Wake Up Dead Man (2025)

A year ago I watched Conclave and said that the Catholic heart of the film did not not reach me. Well, after laying with a 27-year-old Catholic priest in New York last June, I think I have changed. I really dig this movie. The writing is relentless and disquieting, yet still light and acerbic. The presentation is pleasantly stylized. And it has a god-tier cast: I never thought I'd see James Bond, Olivia Pope, Tasha Dunken's dirty otter, Hawkeye, and hot priest share the same stage. 

Religion is a fascinating aspect of the human experience. I think of it as surrendering a part of yourself to a higher abstraction, and we all do it regardless of whether we consider ourselves religious. At the end of this surrender is a reward, which I think is the real reason we participate in the religion, whether we'd like to admit that to ourselves or not. Martha and Grace both gave everything they had to the poisonous church that took and took from them until they had nothing left to give. Shows that you have to got to pick a belief system that doesn't completely backload its rewards, just to protect yourself from abuse, if nothing else. 

The only flaw is that the film doesn't have a real emotional core. It mostly offers characters that you laugh at and feel pity for, not empathize with. Still, it's somewhat cathartic to laugh at these people, because they very much resemble certain real people that I see on the the internet more and more, and they really are sad. Love a woke film when it's good, even when it's a little condescending.