply over time. This has always been the case and will always be so.
Dave Chappelle answered the reparations argument twenty years ago, and its never been contradicted. The day after reparations passes, the money will be all spent on vices and bling and blacks will go back to being poor and in the ghetto.
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.
“The Young Pope” was written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. His big movie “The Great Beauty” is about a childless Boomer Italian writer who wrote one great novel in the 1960s and since then has wasted his life wandering around Europe’s aging beauty spots not accomplishing anything or creating anything new. He’s also completely uninterested in Europe’s post-1960s diversity. Sorrentino is a less reactionary Houellebecq, an obvious nostalgist for the days when the Catholic Church provided the traditionalist counterweight to liberalism’s tendency to sterility:
The gay/queer movement managed to take the substantial amount of good will it had generated by emphasizing their normalcy to get gay marriage approved by SCOTUS and with pretty significant public support.
And then proceeded to crap it away on normalization of mental illness, sexual perversion, and mutilating kids via the trans movement and total saturation of the culture with demands everyone must accept this. At one point it was possible to think the original endpoint was marriage and the crazies hijacked things but it's looking a lot more like gay marriage was just the boost phase and the real target is substantially darker and more sinister.
Like the ascendancy of black political power I think apogee has been reached with acceptance/tolerance of queer politics and people, and neither of these groups have realized that in the not very distant future they will repeatedly find that there is no political penalty for ignoring or dismissing them.
Many societies tolerated homosexual behavior for a time, but it was never "accepted" as good and normal, and almost all reverted back to hating it. There is a reason.
Gays often point to Ancient Greece as a supposed society that accepted homosexuality as equal, but they are lying. Even though the old man-teenage boy pairings were tolerated, it was considered very temporary (and disreputable) and staying together beyond a few years was considered disgusting. And the Theban "gay marriage" before the altar of Hercules was so isolated that it appears to have been little more than a rogue band of radicals who served as crazed mercenaries but otherwise kept away from normal folk; and then Alexander made short work of them. And almost all of normal Greek society found homosexual behavior disgusting and something only tolerated for the few--not something to be accepted for the many.
Obergefell was as shocking to many people as Roe was 50 years before. And it has the same calls for reversal. Both are intolerable on any logical or moral level and only go to show how much long-march communists had corrupted our judicial system.
Once did the movie come to honest political insight. When Stanley Tucci's character remarked that the reason the liberals don't dare oppose the reactionary African cardinal is because he's black.
I've never figured out how Ralph Fiennes pronounces his name "Raif". Also, TIL that Ralph was married to Alex(andra) Kingston 1993-97, although they had no childrens. The English actresses is best known for her eight-year stint on ER
It’s an English upper-class (particularly Norman aristocracy) thing. Fiennes belongs to the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes clan, the last two surnames being pronounced non-phonetically, Wickum Fines. In Waugh’s “Decline and Fall” for example, Margot Beste-Chetwynde should be said Beast Cheating. Fiennes has many distinguished relatives, including the polar explorer and hereditary baronet Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who climbed Everest aged 65.
I watched parts of the movie but it was fluffy. All smoke, mirrors, and secret dramas of the sort to be appreciated by children and other wide-eyed credulos who are still on the fence about whether Queen Elizabeth was a reptile.
The Two Popes however didn't offer any surprises but it did bring a very human quality that felt legitimate.
Conclave was closer to The DaVinci Cide than to The Two Popes.
P.S. Steve, am I mistaken that you've written about or at least referenced The Two Popes"? Google claims no knowledge of it, as do all American AIs, while Chinese Deepseek claims you did speak of it on December 6, 2019 but couldn't provide a link and neither could Unz. Was it in a comment or, contra my vague sense otherwise, did you never actually mention it??
I would agree with your assessment. A solidish entertaining movie until the plot twist. At which point I just turned it off. One of the advantages of watching at home I guess.
I hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before I saw this, and the movie featured so many dimly lit scenes of old men sitting on beds murmuring things about the Vatican that I literally could not stay awake. I had to step out of the theatre and get some coffee, which I didn’t appreciate having to drink after 7 pm. I mean, if you’re really into Catholic ornamentation and ritual maybe you’ll have an easier time than I did, but I would suggest watching it on a really uncomfortable chair so you don’t drift off (this theatre had reclining seats…deadly).
I feel like your movie reviews are a little heavily weighted toward Saileresque conceptual analysis as opposed to the visceral experience of seeing the movie. I mean, Anora was fucking fun as hell to watch and this was kind of the definition of snooze fest but the contrast doesn’t come across
Don't we all know deep down that these church politicians are an utter waste of oxygen and space? How can you look at the current Pope and not know this?
There is good and bad in every profession. But to take a vow of celibacy as a young man and to follow through for the next seven decades does indicate a level of of seriousness lacking in people such as myself.
What percentage actually follow through?
What percentage actually follow through if we count pulling one's pud as a violation? (Which it, theoretically, is.)
"Seriousness" in the name of foolishness is no virtue.
And as to his sexual proclivities, maybe he's just a weirdo.
Is cutting off your junk because you think you're a woman "serious" enough for you?
Am I supposed to admire it?
So, in a nutshell: Anti-Semitism very bad indeed, anti-Catholicism strongly encouraged.
Your brains clearly fit nicely in a small nutshell. Maybe that's why it hasn't registered on you that I said I was an atheist and haven endorsed anything about the Jewish religion. But at least the Jews don't have anything as idiotic as a Pope. Nazis like you like Popes?
I suspect you're looking at this from a secular perspective but you might find this interesting. I read a pretty compelling article that claimed +Benedict resigned because he believed the institutional Church no longer held the Charism. IOW, he no longer believed in the institution-its people, buildings-as a spiritual entity.
I found the article striking because I watched one of +Benedict's last public appearances on TV and he was censing a tacky, overdone creche from that mobile platform they had the poor man ride around on.
In the mystical sense, there's nothing going on that requires a priest to cense a large papier mache creche. It's the sort of empty ritual that a strict theologian like +Benedict would condemn and the look on his face was just tragic.
With the collapse of the Western and Eastern empires, Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology really does not make much sense, and it's beginning to pull the theology down with it. The Moscow Patriarchate's "third Rome" ecclesiology is probably the most integral at this point.
I think institutional Christianity is in for a lot of deconstruction over the next couple of decades.
I initially thought Benedict resigned to start a precedent. He was JP II's right-hand man, and witnessed him go from an energetic pope to a bent and exhausted old man pope riddled by disease. I thought Benedict resigned in order to encourage future popes to resign when they felt age hitting.
But now I'm pretty much convinced Benedict got railroaded by the political machinations inside the church. Although far from a right-winger, Benedict was more Traditional in theology and wanted to clean up the corrupt Cardinals, and so he was opposed by both the radical left in the Church and the the thieving/sexing wing of the Cardinals. They put financial and political pressure on him to resign.
Would he do that if he really believed he was the legit heir to Peter, chosen by God?
As to "financial pressure", didn't he take a vow of poverty or something?
lmao. Smelly Schlomo, I realize thinking isn't your strong suit, but man, your ignorance is breathtaking here!
Must be your inbred nature. :D
Is your inbred nature why you can't muster better insults or say anything remotely on point?
Nazi low functional IQ is a thing.
Inbred Schlomo, why are you so upset that your communist IQ is so low?
The left almost always seems to be better at politics than the right. John Paul II and Benedict XVI were conservatives but did a poor job filling up spaces for Cardinals to their liking. Francis I was a political genius in filling up the Cardinals with his own gang.
As much as I hate Mitch McConnell, he realized this and became the go-to guy for the right on judicial appointments while in the Senate, stopping many bad judges (but not all of them) and getting many Federalist Society-approved judges through.
As a nation, we owe him eternal gratitude for his stopping Merrick Garland from getting on the Supreme Court (although it may have led to Garland's Vishinksy-esque machinations as Attorney General, where he channeled his rage at being denied the seat into all sorts of prosecutorial misconduct). It not only stopped Garland, it prevented the court's balance being pushed to the D side and enabled Neil Gorsuch to take the seat.
Cocaine Mitch got his judges.
"...enabled Neil Gorsuch to take the seat."
"Gratitude"? Now THAT was a waste of a majority. Not quite as bad as Kavanaugh or ACB, but it was the sort of useless legacy GOP move McConnell should have been hung up by his thumbs for for inflicting on the country.
lol. Roe was overturned and shall-issue/constitutional carry is the law of the land.
Get over it Schlomo.
Christ taught that one should be charitable. So we ought to thank Mitch McConnell for doing one thing right in 42 years.
Looking way back, "Shoes of the Fisherman" with Anthony Quinn is an enjoyable film. High liberalism was still very strong then and Quinn plays a Russian Cardinal who had spent years in the Gulag. Quinn is elected pope by acclamation after he describes the conditions of the Gulag and admitting to killing a man. He becomes sort of a liberal Pope John Paul II and at film's end plans to sell all the Catholic wealth to feed the Chinese. How sweet!
I am not sure how "Conclave" will play and I probably won't venture into a theatre to watch. Seems to be an insider sort of film. The real Conclave the Roman Catholic Church will have shortly will be more predictable with Jorge Bergoglio, sometimes called The Pope, having stacked the College of Cardinals with his acolytes. The new Pope will be someone of the same thinking as Bergoglio but perhaps not as thoughtless or erratic. The Church will continue to decline into decrepitude, laughed at by most of the world.
LOL the starving Chinese. What about the Armenians?! 😢
The Chinese are so many and the Armenians are so few. Further, Chinese restaurants are all over the place in America. I don't know of any Armenian restaurant. I'm sure Los Angeles has a few but I haven't been to Los Angeles for forty years.
“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.
"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."
Google states that Conclave's budget was 20 million.
Anora's budget falls around 6 million.
And the Brutalist's budget is around 13 million.
All three films combined budgets don't even total 40 million, which would be about somewhat less than the marketing budget for a standard Marvel film.
By way of contrast, Chris Columbus's 1990 film Home Alone was made for around 18 million (in 1990 money) and that was considered on the modest to beginning of low end of budgets for Hollywood for the time.
Aside from all three films not having much in the way of major special effects, are the low budgets made possible because at least in the case of Conclave and the Brutalist, uh, the actors aren't paid what they used to be, back around 1990's thru the 2010's?
“The Brutalist” is a low-budget movie with two name actors who aren’t quite stars who I imagine were cast for their Oscar-friendliness (eg, Guy Pearce was in “The King’s Speech”, “The Hurt Locker” and “LA Confidential”, Adrien Brody won an Oscar for “The Pianist”). “Conclave” seems to be shot in just a couple of locations so I would imagine that most of the budget went on its cast.
My point though, is that even in 2025, it is very much possible to make a traditional film that's character development based, without all the fireworks of special effects. Name actors, or ensemble casts, apparently are very much doable. 13 million total budget for The Brutalist is very much doable. That's comparable to the budget for last yrs The Holdovers.
Here’s a list of the box office totals of all the Best Picture winners since 1964. The payoff for character dramas has gotten a lot smaller since the days when “A Beautiful Mind”, “Million Dollar Baby”, and “American Beauty” could make well over $100 million domestically. Of course, the movies aren’t as effective, either. “Conclave” has done decent business though, close to $100m worldwide, similar to the last two Kenneth Branagh Poirot movies. It also has a much older average cast age than the typical thriller. Theatrical releases seem to be bifurcating between big dumb kids’ movies and dramas aimed equally at retirees in Europe and America.
https://www.the-numbers.com/movies/comparisons/Best-Picture-Oscar-Winners
Thanks for the info
In Branaugh's 2015 Poirot movie Murder on the Orient Express had a hot young white woman (Daisy Ridley, from Star Wars) in a secret affair with ....a black guy.
DEI and race-mixing, everyone!
For reference, in the 1970s classic film version, the same roles were played by Sean Connery and an absolutely-smitten-by-him Vannesa Redgrave. (It's really fun, because Redgrave is playing it as if she's won the lottery to get Sean Connery, which, given that it's 1974 Sean Connery, was probably how most women watching would have felt).
Anyway, I hard passed on Branaugh's version as a result. It made no cultural ripple, so I'm guessing I missed something that critics loved it (DEI and race-mixing!), it made some money from the Hamilton-type crowd, but then was quickly forgotten.
Branaugh hasn't been the same since the 90s. His Shakespeare adaptations were excellent and great for H.S. students. What happened to him?
Branaugh commented around that time that he had been told no studios would agree to fund his movies with a certain amount of "diversity" in them. I thought he was trying to subtly reference this plot point in particular. My impression of him is that he would much rather stay true to the source material like he did for the Shakespeare plays he made into movies, which to my memory were all diversity free.
Denzel could pass back then.
I just looked at his 2000s Shakespeare films, and, wow, I was wrong, Branaugh was full on DEI-race mixing in those. So he's been part of the problem since at least then. I don't remember that problem with his 90s films; as Ralph L stated, he did put Denzel in one, but it wasn't race-mixing and Denzel wasn't a DEI hire (don't know why Denzel never got to be Othello).
I'm surprised he didn't do that when he directed the first Thor movie as well, although he did make one of the main Thor-Norse God allies to be black (Heimdall), which everyone criticized at the time.
Too bad. In the 1990s, if you had to study Shakespeare for class, catching one of his 1990s Shakespeare films was a pleasant experience. Sad!
His shortened Magic Flute was okay.
I've never watched a film more boring than "My Fair Lady." Fell asleep watching it with my girlfriend before I met my wife. "The Sound of Music" is a big bore, too. I'd rather watch re-runs of "Mr. Ed" or "Gilligan's Island."
Fun fact: My Fair Lady is why Julie Andrews won an Oscar for Mary Poppins the same year.
Andrews had been the lead in the wildly successful Broadway musical version of My Fair Lady, and had been expected to reprise the role on the big screen, but Audrey Hepburn swooped in and stole the film role from her. The angry gays rebelled and gave Andrews an Oscar for Mary Poppins while refusing to even nominate Hepburn's dynamite performance, while nonetheless giving My Fair Lady every other major award (Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director).
Hey, remember when the Oscars semi-mattered?
That's interesting. I'm sure the Academy was thrilled to give George Cukor the Best Director award.
“(although Blair’s post-office conversion to Catholicism perhaps upset Harris).”
Blair was practicing as a Catholic before he became PM in 1997 and could be seen at mass with his wife and kids in central London in the mid-1990s. He had his own odd reasons for not being public about his Catholicism until after he left office, perhaps due to the Church of England’s status as official religion in the UK and not wanting to be the first Catholic PM.
Then Boris Johnson went and married Carrie Symonds in Westminster Cathedral in 2021 while PM in a Catholic ceremony. The story given at the time was that Johnson was baptised a Catholic as an infant although he never told anybody and married his first two wives in non-Catholic ceremonies.
So the question of who actually was the UK’s first Catholic PM remains very much up for debate!
Blair would go to mass with his wife and kids and even present himself for communion (until asked by the Church hierarchy to stop) but he didn’t formally convert until leaving office. Tony Blair has a happy-clappy kind of theology stemming from an Australian Anglican priest, Peter Thomson, he met when he became a practising Christian at Oxford (Blair spent some formative childhood years in Australia. After office he has been much less tethered to the UK than most-ex PMs and seems to prefer sunnier places). His wife Cherie was a cradle Catholic from Liverpool. The Blairs had another motivation for practising as Catholics during their time in office: it enabled them to send their children to what is technically a state school, the London Oratory, but in effect functions as a highly selective private school. This is extremely important for internal Labour Party politics.
Harris is married to novelist Nick Hornby’s sister. Harris and Hornby are two center-left figures who have stood somewhat against educational dumbing-down in the UK. Harris’s subject matter (WWII, Ancient Rome) seems to cleave pretty closely to an old-fashioned grammar school syllabus. Looking her up, I see his wife Gill Hornby has written a novel about status-striving mums at highly competitive Home Counties schools. I somewhat doubt their four children were educated at bog standard comprehensives, either.
“Blair would go to mass with his wife and kids and even present himself for communion (until asked by the Church hierarchy to stop) but he didn’t formally convert until leaving office.”
This is kind of semantic. You can be baptised as an Anglican like Blair but don’t need a re-baptism as an Anglican. Blair most likely underwent Catholic sacraments of communion and possibly confirmation as well. My guess is that this was well before he entered office.
I joked at the time that as Johnson’s two previous marriages and irregular private life had not stood in the way of his being married as a Catholic, he should also be elected as the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster after finishing his term as PM. There’s still time…
There's an apocryphal joke that art history (i.e. in Ivy League lecture halls) consists of Jews teaching Protestants about Catholicism.
Conservative Catholic convert Matthew Schmitz finds the movie to be tediously predictable: https://archive.ph/IqMIQ
I wonder if that set up works for anything else.
Is explaining the Talmud something that Catholics teach the Protestants about Jews?
I can't speak for everyone, but in my circles The Talmud is something a non-catechismic Rabbi introduces to intellectually curious Westerners generally hailing from a variety of Christian backgrounds but who are too intellectually honest and spiritually sensitive not to independently pursue their deeper curiosities.
See my Underwhelming Expose of the first paragraph of the Talmud.
https://youtu.be/KKoxUZSZBPk
And spare a sigh for the millions of 8 year old boys who have to wrap this around their heads around all this between 9am and 3pm only to be freed into the warm embrace of multiplicate tables and English grammar lessons until the blessed 7pm bus arrives and they get to go home for some quality homework time.
I think you should dumb Taki and do all your essays here. It's the best source of income.
And your buddy Unz is now an outright lunatic, so dump that too.
hehe 'now'
Whenever someone frets to me that the mullahs of Iran will nuke Israel should they ever acquire a bomb, I tell them it won't happen...not on the mullahs orders anyway. In the few years after the revolution the criteria for rising in the organization were fanaticism. After a few decades all those guys are standard corporate hierarchy climbers. Their main skill is saying and doing what they need to do to get to the next level of the hierarchy (any hierarchy). True believers and fanatics cannot compete with them. I guarantee you there have been agnostics, if not atheists, in top positions in the Church and the Iranian org.
Those kind of people want to die in a nuclear conflagration waaaaay less than a proper fanatic.
Off-topic: This story is pure Sailer gold:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/26/nyregion/nyc-weed-dispensaries-debt.html
"How a Plan for Reparations Became a Debt Trap for Marijuana Retailers.
New York persisted with a plan to build flagship dispensaries for people the state once prosecuted for weed offenses, even as it failed to meet its goals....
"The state inspector general’s office is investigating the program, called the Cannabis Social Equity Investment Fund. The situation exposes how an experiment in reparations that sought to lift people disproportionately harmed by prior enforcement against marijuana not only failed but also helped derail the rollout of legal cannabis in New York."
Interesting ! Definitely iSteve content.
Nice catch. The "people are rotting in prison over minor drug offenses" line was always BS - most of them were criminals in other areas and a drug charge was just one way to get them behind bars. Naturally a lot of them aren't really business geniuses either, so they aren't going to be able to leverage programs like this (which sounds genuinely bad) into an independent enterprise.
The concept of reparations has a lot of flaws but the most obvious is simply this: 90 percent of the entire population simply lacks the ability to run a business or take a financial windfall and turn it into a sustainable investment that will multiply over time. This has always been the case and will always be so.
Dave Chappelle answered the reparations argument twenty years ago, and its never been contradicted. The day after reparations passes, the money will be all spent on vices and bling and blacks will go back to being poor and in the ghetto.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PxPmZAoFI
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.
“The Young Pope” was written and directed by Paolo Sorrentino. His big movie “The Great Beauty” is about a childless Boomer Italian writer who wrote one great novel in the 1960s and since then has wasted his life wandering around Europe’s aging beauty spots not accomplishing anything or creating anything new. He’s also completely uninterested in Europe’s post-1960s diversity. Sorrentino is a less reactionary Houellebecq, an obvious nostalgist for the days when the Catholic Church provided the traditionalist counterweight to liberalism’s tendency to sterility:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=PiolWBlf35M&pp=ygUaVGhlIGdyZWF0IGJlYXV0eSBoaWdobGFuZHM%3D
Yes, "The Great Beauty" is quite good. The parody of Marina Abramovic is quite funny.
The gay/queer movement managed to take the substantial amount of good will it had generated by emphasizing their normalcy to get gay marriage approved by SCOTUS and with pretty significant public support.
And then proceeded to crap it away on normalization of mental illness, sexual perversion, and mutilating kids via the trans movement and total saturation of the culture with demands everyone must accept this. At one point it was possible to think the original endpoint was marriage and the crazies hijacked things but it's looking a lot more like gay marriage was just the boost phase and the real target is substantially darker and more sinister.
Like the ascendancy of black political power I think apogee has been reached with acceptance/tolerance of queer politics and people, and neither of these groups have realized that in the not very distant future they will repeatedly find that there is no political penalty for ignoring or dismissing them.
Many societies tolerated homosexual behavior for a time, but it was never "accepted" as good and normal, and almost all reverted back to hating it. There is a reason.
Gays often point to Ancient Greece as a supposed society that accepted homosexuality as equal, but they are lying. Even though the old man-teenage boy pairings were tolerated, it was considered very temporary (and disreputable) and staying together beyond a few years was considered disgusting. And the Theban "gay marriage" before the altar of Hercules was so isolated that it appears to have been little more than a rogue band of radicals who served as crazed mercenaries but otherwise kept away from normal folk; and then Alexander made short work of them. And almost all of normal Greek society found homosexual behavior disgusting and something only tolerated for the few--not something to be accepted for the many.
Obergefell was as shocking to many people as Roe was 50 years before. And it has the same calls for reversal. Both are intolerable on any logical or moral level and only go to show how much long-march communists had corrupted our judicial system.
The new pope is non binary because that is the will of god.
Brilliant, truly makes you think.
Unfortunately the retardation wasn't obvious from the trailer and I spent money on going to see this, didn't want to spoil myself reading reviews.
I must begrudgingly admit the movie absolutely has it's virtues, but in a way that makes it more frustrating. It's a waste of talent.
The movie is well made, it was great at setting the tone right away, it managed to set up intriguing mystery and featured a cast of great actors.
All for what for obnoxious in your face political messaging, sad.
Once did the movie come to honest political insight. When Stanley Tucci's character remarked that the reason the liberals don't dare oppose the reactionary African cardinal is because he's black.
I've never figured out how Ralph Fiennes pronounces his name "Raif". Also, TIL that Ralph was married to Alex(andra) Kingston 1993-97, although they had no childrens. The English actresses is best known for her eight-year stint on ER
That's a common English pronunciation. Ralph Vaughn Williams also used it. The DailyMail signed me up as Ralf L without my consent.
The irony is that it seems like his name should be a camel-case RaIph, with a capital I in the middle
It’s an English upper-class (particularly Norman aristocracy) thing. Fiennes belongs to the Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes clan, the last two surnames being pronounced non-phonetically, Wickum Fines. In Waugh’s “Decline and Fall” for example, Margot Beste-Chetwynde should be said Beast Cheating. Fiennes has many distinguished relatives, including the polar explorer and hereditary baronet Sir Ranulph Fiennes, who climbed Everest aged 65.
I watched parts of the movie but it was fluffy. All smoke, mirrors, and secret dramas of the sort to be appreciated by children and other wide-eyed credulos who are still on the fence about whether Queen Elizabeth was a reptile.
The Two Popes however didn't offer any surprises but it did bring a very human quality that felt legitimate.
Conclave was closer to The DaVinci Cide than to The Two Popes.
P.S. Steve, am I mistaken that you've written about or at least referenced The Two Popes"? Google claims no knowledge of it, as do all American AIs, while Chinese Deepseek claims you did speak of it on December 6, 2019 but couldn't provide a link and neither could Unz. Was it in a comment or, contra my vague sense otherwise, did you never actually mention it??