Conclave: Edward Berger’s last film, a remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, managed to get some attention on Netflix and at the Oscars in one of the pandemic years, 2021 or 2022; I always got it mixed up with Sam Mendes’ 1917, a thoroughly pedestrian “one-shot” exercise following WWI soldiers through the trenches. Berger’s film is locked away on Netflix, whereas I saw 1917 at the now shuttered Landmark Harbor East in December 2019. I probably would’ve seen All Quiet on the Western Front if it played anywhere, and I know I’m not alone; if that remake was anything like his sleeper hit Conclave, exhibitors have another reason to remain pissed at Netflix.
The trailer for Conclave made it look like one of this decade’s many “fake movies,” ones that belong in an aside on 30 Rock or The Simpsons rather than fully-realized in our world. This is no Red One or The Fall Guy; still, whoever tweeted that Conclave has “strains of Verhoeven” left me sorely disappointed. While the film moves along at a brisk pace, Ralph Fiennes coordinating gossip within the Vatican so that they may best help select a new Pope. Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and many other men (and Isabella Rossellini) court and destroy each other with flattery and melodramatic revelations—of adultery, secret children, taboo medical conditions.
Conclave isn’t subversive or particularly interesting beyond its enjoyable two hours—in other words, a perfectly fine programmer meant to do well with a certain audience. And now it has… still, like Barbie and Oppenheimer last year, this is just a reminder of what once was, an occurrence that’s now an aberration: a movie doing well in theaters based mostly off of the cast and good word of mouth.
Ghost: Never seen it, and in all of American film history, I have the most blind spots during the George H. W. Bush administration. The pottery scenes, the clay covered hands, the most iconic moment of the movie over and done within a minute near the beginning. This is a two-hour crime thriller with a money laundering scam at the center. Demi Moore, Patrick Swayze, and Whoopi Goldberg star in the second highest grossing movie of 1990, a sleeper hit with mixed reviews that took off on home video. Despite the ridiculous (and unnecessary) plot, and the over-use of then-new CGI to render Swayze as a ghost, any time him and Moore are together the movie just takes off, soaring into the highest tier of movie melodramas.
But those moments are few and far between, unlike John Carpenter’s somewhat similar but far superior Starman—Ghost is less concerned with the love between its stars than the run of the mill embezzlement plot girding iconic moments that need no support.
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