Movies
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I mean if we’re going to get hung up on white teeth we should probably also get hung up on trans, Desi, black, and Latino actors being portrayed as Greeks, no? Why is realism so important anyway? Especially for a 3,000 year old myth with clearly impossible actors and events throughout?
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The teeth and dialogue are more of an issue because they're part of how the characters are actually presented within the world of the film. Really modern-looking dentistry and grooming stand out when everything around them looks ancient and realistic. At least to me, the race of an actor is far less relevant - and whether an actor is trans is even less relevant.
Yea, realism isn't inherently important. But Nolan clearly goes out of his way to establish realism throughout the film, which is why the modern details stand out a little. Anyway, very good film, these are just small things!
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I guess I just missed Nolan trying to establish realism. Magical realism? Sure. But I’m confused by all this talk about realism. People like Elon Musk saying they’re going to use AI to do a “realistic” version of the Odyssey… a myth from thousands of years ago featuring 6 headed monsters, witches who turn men into pigs, giant cyclopses, sirens, gods trifling with humans…. It’s just about like wanting to make a realistic version of Dante’s Inferno. It’s a category error.
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Yeah, fair. Though I’d argue that Homer’s Odyssey is grounded in a retelling and recording of oral tales he received through many retellings. At best it is a distorted recording of some aspects of how some people in antiquity saw their world and what they believed about its history. And we lack the cultural context and language to truly contextualize and understand it as they would have. So I guess I just don’t give a shit because we aren’t capable of understanding it as contemporaries would have even if it had actually occurred.
Side-note: I’d be surprised if ancient Greek theater audiences found the male actors portraying women distracting whatsoever on the basis of not looking or sounding like women. It’s interesting that modern audiences expect verisimilitude to be spoon fed to us as if we were observing real events. I wonder how widespread that is and how it evolved?
That’s one reason I think books are a superior medium. They actively engage your imagination in the act of painting the picture instead of forcing you into someone else’s vision.
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@mclaincausey I watched the radiohead documentary this director made probably a dozen times in the first year it came out
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@mclaincausey Well-put. And I agree, books will always be superior
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The teeth and dialogue are more of an issue because they're part of how the characters are actually presented within the world of the film. Really modern-looking dentistry and grooming stand out when everything around them looks ancient and realistic. At least to me, the race of an actor is far less relevant - and whether an actor is trans is even less relevant.
Yea, realism isn't inherently important. But Nolan clearly goes out of his way to establish realism throughout the film, which is why the modern details stand out a little. Anyway, very good film, these are just small things!
Exactly this! Well said
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@SKT Fight Club springs instantly to mind, for a lot of reasons. The movie is much tighter than the book and just really well done. I also had occasion to reread the book and rewatch the film in maybe 2017? (I was teaching in a university program that gave us instructors a limited choice of texts to teach and that was one of them, I say as a defense I probably wouldn't have picked that at random lol.) Point is, the book felt so, so dated and the dialogue just wooden and lazy, whereas the film I think stands up to time.
