One Is Fake, the Others Aren't

I. Let the Fresh Air of the Spirit Dry the Laundry

Conclave (dir. Edward Berger, 2024), an entertainment about the election of a pope, looks like it's going to air clerical dirty laundry, and it does some of that.
Halfway through, however, when the priest Lawrence (a terrific Ralph Fiennes) kneels at his bedside to pray, troubled by spiritual dryness, I started to suspect the movie of reverence... not for Church politics, but for the Holy Spirit.

And reverential it is.
During the final vote, a breeze flutters the voting material in front of Lawrence, sitting in the Sistine Chapel where the vote is held. He looks up, to a high window that has been shattered earlier.
The famous call of the reforming pope (now saint) John 23 comes to mind:
Open the windows of the church and let the fresh air of the Spirit blow through.

For all of Conclave's sophisticated design values (it's gorgeous!), this scene also reminded me of the childish movie The Sound of Music, when the nun played by Julie Andrews reminds herself,
Mother Superior always says, whenever God closes a door, somewhere he opens a window.

As the credits rolled, I turned to bink and said,
"That was weirdly pious."

"Yes," she said, "it was like Song of Bernadette."

Also, bink said, in the vein of Shoes of the Fisherman––or Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Zeffirelli's love song to St. Francis, both championing pure hearts in a corrupt Church.

But kneeling by your bed to pray? That's how non-Catholics think priests act.
Sure enough. Robert Harris, who wrote the novel Conclave, said,

"I approached this not as a Catholic and not as an expert in the Church. So my preparation began by reading the gospels, which are revolutionary..."

He didn't realize the gospels are revolutionary until his sixties?
That explains a lot.
This movie believes that the Spirit works through the Church.
And it does, just as it works through the Speedway gas station.
That is, if the Spirit works, it works everywhere.
Even in a lowly peasant girl in France.

I roll my eyes at the reverence––(the healing Spirit troubling the waters is here represented by turtles)–– but I do recommend the film.
It's a romp, a slow romp, but a fun one, with pleasing visuals and a teasing, too short turn by Isabella Rossellini as the nun running hospitality.
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II. "I'm moving toward as much less as possible."

It's hard for fiction to be as convincingly weird as real life. You know? The Spirit might very well use turtles to trouble the waters, but when you put it in a fiction movie, it seems contrived. I grow impatient.

While I was house sitting, I watched two excellent documentaries on the Criterion Channel.

The first was The Gleaners and I, by Agnes Varda (2000).
Why didn't someone make me watch this years ago?
It's THRIFT LIFE!

I knew it was a well-regarded doc but had thought it was about agriculture.
Sort of, but not really. It's about people who survive or create by gathering throw-aways, and it's as much about urban scavengers as rural.
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III. "Richard Nixon should do time in a greenhouse."

The second was a rewatch of Hearts and Minds (1974, dir. Peter Davis)--a classic about the US in Vietnam--have you seen it?

I watched it twice--the second time with the director's excellent commentary.
I also watched footage that didn't make it in the film, including a half-hour interview with Tony Russo, who worked alongside Daniel Ellsberg (who is in the film) to release the Pentagon Papers.
Russo interviewed Vietnamese prisoners of war held by the US in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, and realized the war was unwinnable and that the US was on the wrong side.

US leaders should do time in prison, he says.
But "I don't want to see them brutalized," he said. "Nixon should do time in a greenhouse, taking care of plants."

The film has no narration. Not a problem for many people my age, but I wonder what someone young, of Marz's age (born in the 1990s), much less a teenager would make of it.