Month: April 2025

Non habemus papam

Well shit, RIP Frank. Not exactly a surprise, I know, and yet… somehow it is, despite that. He seemed to be doing well after getting out of hospital, well enough to do his Easter business just yesterday. Suppose his timing was good if nothing else. Maybe the thought of having to deal with J. Divans was what finished him off.

I am, alas, inclined to agree with Father Nathan here:

Yeah. With the general rightwards shift going on around the world, I can easily imagine the church doing the same. Not that I think it’s ever been a force for progress as such, but I think old Jorge was more forward-looking than most, and there’s going to be plenty of people in the Vatican who’ll be glad to see the back of him so they can let the Vatican slide backwards…

The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962)

Ah, few things were better than those old Italian film posters for films like this; fairly sure that some of the posters were better than the films they were promoting… though I hesitate to say that about this film, which I do think is well made, and the recent blu-ray restoration shows it off to good effect. Director Riccardo Freda had basically invented Italian gothic cinema in the late 50s with I vampiri; by this time, the genre was well established but, as Tim Lucas’ commentary notes, Italian audiences only really went to see Italian films that pretended they weren’t homegrown… hence why almost everyone here is given an Anglo pseudonym of varying degrees of ludicrousness (“Frank Smokecocks“? And I thought “Anthony Daisies” was an unfortunate attempt to translate a name literally…). Also, scriptwriter Ernesto Gastaldi was give the instruction to come up with something in the vein of Roger Corman’s Poe films, and I daresay he gave the producers that… with an additional twist, that being the titular doctor’s necrophilia kink. AIP wouldn’t go that far, hence why they refused to distribute it, and also why star Robert Flemyng tried to get out of it; the first script he read didn’t have the necrophilia angle, and it was too late to back out once he got the later version that did have it… Anyway, while Flemyng’s lack of enthusiasm doesn’t exactly help things, Hichcock is nonetheless worth watching for its visuals if nothing else; the narrative is maybe a bit thin and prone to moments of making no sense that Lucio Fulci might’ve considered bold, but the visual telling of events is often extraordinary. I offer some examples that you can click to enlarge:

Nothing if not great to look at throughout; I love how a lot of 60s cinema looks, but Freda and cinematographer Raffaele Masciocchi conjure up some quite marvellous stuff with colour (Tim Lucas wonders if Freda’s old cameraman Mario Bava offered some uncredited assistance), and the visuals are solidly accompanied by Roman Vlad’s music (for some reason, the only crew member credited under his own name). Hichcock might be more style than substance in the end, but the style is impressive enough that I’ll take that…

Tariffs for the Vatican!

Pope Ghosts JD Vance at Vatican, Sends Top Cardinal to Lecture VP on Compassion

Vice President JD Vance flew to Rome hoping to meet with Pope Francis. Instead, the Pope skipped the meeting entirely—and sent his top cardinal to deliver a pointed message about compassion and care for the vulnerable.
Vance was greeted not by the pontiff, but by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. In a statement, the Vatican said the meeting covered global conflicts, political unrest, and “difficult humanitarian situations,” with a clear focus on “migrants, refugees, and prisoners.”
The conversation sounded more like a lecture than a diplomatic exchange. And the Pope’s absence was hard to ignore.
While Sky News reported that Vance had a brief, private encounter with the Pope at his residence, there were no details, no photos, and no official mention. The real meeting—the one on the schedule—never happened.
The message? Clear enough: the Pope isn’t backing down from his public criticism of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

Old Frank was in hospital for a while there but, as the article notes, he’s out now and doing his public duties and met Charles and Camilla recently, so this is a very deliberate snub, meeting the leader of the opposition but not one of his highest-profile converts. Obviously the Catholic church still leaves much to be desired, but still nice to see. I suspect Mushroom Cock would declare the US to now be sedevacantist with regards to the church for this insult, if only he knew how to spell it…

Now Barabbas was hungry

This appears to be three men in loincloths on crosses next to what looks like a shopping centre parking lot with two Macca’s signs, and a fourth man in a loincloth hanging out at some tent to the side. I have absolutely no idea what this is otherwise about; obviously I know it’s a crucifixion scene, I’m not that dense, but… what really is going on? Were the dudes on the crosses doing it in shifts? Is the fourth guy supposed to be Barabbas? Is he taking his lunch break or something? Why is it taking place… there, wherever there is? I mean, I think the idea of staging the crucifixion like this is odd enough, but in that setting it seems more than usually incongruous.

THERE’s a shock

Fyre festival 2 ‘postponed’ just weeks before it was scheduled to start

Fyre festival 2 has been “postponed”, according to messages sent to ticket holders, just weeks before it was scheduled to start.
The event, advertised as a luxury music festival, was supposed to take place in Mexico from 30 May to 2 June. It was intended as an improved followup to the failed Fyre festival in 2017, which experienced problems with security, food, accommodation, medical services and artist relations, resulting in the festival being indefinitely postponed and eventually cancelled.
“The event has been postponed and a new date will be announced. We have issued you a refund. Once the new date is announced, at that time, you can repurchase if it works for your schedule,” read a message sent to ticket holders, ABC News reported. […]
Despite descriptions about the location of the sequel festival on the website, Mexico officials had previously confirmed that no event of that name was planned to be held there.
“We have no knowledge of this event, nor contact with any person or company about it,” Edgar Gasca, from the tourism directorate of Isla Mujeres, told the Guardian. “For us, this is an event that does not exist.”

Yeah, when your advertised location calls bullshit on you like that, you’re probably fucked. This, I’m sure, comes as no surprise to anyone paying attention. I fear, however, this isn’t the last we’ve heard of Fyre Festival 2, not least because I will be surprised if those refunds turn out to have been real, and there’ll probably be a whole stack of other legal issues arising…

Is this what he thinks about Edolf too?

This is RFK Jr’s latest statement about autistic people.

I am becoming increasingly fine with the idea of everyone in this fucking regime dying. I mean, we all die eventually, of course, but I want them to die sooner rather than later. And preferably violently. I don’t want any of these people to live long enough to die of natural causes.

And I HATE that about me. As I may have said before, I don’t like the idea of taking pleasure in someone’s death, I could refuse to mourn them but I couldn’t actively celebrate their departure. I could do that now. These people have made me a worse person, because I could be very happy about theirs. Their leaving this world would actually leave it a better place. And I REALLY hate that I’m like this now. But that’s where we are. Cos I certainly don’t see any other way out of the current nightmare.

Last and First Men (2020)

I’ve been looking at my Century of Cinema progress and been… I don’t know, maybe a bit bothered that so far it’s leaned somewhat heavily on horror. That’s because I do have a fair bit of that sort of thing in my collection waiting to be watched (and indeed rewatched), but my general taste is broader than just the horror end of things and I’ve felt like I should maybe cast a slightly wider net than that… so, for title #30*, I looked at the unwatched videos on my hard drive for something a bit more serious and arthouse, and picked this. And yeah, “serious and arthouse” was what I got. Woof. I think I may need something trashier to balance me out after this…

Anyway, this is based on the novel of the same name by Olaf Stapledon, fairly famous SF novel from 1930 that, frankly, I’ve tried but failed to read in the past… from what I can see, this mostly just retains the plot conceit that the 18th and last human race is contacting us, the first human race, from two billion years in the future; the story of the intermediate races is kind of passed over. Also, this is one of the most abstract book adaptations I’ve ever seen; the only things that appear on screen (there’s no humans involved apart from Tilda Swinton as the narrator from the end of humanity) are spomeniks, the old Yugoslavia’s somewhat perplexing WW2 memorial monuments. They’re as bizarre in this film as I suppose they must be in reality, these giant abstract concrete things that just appear in random parts of the landscape. All of this originated as a multimedia event (played here in Sydney among other places) by composer Johann Johannsson, who died of a drug overdose before the film was finished; there is quite some beauty to it (the monochrome Super 16mm film visuals are often stunning), but the thing is quite plodding and felt a lot longer than its 71 minutes given that it doesn’t exactly follow a conventional narrative or plot. Still, I can’t say it didn’t give me what I was looking for from it, so there’s that.

*You may notice I haven’t actually made that many posts for this tag, which is because some of them have been rewatches of films I reviewed years ago at my old film blog. Apart from The Unknown and The Naked Gun, I haven’t felt any need to say anything else about those ones.