It’s generally accepted that Pope Leo is a savvy, intelligent, well-educated fellow who’s not only been around but knows the spiritual ins and outs of transcendent cinema. This is partially indicated by Leo calling Ordinary People one of his four all-time faves. But including The Sound of Music and Life Is Beautiful in this quartet…uhm, sorry but nope.
HAL 9000 response: “Stop, Leo. Will you stop, Leo? Stop, will you?”
But at least Leo understands and embraces the idea of movie plexes existing, after a fashion, as debauched churches…once-holy places of occasional spiritual contemplation .
Sexy, stand-alone movie theaters are, of course, nonexistent these days…existing only in boomer and GenX memory banks…once regarded in some quarters as lights-out havens for spiritual contemplation, but now mostly degraded into gladiator arenas. People used to sit in single-screen movie theatres for 95, 105 or 115 minutes or longer and actually pay attention for the most part!
Now the only way to savor really good films in a theatrical environment with Pope Leo types…people who ‘get’ it and love the worshipful aspect, that is…the only way to sample this kind of secular high is to (a) attend an upscale film festival (Venice, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Berlin, New York, AFI Fest in Los Angeles, Sundance, Savannah) or (b) catch films at smarthouse cinemas in big cities.
The church thing was killed by (a) coarse, ball-scratching, brain-fart audiences, (b) elite Hollywood wokethink propaganda movies (2017 to 2024) that all but smothered the art of cinema itself, (c) Millennial and Zoomer couch potatoes submitting to streaming feeds, (d) AMC theatres showing 20 to 25 minutes of trailers before each and every feature, and (e) old-fart GenXers and geriatric boomers who submitted to understandable pandemic terror five and two-thirds years ago, but who will never, ever return en masse due to (a), (b), (c) and (d) plus lingering squeamishness.
That older married woman I spoke to a few weeks ago who’d never even heard of Anora…good God.
Leo again…
Repeating: The art of cinema and the faith of cinematic churches is alive and well if (a) you can attend the above-named major film festivals or (b) if you restrict yourself to connoisseur movie houses (Film Forum, New Beverly, Vista, etc.) and upscale, movie-friendly museum forums like MOMA, LAFCA, London’s Princess Anne, etc.