Thanks, Roy! Always appreciate your reviews. I'll probably see the movie sometime over the next couple of weeks, and going in I've decided to simply take it on its own terms -- a Nolan vehicle with some spectacular imagery and sound. As another sword-and-sandals movie asked, "Are you not entertained?!?"
And Rome was never like that! No one seemed to care much. A book is a book. A movie is a movie. A Manwich is a meal. History is history, as are we all eventually. Fade out.
As to โRome was never like that,โ I recently reprised and enjoyed ๐, ๐๐ญ๐ข๐ถ๐ฅ๐ช๐ถ๐ด. The sequences of the obsequious Senate under mad Caligula resonated for some reason. The series was as vastly entertaining as Iโd found it fifty years ago, but once again I caught myself thinking โAugustus, Tiberius, Livia and the rest of the imperial familyโthis is ๐ฆ๐น๐ข๐ค๐ต๐ญ๐บ how they would have behaved back then had they all been RADA-trained!โ
Yes, wasn't it Thucydides who stated outright that the speeches he provides, not having been there, are what seems like the historical actors would have done and said at the time?
Glad you liked it. I had a good time with it myself. My only complaint (and Iโm not really sure itโs a complaint) is that the way itโs structured โ as a series of flashbacks that are themselves interrupted by cutaways to the Telemachus/suitors storyline โ made it feel like I was watching a clip show. Like somewhere out there, Nolan made a 10-hour prestige TV miniseries of The Odyssey and then strung all the set pieces together for a three hour theatrical cut. Still fun to watch, tho!
Oh, I know. The trouble is that Homerโs frame for the flashbacks, Odysseus regaling his hosts with tales of his adventures, is much more organic than how Nolan does it. For me the frame kept calling attention to itself and breaking the flow of the film. As always YMMV.
i grabbed a copy of Perfesser Wilson's translation over at Tsunami books a week ago. if i am to 'zip' thru this before i see the movie it'll be 'how 'bout never', since i'm still in her intro. i liked her take on the movie in nyrb, & tried to separate her scholarly view from her newly-made millionaire view, but who's to say, really. But her "Odysseus-is-complicated-not-jason-bourne-maybe-ripley" suggestion for Matt Damon, makes me wanna read Wilson's script, er, translation.
Whenever there's a whiff of the literary, GM comes wafting back...
Amazing review as usual, chief. It's always important to remind (as you imply) that every adaptation (or translation) is made for its own time, in its own time. And there's a lot of pressure for a director to stamp an adapted script as their own. (Your comparison to Jason & the Argonauts is apt, though almost no one reads its source, the Argonautika, to check its work.)
I love Wilson's Odyssey & use it to teach from. Her version is very refreshing in that it purges a latent misogyny not present in Homer but accrued across the millenia of translators. Also, she keeps focus on the suspicion that Odysseus is not a reliable narrator of his own story.
"I love Wilson's Odyssey & use it to teach from. Her version is very refreshing in that it purges a latent misogyny not present in Homer but accrued across the millenia of translators."
The barbarian in me keeps thinking about how much the Trojan War, and its aftermath, was caused and influenced by ignoring what women have to say (again, one barbarian's view).
"Odysseus is not a reliable narrator of his own story."
Now this is a version I could really dig, Odysseus as the most epic bullshit artist EVER. We see Odysseus relating his experiences sitting in front of the fire, then cut to what REALLY happened, all played for comic effect. The Laestrygonians turns out to be a mall cop rousting Odysseus and his buddies from some benches in front of the Cinnabon.
Is there only one source for any of the great stories in classical mythology? One of the things about myths is that the stories are retold so many times that itโs like the longest game of telephone ever. No one can claim theirs is the true and correct version. I have tons of respect for classicists who translate the texts and bring the stories therein to life in my native tongue, but I havenโt read Wilsonโs review. I know she was disappointed that the guile of the trickster Odysseus was mostly absent from the film. I also think I remember her saying in an interview after her translation was published that she felt that the Odyssey was a love story, an angle not played up much in the film. I agree But the movie is billed as Christopher Nolanโs The Odyssey, not Homerโs Odyssey. I love them both.
"But thatโs kind of what I liked about it. I mean, I never thought too hard about what Ray Harryhausen was trying to say about the nature of man and society with Jason and the Argonauts, either."
Around 1980 or so, I perused a nice coffee-table book of Harryhausen stills. That was cool, but the best part was text by The Master Himself. He could feel the sand running out, and gazed back wistfully at his golden years. He had plenty to say about what these whippersnappers had done to his beloved cinema. All of the new movies were full of "permissiveness", a word that popped up regularly in the book.
Mind you, in "Mysterious Island" set in the 1860's one of our female leads discards her Victorian hoops and ruffles for a "trim garment" of animal skins, thus setting the tone for Raquel Welch's ensemble in 'One Million Years BC". After all, the dads and older brothers, roped into accompanying the wee-ones to the matinee deserved a treat. Just good clean fun, with lots of monsters.
A real treat would be a chance to see Harry's reaction on the day he saw "Mean Streets" or "Taxi Driver".
If we're sharing our crushes on the women in Mysterious Island, I'd listen to Joan Greenwood read any translation of the Odyssey she cares to read, or the phonebook, whatever. Now I need to go back and rewatch Man in the White Suit.
I've seen it twice and think there's plenty of good in it. The dialogue is generally sub-par to awful (but of course, the dialogue is not the whole script, something that I think Wilson misses in her review, ymmv).
I also think that Damon is miscast; he's still too boyish a presence even with greying hair and raspy voice.
I take your point but that's kind of what I liked about him. In soldiers I've met, even the best and the oldest of them, I've seen this grown-up boy thing: the character and morality most of us acquire over decades, soldiers learn in basic training and in the comradeship of the barracks. I thought during the movie I would actually like to see Damon play Macbeth.
On reconsideration, while I enjoyed Wilson's piece, she, like, elided or ignored a major point: It's an adaptation and with the rarest of exception every adaptation by definition is full of compromises. In this case, movie with limited running time for an audience unfamiliar with the poem and the times in which it's set and all that. So some liberties must be taken, some may be taken. At the end of the day, both poem and movie are entertainments.
Like, by and by, Wilson's piece.
Too, we're in an era in which we're lied to 24/7 about all the important stuff. So Nolan took liberties with which Wilson disagrees. Big deal.
Speaking of, my focus re the film is that Zeus' Law stuff and the anti-xenophobia. Which, in an episode of synchronicity or at least coincidence, led to a wee Google search on Sodom and Gomorrah is which I learned, presuming Google's correct, the primary sin wasn't orgies in the street or other acts of fun but that the people of that fine city were, well, hugely xenophobic to God's visiting angels.
Which, like the movie, circles back to the scumbags running this nation as well as the scumbags corrupting them and the scumbags that keep electing and empowering that first group of scumbags.
But back to art, I gift y'all this exceptional work of fine art:
I haven't seen the movie (but I'm itching to). Somewhat familiar (but rusty) with the subject material. If the major criticism of the movie is that it deviated form some generally accepted (or wished for) thematic content, that's not a criticism at all.
"Sorry, folks. You canโt fully grasp the Odyssey by seeing a film version! You also canโt comprehend it by reading it in a book. You have to hear it sung by a bard in dactylic hexameter while in such an ecstatic state of drunkenness, you channel the Muse and add your own lines."
Thanks for this. I feel less bad about wanting to avoid this until everyone has moved on, and better about avoiding IMAX.
Much as I enjoy the wildebeest masses on the move, I get visuals of the man-made kind without having my cerebrum rubbed in them.
Side note, Lois Smith turns up in the darnedest bits. The sister in Five Easy Pieces. The mom in Falling Down.
I'll see this thing for Samantha Morton, who has not turned up in all the talkshows and other tumultuous hype.
I dream about these celebrities now because of the barrage of Nolan hype. I used to like him for his movies. Now I like some of his stuff but suspect he's a bit of a weirdo, like Kubrick and Malick.
So shoot me for my superiority to celebrity transient glitz.
I read Wilsonโs Odyssey in preparation for an upcoming trip to Greece. I suppose I should see this movie, too. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or O, Brother, Where Art Thou? or Ulysses.
As a callow youth, when confronted with the Iliad and then the Odyssey and then (oh my God, there's another one?!) Virgil's Aeneid I was bored to tears. I thanked the gods that I was born a century too late to be forced to learn Greek and Latin to read them. The classics did not come alive for me until I got to the plays, which were enthralling (apocryphal it may be, but I loved the story that the Chicago police once raided a performance of "The Frogs" looking to arrest some guy named Ari Stophanes).
I haven't seen the film yet, and I'm only sticking my nose into this discussion because it sounds really entertaining, unlike my immature reaction to the source material. But then I think that the best cinematic interpretation of the New Testament is "The Life of Brian." Philistinism gets a bad rap, but I say authenticity and deep meaning be damned, three chairs for entertainment!
Roy is good at this. I'd bet all the money in my pocket you're not gonna find another review that mentions Harryhausen, unless its some failed comedy writer on Substack playing to the pit.
Iโve read Homer in two English translations, Lattimore and Fagels, and found myself slightly preferring the former in each instance, but the critic Guy Davenport did not care for Lattimoreโs approach at all (I reproduce the following excerpts from his essay โAnother ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ,โ included in the magnificent collection ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฆ๐ฐ๐จ๐ณ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฉ๐บ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฎ๐ข๐จ๐ช๐ฏ๐ข๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ, which you, all of you, ought to run, not walk, to acquire):
___________________
And Professor Lattimoreโs ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ, where does it fit in all of this? Like his ๐๐ญ๐ช๐ข๐ฅ, it will please professors and serve as a standard textbook, for to the professorial eye it is accurate. It fits almost word for word over the Greek text; it can be used as a crib by the student. Its architecture is this: there was an extensive wall made of Greek bricks. Brick by brick Professor Lattimore has taken down this structure, replacing each Greek brick with an English one, or perhaps a Basic English one. This is a mode of translation plumped for by Vladimir Nabokov, a translator of formidable talent and effectiveness (though it perhaps ought to be noticed, if only to catch in an inconsistency a man so sure of himself, that when Nabokov translates his own poems he takes his liberties). It is the mode by which hopeful Christians assume the Bible was translated.
Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed. The Greek says โof Odysseus the loved son,โ and Professor Lattimore translates โthe dear son of Odysseus.โ Who uses such language in English? Chapmanโs โUlyssesโ lovโd sonneโ seems more contemporary. Bryant says โdear son,โ perhaps with an impunity that we feel we ought to withhold from Professor Lattimore. I once dined with Professor Lattimore and he did not speak like William Cullen Bryant. He spoke a charming and fluent and even racy colloquial English.
If we take everything in Greek in a literal, grammar-book sense, obviously we are going to come up with some strange locutions. If Homer says โAnd in his hand he had a bronze spear,โ by what determined deafness to English must Professor Lattimore write โin his hands holding a bronze spear?โ The verb is โhave,โ not โhold.โ One may say โin his hand a bronze spear,โ or โholding a bronze spear,โ but not a mixture of the two. And why โhandsโ? The Greek is โhand.โ To read Professor Lattimoreโs ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ we must simply accept the curious fact that he is writing in a neutralized English wholly devoid of dialect, a language concocted for the purpose of translating Homer. It uses the vocabulary of English but not its rhythm. It has its own idiom. One can say in this language such things as โslept in that place in an exhaustion of sleepโ (for Homerโs โaching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleepโ), and โthe shining clothes are lying away uncared forโ (for โyour laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washedโ).
Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars. When, for instance, the Kyklops dines on Odysseusโs men, he washes his meal down with โmilk unmixed with water.โ But why would anyone, except a grocer, water milk? The word that makes the milk seem to be watered is the same as the one that turns up in the phrase โunmixed wine,โ meaning neat. But even there the wine is unmixed because it is for dipping bread into; so the word comes to take on the latter meaning. What the homely Kyklops was doing was dipping the meat in his milk.
There is a chill puritanism about Professor Lattimoreโs program: which is to render the ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ ๐ข๐ฅ ๐ท๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฃ๐ถ๐ฎ into English. Tone be damned, rhythm and pace be damned, idiom (like the milk for dunking) be damned; this version is going to be punctiliously lexicographicโฆ
I've read Lattimore and done my own translations as a grad student (30 years ago). Yeah, maybe Lattimore's translation should be superceded, I(m fine with that. But we can't shit on people who were doing their jobs as best they knew how to.
At your leisure, then, two pages on the composition of โOzymandias,โ from the same collection. I may have linked to this once before back in the day, but Iโve found the essay never suffers from revisiting.
Thanks, Roy! Always appreciate your reviews. I'll probably see the movie sometime over the next couple of weeks, and going in I've decided to simply take it on its own terms -- a Nolan vehicle with some spectacular imagery and sound. As another sword-and-sandals movie asked, "Are you not entertained?!?"
And Rome was never like that! No one seemed to care much. A book is a book. A movie is a movie. A Manwich is a meal. History is history, as are we all eventually. Fade out.
As to โRome was never like that,โ I recently reprised and enjoyed ๐, ๐๐ญ๐ข๐ถ๐ฅ๐ช๐ถ๐ด. The sequences of the obsequious Senate under mad Caligula resonated for some reason. The series was as vastly entertaining as Iโd found it fifty years ago, but once again I caught myself thinking โAugustus, Tiberius, Livia and the rest of the imperial familyโthis is ๐ฆ๐น๐ข๐ค๐ต๐ญ๐บ how they would have behaved back then had they all been RADA-trained!โ
Right. I don't want the truth, I want BETTER than the truth.
Yes, wasn't it Thucydides who stated outright that the speeches he provides, not having been there, are what seems like the historical actors would have done and said at the time?
Better than the truth for the show!
Glad you liked it. I had a good time with it myself. My only complaint (and Iโm not really sure itโs a complaint) is that the way itโs structured โ as a series of flashbacks that are themselves interrupted by cutaways to the Telemachus/suitors storyline โ made it feel like I was watching a clip show. Like somewhere out there, Nolan made a 10-hour prestige TV miniseries of The Odyssey and then strung all the set pieces together for a three hour theatrical cut. Still fun to watch, tho!
Essentially that's how the Odyssey itself is structured, though far less frenetically than I imagine Nolan handles it.
Oh, I know. The trouble is that Homerโs frame for the flashbacks, Odysseus regaling his hosts with tales of his adventures, is much more organic than how Nolan does it. For me the frame kept calling attention to itself and breaking the flow of the film. As always YMMV.
Absolutely agree. I don't know if you remember that mini-series adaptation from the late 90s. That one was sequential, IIRC. Fun though.
I have not seen that, will have to check it out. Thanks!
Yondah lies da castle of my foddah!
An absolutely classic line reading. No notes.
Now say "wine dark sea"
Whine deck see
I love you Spahtacus like you was my own fadduh
Curtis wasn't THAT bad.
Opinions vary! Takes two to tango! Yonda lies the fodda fer a fight!
i grabbed a copy of Perfesser Wilson's translation over at Tsunami books a week ago. if i am to 'zip' thru this before i see the movie it'll be 'how 'bout never', since i'm still in her intro. i liked her take on the movie in nyrb, & tried to separate her scholarly view from her newly-made millionaire view, but who's to say, really. But her "Odysseus-is-complicated-not-jason-bourne-maybe-ripley" suggestion for Matt Damon, makes me wanna read Wilson's script, er, translation.
I thought the opening of Wilson's review smacked of a kind of snobbishness. Kinda soured me on the rest.
lotta that reaction, it seems, on bluesky, which, frankly, has collapsed too many of my veins these days, so mebbe i'll get into The Odyssey today.
when people flaunt, i'm wondering 'do they walk the talk?' (as does, for example, another Wilson woman, A'ja.)
Whattaya want, she's a classicist
The trouble with a classicist - he looks at a tree
That's all he sees, he paints a tree
The trouble with a classicist - he looks at the sky
He doesn't ask why, he just paints the sky
Sounds like something John Cale would say.
CORRECTED I HOPE!!!!
This should be what you need:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/instant-classics/id1831429397?i=1000776073477
(Instant Classics podcast; what one needs to know before seeing the movie.)
Fucking dotards not knowing how to get and paste a linkโฆ
That was kind of a low blow! ;-)
I haven't changed my opinion, but we can time travel if you must! lol
At least the movie's been a blessing for the classics hustlers!
thanks
(yeah, that other one has the aesthetics of an unsolicited dick pic.)
Thatโs our beloved POTUS โ some people say the greatest one ever, greater than Washington or Lincoln โ so all appropriate respect.
"Some people" are now forever banned from breathing. That oughta do it.
Uhhhhโฆโฆโฆ.
Todayโs a day for thinking that, but not saying soโฆ
(Todayโs reading has been Nazis vs Jews in Germany and Poland prior to and during WWII andโฆ you knowโฆ too much resonates or strikes a chordโฆ)
Oh so many dates highlighted in red...
Whenever there's a whiff of the literary, GM comes wafting back...
Amazing review as usual, chief. It's always important to remind (as you imply) that every adaptation (or translation) is made for its own time, in its own time. And there's a lot of pressure for a director to stamp an adapted script as their own. (Your comparison to Jason & the Argonauts is apt, though almost no one reads its source, the Argonautika, to check its work.)
I love Wilson's Odyssey & use it to teach from. Her version is very refreshing in that it purges a latent misogyny not present in Homer but accrued across the millenia of translators. Also, she keeps focus on the suspicion that Odysseus is not a reliable narrator of his own story.
I glad she did that but in a way, it's what she criticized Nolan for doing by making his own changes.
In a way, I guess :D
Sounds like the eternal cry of the C-list film critic: "This is not the film I would have made!".
"I love Wilson's Odyssey & use it to teach from. Her version is very refreshing in that it purges a latent misogyny not present in Homer but accrued across the millenia of translators."
The barbarian in me keeps thinking about how much the Trojan War, and its aftermath, was caused and influenced by ignoring what women have to say (again, one barbarian's view).
That's an interesting comment (about Wilson's translation). I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
"Odysseus is not a reliable narrator of his own story."
Now this is a version I could really dig, Odysseus as the most epic bullshit artist EVER. We see Odysseus relating his experiences sitting in front of the fire, then cut to what REALLY happened, all played for comic effect. The Laestrygonians turns out to be a mall cop rousting Odysseus and his buddies from some benches in front of the Cinnabon.
I eagerly await the theatrical release of your "Life Of Odysseus".
Grok and I are in talks right now.
The ORIGINAL Flashman!
Odysseus was "Bob" before there were Pipes to smoke.
Is there only one source for any of the great stories in classical mythology? One of the things about myths is that the stories are retold so many times that itโs like the longest game of telephone ever. No one can claim theirs is the true and correct version. I have tons of respect for classicists who translate the texts and bring the stories therein to life in my native tongue, but I havenโt read Wilsonโs review. I know she was disappointed that the guile of the trickster Odysseus was mostly absent from the film. I also think I remember her saying in an interview after her translation was published that she felt that the Odyssey was a love story, an angle not played up much in the film. I agree But the movie is billed as Christopher Nolanโs The Odyssey, not Homerโs Odyssey. I love them both.
We appreciate you fore and waft.
"But thatโs kind of what I liked about it. I mean, I never thought too hard about what Ray Harryhausen was trying to say about the nature of man and society with Jason and the Argonauts, either."
Yeah!
Around 1980 or so, I perused a nice coffee-table book of Harryhausen stills. That was cool, but the best part was text by The Master Himself. He could feel the sand running out, and gazed back wistfully at his golden years. He had plenty to say about what these whippersnappers had done to his beloved cinema. All of the new movies were full of "permissiveness", a word that popped up regularly in the book.
Mind you, in "Mysterious Island" set in the 1860's one of our female leads discards her Victorian hoops and ruffles for a "trim garment" of animal skins, thus setting the tone for Raquel Welch's ensemble in 'One Million Years BC". After all, the dads and older brothers, roped into accompanying the wee-ones to the matinee deserved a treat. Just good clean fun, with lots of monsters.
A real treat would be a chance to see Harry's reaction on the day he saw "Mean Streets" or "Taxi Driver".
"... Raquel Welch's ensemble in 'One Million Years BC."
That was around the time I found Harryhausen's creatures less interesting than some of the humans in the movie!
The dinosaurs were key!
Every time another pterodactyl or diplodocus came after Raquel, a little more of her costume came loose.
I'd give this 10 "likes" if I could!
If we're sharing our crushes on the women in Mysterious Island, I'd listen to Joan Greenwood read any translation of the Odyssey she cares to read, or the phonebook, whatever. Now I need to go back and rewatch Man in the White Suit.
My take: I know what The Odyssey means to me. It's cool if it doesn't the same to you.
I've seen it twice and think there's plenty of good in it. The dialogue is generally sub-par to awful (but of course, the dialogue is not the whole script, something that I think Wilson misses in her review, ymmv).
I also think that Damon is miscast; he's still too boyish a presence even with greying hair and raspy voice.
I take your point but that's kind of what I liked about him. In soldiers I've met, even the best and the oldest of them, I've seen this grown-up boy thing: the character and morality most of us acquire over decades, soldiers learn in basic training and in the comradeship of the barracks. I thought during the movie I would actually like to see Damon play Macbeth.
On reconsideration, while I enjoyed Wilson's piece, she, like, elided or ignored a major point: It's an adaptation and with the rarest of exception every adaptation by definition is full of compromises. In this case, movie with limited running time for an audience unfamiliar with the poem and the times in which it's set and all that. So some liberties must be taken, some may be taken. At the end of the day, both poem and movie are entertainments.
Like, by and by, Wilson's piece.
Too, we're in an era in which we're lied to 24/7 about all the important stuff. So Nolan took liberties with which Wilson disagrees. Big deal.
Speaking of, my focus re the film is that Zeus' Law stuff and the anti-xenophobia. Which, in an episode of synchronicity or at least coincidence, led to a wee Google search on Sodom and Gomorrah is which I learned, presuming Google's correct, the primary sin wasn't orgies in the street or other acts of fun but that the people of that fine city were, well, hugely xenophobic to God's visiting angels.
Which, like the movie, circles back to the scumbags running this nation as well as the scumbags corrupting them and the scumbags that keep electing and empowering that first group of scumbags.
But back to art, I gift y'all this exceptional work of fine art:
๏ฟผ๏ฟผhttps://whowhatwhy.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/IMG_0022.jpeg
And speaking of, best of luck to David Hearn on his forthcoming civil lawsuit against Trump's DOJ for false arrest and wrongful prosecution.
You made me click that link twice.
Which link now?
Pot-bellied Trump. You (I think) fixed the first link
Did the podcast link work thoโ?
But in another synchronicities or maybe episode of irony, Beats famously did a video in the nude.
So the link meant to take you to Beard, who once lectured in the nude, takes you to the wrong (semi-)nude.
Only Freud knows whether there was some super-deep Freudian subconscious thing going on.
Me, I think there was just cognitive decline going on there or, circling back to Freud, a fuck up.
"Fuck up" is a perfectly innocuous term to me. They happen all the fucking time.
Why would you do that to a person
Accidentally due to being a retard, a dotard and, worse, a retarded dotard.
Since you asked ๐
Also, just an accident.
Ugh, wish you'd put a trigger warning on that link. Ugh!
My brand is all the trigger warning you should need.
But sure, good idea.
If I can remember.
I haven't seen the movie (but I'm itching to). Somewhat familiar (but rusty) with the subject material. If the major criticism of the movie is that it deviated form some generally accepted (or wished for) thematic content, that's not a criticism at all.
Based on this review, I'm just going to have to wait until GROK-AI produces a historically accurate version.
It will be epic, but probably not in the way anyone would hope for.
Can't wait for the scene where Antinoous & the suitors check their T levels & then get injected.
Well, that's just cynical, friend!
Would this be prior to or following the testicle-tanning?
The only thing following that is the application of lots of olive oil
I really must protest this idea that guys like getting their balls rubbed with oil!
The only thing for it, my friend, is research! :)
I'm not an expert on the topic of "classical Greek ball-tanning," but I haven't come across it in Plato/Socrates. so I think it maybe wasn't a thing
The first rule of "classical Greek ball-tanning" is "don't talk about "classical Greek ball-tanning," dontcha know...
It will do for movies what the CyberTruk did for trucks.
I saw one the other day parked nearby. It had a kind of grey camo wrap and "BODEGA BOYZ" on the side in big pink letters.
Regular Car Reviews nails it:
https://youtu.be/L3oO510dyVI
Can't resist... https://x.com/i/status/2077625631932616848
"Sorry, folks. You canโt fully grasp the Odyssey by seeing a film version! You also canโt comprehend it by reading it in a book. You have to hear it sung by a bard in dactylic hexameter while in such an ecstatic state of drunkenness, you channel the Muse and add your own lines."
Umm... yeah, what's your point? ;-)
Too true!
Thanks for this. I feel less bad about wanting to avoid this until everyone has moved on, and better about avoiding IMAX.
Much as I enjoy the wildebeest masses on the move, I get visuals of the man-made kind without having my cerebrum rubbed in them.
Side note, Lois Smith turns up in the darnedest bits. The sister in Five Easy Pieces. The mom in Falling Down.
I'll see this thing for Samantha Morton, who has not turned up in all the talkshows and other tumultuous hype.
I dream about these celebrities now because of the barrage of Nolan hype. I used to like him for his movies. Now I like some of his stuff but suspect he's a bit of a weirdo, like Kubrick and Malick.
So shoot me for my superiority to celebrity transient glitz.
I read Wilsonโs Odyssey in preparation for an upcoming trip to Greece. I suppose I should see this movie, too. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey, or O, Brother, Where Art Thou? or Ulysses.
Or My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
As a callow youth, when confronted with the Iliad and then the Odyssey and then (oh my God, there's another one?!) Virgil's Aeneid I was bored to tears. I thanked the gods that I was born a century too late to be forced to learn Greek and Latin to read them. The classics did not come alive for me until I got to the plays, which were enthralling (apocryphal it may be, but I loved the story that the Chicago police once raided a performance of "The Frogs" looking to arrest some guy named Ari Stophanes).
I haven't seen the film yet, and I'm only sticking my nose into this discussion because it sounds really entertaining, unlike my immature reaction to the source material. But then I think that the best cinematic interpretation of the New Testament is "The Life of Brian." Philistinism gets a bad rap, but I say authenticity and deep meaning be damned, three chairs for entertainment!
The "Aeneid," like most Roman rips of Greek stuff, was pretty boring. Propaganda, even...
Ari Stophanes was behind the counter of that Chizburgeh joint where you get no Coke, Pepsi and CHEEPS.
That they didn't immediately look on Halsted just north of Downtown indicates a failure of imagination.
I say Pasolini but Life of Brian is up there!
Oh yes, Pasolini's Jesus. As the Firesign Theatre once said, 'Those eyes - weird!"
Did not think I could stand to hear one more word about this movie, but I am glad I read this.
Roy is good at this. I'd bet all the money in my pocket you're not gonna find another review that mentions Harryhausen, unless its some failed comedy writer on Substack playing to the pit.
Iโve read Homer in two English translations, Lattimore and Fagels, and found myself slightly preferring the former in each instance, but the critic Guy Davenport did not care for Lattimoreโs approach at all (I reproduce the following excerpts from his essay โAnother ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ,โ included in the magnificent collection ๐๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฆ๐ฐ๐จ๐ณ๐ข๐ฑ๐ฉ๐บ ๐ฐ๐ง ๐ต๐ฉ๐ฆ ๐๐ฎ๐ข๐จ๐ช๐ฏ๐ข๐ต๐ช๐ฐ๐ฏ, which you, all of you, ought to run, not walk, to acquire):
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And Professor Lattimoreโs ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ, where does it fit in all of this? Like his ๐๐ญ๐ช๐ข๐ฅ, it will please professors and serve as a standard textbook, for to the professorial eye it is accurate. It fits almost word for word over the Greek text; it can be used as a crib by the student. Its architecture is this: there was an extensive wall made of Greek bricks. Brick by brick Professor Lattimore has taken down this structure, replacing each Greek brick with an English one, or perhaps a Basic English one. This is a mode of translation plumped for by Vladimir Nabokov, a translator of formidable talent and effectiveness (though it perhaps ought to be noticed, if only to catch in an inconsistency a man so sure of himself, that when Nabokov translates his own poems he takes his liberties). It is the mode by which hopeful Christians assume the Bible was translated.
Translation involves two languages; the translator is in constant danger of inventing a third that lies between, a treacherous nonexistent language suggested by the original and not recognized by the language into which the original is being transposed. The Greek says โof Odysseus the loved son,โ and Professor Lattimore translates โthe dear son of Odysseus.โ Who uses such language in English? Chapmanโs โUlyssesโ lovโd sonneโ seems more contemporary. Bryant says โdear son,โ perhaps with an impunity that we feel we ought to withhold from Professor Lattimore. I once dined with Professor Lattimore and he did not speak like William Cullen Bryant. He spoke a charming and fluent and even racy colloquial English.
If we take everything in Greek in a literal, grammar-book sense, obviously we are going to come up with some strange locutions. If Homer says โAnd in his hand he had a bronze spear,โ by what determined deafness to English must Professor Lattimore write โin his hands holding a bronze spear?โ The verb is โhave,โ not โhold.โ One may say โin his hand a bronze spear,โ or โholding a bronze spear,โ but not a mixture of the two. And why โhandsโ? The Greek is โhand.โ To read Professor Lattimoreโs ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ we must simply accept the curious fact that he is writing in a neutralized English wholly devoid of dialect, a language concocted for the purpose of translating Homer. It uses the vocabulary of English but not its rhythm. It has its own idiom. One can say in this language such things as โslept in that place in an exhaustion of sleepโ (for Homerโs โaching with fatigue and weary for lack of sleepโ), and โthe shining clothes are lying away uncared forโ (for โyour laundry is tossed in a heap waiting to be washedโ).
Professor Lattimore adheres to the literal at times as stubbornly as a mule eating briars. When, for instance, the Kyklops dines on Odysseusโs men, he washes his meal down with โmilk unmixed with water.โ But why would anyone, except a grocer, water milk? The word that makes the milk seem to be watered is the same as the one that turns up in the phrase โunmixed wine,โ meaning neat. But even there the wine is unmixed because it is for dipping bread into; so the word comes to take on the latter meaning. What the homely Kyklops was doing was dipping the meat in his milk.
There is a chill puritanism about Professor Lattimoreโs program: which is to render the ๐๐ฅ๐บ๐ด๐ด๐ฆ๐บ ๐ข๐ฅ ๐ท๐ฆ๐ณ๐ฃ๐ถ๐ฎ into English. Tone be damned, rhythm and pace be damned, idiom (like the milk for dunking) be damned; this version is going to be punctiliously lexicographicโฆ
I've read Lattimore and done my own translations as a grad student (30 years ago). Yeah, maybe Lattimore's translation should be superceded, I(m fine with that. But we can't shit on people who were doing their jobs as best they knew how to.
Kinda depends on their intent, dunnit?
Well that was bracing, thanks
At your leisure, then, two pages on the composition of โOzymandias,โ from the same collection. I may have linked to this once before back in the day, but Iโve found the essay never suffers from revisiting.
https://rcareaga.com/davenport_ozymandias.pdf
Thanks for that.