Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 1 Post
  • 6 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023
  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetomovies@lemm.ee•Has anyone here watched Conclave? How was it?English
    2·
    17 hours ago

    Ah interesting. I noticed those hints, but thought they were going in a different direction.

    Spoilers

    Given all the talk about other bishop’s illicit personal relationships, I was wondering if he had gotten a woman pregnant and she then got an abortion.

    But I agree with you strongly re trans vs intersex. It would have been much less believable for the Catholic Church to embrace, even unknowingly, an AFAB trans man as pope than AMAB intersex.

    I’d push back a bit at your characterisation of him as “not biological male” though. Intersex people like Benitez do a good job of demonstrating why exactly the position held by some people (especially transphobes trying to make a biological deterministic argument) that even if gender might be complicated, sex is a binary, is untrue. Between chromosomes, gonads, genitals, gametes produced, hormones produced, hormone receptors, and secondary sexual characteristics, it’s pretty clear that sex is too complicated to accurately talk about whether someone actually “is” or is not male. We know explicitly that he had female gonads, male genitals, and male secondary sexual characteristics. Which certainly implies a more male-like hormone production and/or reception. Personally I wouldn’t say that Benitez “is a biological male”, but nor would I confidently assert that he “isn’t a biological male”.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPtomovies@lemm.ee•Conclave was almost a great movie, but failed to stick the landingEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    Re the context of when the book was written…I didn’t actually know it was based on a book, as I watched it. I did already know that as I wrote this review, but that was too late to shape my original interpretation of the film as I watched it.

    Plus, I don’t really love it as an excuse. There are two possibilities as I see it. Either it worked in the book but didn’t translate well to screen, in which case they should have made the necessary changes to come up with something that did work. Or it didn’t work in the book and they should have taken the opportunity of the adaptation to improve upon it. It wouldn’t be the first time an adaptation significantly changed the source material.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zoneOPtomovies@lemm.ee•Conclave was almost a great movie, but failed to stick the landingEnglish
    1·
    18 hours ago

    with quite a bit of foreshadowing that he is going to be corrupted by a lust for power

    Yeah I definitely saw this and was a little disappointed it didn’t amount to anything. I left it out because I wasn’t actually sure it was really there, or if I just read it into the film without serious evidence.

    It’s like a 9/10 film for 85% that drops to a 6/10 right at the end

    Those are almost the exact numbers I was gonna give it. I’d have said 8/10 down to 6/10.

  • Zagorath@aussie.zonetomovies@lemm.ee•Has anyone here watched Conclave? How was it?English
    1·
    1 day ago

    Which part of the ending can you see coming? The person who ends up being pope, I predicted based purely on narrative structure right from the beginning. The twist after he becomes pope? I never would have called it, so I’d love to know what the early clues are to that.

    Personally, I wouldn’t have minded the ending if it hadn’t felt so rushed.

    Spoilers

    Going from the Mexican guy having like 5 votes in the previous vote to the bombing and his relatively under-written speech (to its credit!), to suddenly he wins the next vote. I had expected him to have a very good showing in the next vote, then some more politicking, and then win a final vote. Had they gone for a bigger speech in that theatre, and risked over-writing it, maybe then his sudden win would have felt more earnt. But the way they went with it felt incredibly rushed.

    Once the twist of him being intersex was revealed, I had expecting to see some fallout of that in the denouement. Instead, there just…wasn’t a denouement. Which just added to how rushed it all felt.