Satan’s Screen Time

We went to see The King’s Speech, which was quite good even though there were no surprises, because I’d seem the same story dramatized in a television movie a couple years ago.  The story was the same, but the climactic scene was different: in the TV movie, the big scene was George VI’s first speech as king; but in the screen version, the big speech was given on the first day of the Second World War.  I guess they decided that a speech amounting to “PS: I’m the new King-Emperor” was insufficiently dramatic. Better to have bombs falling, albeit on Warsaw.

Which reminds me (because ’tis the season, I guess) of the traditional holiday song:

Hark,  the herald angels sing

Mrs. Simpson’s pinched our king.

By the way, did anyone notice that during the thirteen years spanned by the film’s story, Logue’s sons aged, while the princesses didn’t?

Now that the Queen Mother has died, everyone’s rushing to film the stories she wouldn’t have liked to see.   I’m waiting for the story of Bertie’s younger brother George Duke of Kent, who was a hard-partying, promiscuous bisexual who slept with Gloria Vanderbilt and Noel Coward (though not at the same time).  He was also addicted to morphine and cocaine, was the Grand Master of the Freemasons, and died in a World War II plane crash, said by some to Not Be Accidental.  (Said by some Wiccans, in fact, to be the human sacrifice required of the royal family when England is in danger.   Which leads me to wonder why, if they had to sacrifice somebody, it couldn’t have been the Duke of Windsor.)

While at the theater, we saw trailers for Season of the Witch and The Rite, which indicates that Satan will be getting a lot of screen time here in 2011.  Reviews seem divided as to whether Season of the Witch is so-bad-it’s-good or simply awful, though Charlie Jane Anders suggests it was simply a rewrite of a Monty Python movie.  In any case, I suspect Satan is deeply embarrassed by it.

Nicholas Cage plays a Crusader who develops a conscience, though only after slaughtering a couple thousand Muslims.   Cage, by the way, is scheduled to fight Satan again later this year, in something called Drive Angry 3-D.  In it, he escapes from Hell, steals a muscle car, and tries to prevent his granddaughter from being sacrificed in order to bring Hell to Earth.  Or something.   Will Satan fall victim to an Impala Super Sport with many chrome accessories?  The trailer makes the film seem hideously awful, with not nearly enough campy humor to redeem it (as in, for example, Machete).

Didn’t Nicholas Cage used to be, y’know, an actor an’ shit?  I seem to recall that he made some good movies before he decided to become a second-rank Stallone.

More interesting to me than why Cage decided to downgrade his career is the fact that Hollywood— which, as we all know, is a nest of atheists, commies, and liberals— is now making a whole passel of movies supporting not simply a conservative interpretation of Christianity, but a series of films supporting the most reactionary positions of the Church conceivable.   Positions that say, “Witches exist and must be burned,” “Demons exist, can possess anyone they like, and must be driven out with Latin and holy water and (maybe) torture,” and possibly even, “Hell is just on the other side of that Chevy.”

Isn’t it a few years too late for this kind of millennialism?

On the other hand, perhaps it’s simply a plot.  Maybe the Secret Hollywood Masters decided, “We’re going to degrade religion by making it the central element in the most hideously cheesy films imaginable.  No one will take Christianity seriously after this!  Ha-ha-ha!”

If so, they’re doomed to disappointment.  If people back in the day could watch stuff like The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, Ben Hur, and Salome and not notice that they were a hideous parody of their religion, they’re hardly going to balk at Season of the Witch.

Hmm.  Maybe Nic Cage isn’t the new Stallone.  Maybe he’s the new Victor Mature.