Dead Pope Film Festival

[onager]

Let's turn off that non-stop Pope-a-looza currently playing in All Media, and go rent some DVD's!

Now let's see...what should we watch to honor the death of a Pope? Boy's Town...cough-cough-cough? Song Of Bernadette?

Uh...no. Here are a few of my favorite movies about the Church Militant. What are yours?

The Devils: who better than Ken Russell to take on an organization with a taste for flamboyant costumes, garish ceremonies, and sexual depravity? Based on Aldous Huxley's novel about real events during the reign of Cardinal Richelieu in France. The Inquisition judges in their KKK-like robes and hoods are unforgettable.

The Crime of Padre Amaro: Carlos Carrera's movie was predictably denounced and banned by You-Know-Who when released in 2002. The protagonist is a totally unlikeable shit who will do anything to advance his career in the priesthood. Sucking up to Mexican druglords for church contributions, arranging abortions, intimidating journalists...whatever it takes.

Amen: Costa-Gavras' account of how the Church ignored the Holocaust. Based on the true story of an SS officer who repeatedly warned the Vatican about what he had seen at Auschwitz and other death camps. The priest in the movie is a composite of several people who tried to help...to no avail.

The Magdalene Sisters: rent the DVD, so you can also watch the original BBC documentary that inspired the movie, "Sex In A Cold Climate."

L'Age d'Or: banned in most of Europe for about 40 or 50 years. What did they expect when Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali got together? Made in 1930 and still hilarious. An upraised middle finger to all bourgeois values, and especially the church.

The Agony & The Ecstasy: Charlton Heston tells Pope Julius II he will take his paintbrush when he pries it from his cold, dead fingers. Julius II was the "Warrior Pope," which is reason enough to watch it. A Hollywoodized account of how the world worked when the Church still ran much of it.

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. Actually, The Guardian has an article today from their art critic

pointing out that all the shots you see on TV come from Michelangelo's designs, and he wasn't exactly conventional in his Catholic thinking.

Michelangelo's radical theology seems to have gone unnoticed in the Vatican. Yet Luther would surely have understood him when he said there was no gold on the Sistine ceiling because the heroes of the Bible "were poor men". It was Michelangelo's sexuality, however, that troubled his papal patrons. All his life, he tried to reconcile his passion for Christ with his passion for young men's bodies - insisting in verse that all love is a gift of the divine. The painting in which Michelangelo expresses this most nakedly is the Last Judgment. When the Pope's advisers saw its nudes embracing in Paradise they condemned it as more appropriate for a bathhouse than the Sistine Chapel. After Michelangelo died the nudes had draperies painted over their genitalia and when the fresco was restored in the 1980s many were left in place. After all, you wouldn't want the cardinals getting distracted during a conclave.

Admire the stage instead

And The Devils is certainly excellent. Even my mother thought it was a good film, and she's a practising Christian who normally frowns on nudity in movies.

[fshrink]

2. I managed to avoid ALL of it so far! eom