Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: A Man For All Seasons!

Well of course they tried to whack Trump, just as they tend to murder everyone who dares to stand athwart the designs of Progress. Sir Thomas More is not only cinéma's great reactionary hero, but one of history's too. A Man For All Seasons recounts with bottomless wit and pathos the escalation of his persecution by heretical, philandering fatass Henry VIII and his cadres of Maoist goons from the pointed nudge to threats, imprisonment, struggle session and show trial, to the final execution of the recalcitrant saint. Sir Thomas (Paul Scofield, who honed the role to perfection in many prior stage performances) seeks only to live up to the minimum standard Solzhenitsyn espoused: not to take arms against his era's iteration of the perennial petulant libtard revolt against truth, beauty, hierarchy and God, merely to opt out of it; not to say that which he does not believe. Let the lie come into the world, let it even reign there for a time, but not through me.

Who would win: the most painstakingly prudent man of his time, or everyone else being petty and retarded?

Sir Thomas remains a dignified enigma, one of the few grown-up protagonists to grace the screen, but the drama lays bare the small souls of his regime-compliant nemeses. Cromwell (Leo McKern), Henry's chief hatchetman, appeals to the consensus of the credentialed classes like the classic reddit midwit and/or Woman On Twitter (but I repeat myself):

Like UGH, like seriously? Like don't you see that all the celebrities you hate, the journalists who sneer at you, The Science, every corporation, and a bunch of soyjaks with "PhD" in their bios all agree that men are women, Russia blew up its own pipeline, covid was deadly to all gatherings except George Floyd protests, and Israel is our greatest ally? Like, do you even care about peer pressure at all?

Of course it's not too long before this crude veneer of sophistication gives way to blunt threats of torture on the rack. But most of us are neither More nor Cromwell, saint nor psychopath. Between the Good and the Bad scurry the Ugly. Perhaps you recognise yourself in this guy...

Or this guy...

Or this little asshole...

This oleaginous pissant is every resentful commie social climber you've ever met in your life. The most well-observed depiction of the true, abject face of evil in the movies.

All these people have their litanies of rationalisations. Of course, they all have to live under the considerable shadow of Fat King Fuckpants and his temper tantrums. Few scenes in movies demonstrate the hapless lot of sycophants trapped in the orbit of power like the one where Henry (Robert Shaw) jumps off his boat to find himself splattered in mud, turns and gives an I-meant-to-do-that laugh, taken up by his toadies, who all pile into the mud after him. It must be what it's like pretending Biden is the president.

Couldn't be me!

You know, as much as people shit-talk the boomers (and they're right to), at least the boomers actually sold out: they had goofy principles to begin with, but when they abandoned them, they at least got paid. My generation (millennials) abandoned all our principles for literally nothing. We all grew up laughing at Pain Olympics and the "Offended" page of Encyclopedia Dramatica, then at some point we all started pretending to be pious libtards, but we didn't even get anything for it. Man buries the millennial with this riposte:

You did it for worthless social credit.

Watch A Man For All Seasons, and repent.