Re-upping this since the movie is now released. *
Whatever the arguments on CI about Padre Pio, Shia LaBoeuf, or the film itself in its aesthetic aspects, the more serious focus should be on the director, Abel Ferrara. So far, the various Catholic online tabloids have been
generally uncritical, mostly repeating the recommendations of various Capuchins who acted as advisors to the film.
Ferrara's
Wiki bio says he's a Buddhist, for what that's worth. His filmography includes gratuitous blasphemies not much different from any night on network TV. It's known that he started his career in porn. Sure, he took narrative liberty with the
Padre Pio film, focusing more on political clashes in southern Italy pre-WWII than on the priest himself. OK, so he's on par with other worldly celebrities who get trotted out as [cultural] Catholics.
Yet it gets worse. A few highlights: His teacher and mentor,
Rosa von Praunheim, is admired in highbrow avantgarde circles for his/her/its activist depravity. In a 1993
interview in ArtForum about the film
Bad Lieutenant, Ferrara uses the interview and the film as
vehicles for his egotistic ramblings about the First and Sixth Commandments. In 2021, Ferrara joined Italian poet Gabriele Tinti for a reading at
Cappella Sansevero, a Neapolitan 17th century chapel with its own
macabre history. The chapel houses several aesthetically admired/spiritually notorious sculptures, and to this day, is affiliated with occult goings-on. Tinti's work barely hides its own hermeticism, and several 2021 interviews and reviews around that poetry reading were published in online sites readily describable as hipsters-meet-
Eyes Wide Shut.
*
tl;dr: The
Padre Pio movie is more than merely vulgar. What is it is one more demonic trojan horse meant to confuse and undermine Catholics misled into believing that it's a historically grounded biopic.
Topic: Shia LaBeouf to play Padre Pio! (Read 10101 times)