Movies
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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.
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The mum and dad thing is just us conditioned to think that anything ancient (Greek or Roman or Egyptian etc) has to be Shakespearean English to be authentic when, well, that isn't in the slightest bit authentic. Or for them to speak in an antiquated manner. I liked they went contemporary and tbh, I didn't get distracted at all. If it was all in classical dialect (whatever that is) I reckon it would have been far more distracting.
The mum and dad part of it, well, surely it's just translated right? Him saying 'father' appears more serious of a word but the Greeks back then would have referenced their parents using whatever the equivalent of mum and dad was.
I feel like I'm coming across as a Nolan fanboy at this point
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Nothing wrong with that at all. I’m probably one myself.
I don’t think Odyssey is the right vehicle for it, but I am now curious to see what Bronze Age life would have authentically looked like in Ancient Greece. Would they be wearing their armor at all times and swimming effortlessly in it? How did men and women, and parents and children, really address one another? How different was Sparta from Athens? Did Ithaca even exist? Where was it and what was it like? How did members of different city-states interact and get along?
Totally agree on Fight Club, as sacrilegious as it feels to admit it.
Think it, be it.
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@mclaincausey Bronze Age life would probably be very different to what we expect from “ancient Greece” as we’re going back maybe another 500 years or so (this is an extension of @Nick’s point). Life, dress, armour, social structure would not be what we’ve been conditioned to expect. I guess this is one of the things Nolan had to address. Would something more authentic to the original period look more wrong to us than a blend of our expectations of ancient Greece and modern sensibilities? Maybe authenticity is the wrong standard for a story that’s been retold and reinterpreted so many times.
I probably should see it before sharing further thoughts!
“His thoughts were red thoughts and his teeth were white.“
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@mclaincausey Wait for Elon Musk to find out the dynamics and details of Spartans between them, their wife and their lover.
The imagination is the golden pathway to everywhere - Terence McKenna
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@ARNC yep! I mean it’s Bronze Age occurrences versus Iron Age retelling. Homer himself had anachronisms in the original source material. He was recording (with poetic license) oral traditions from centuries ago, through an intervening dark age of civilizational collapse. In fact I shouldn’t have used the term “city states.”
So we shouldn’t treat The Odyssey in any form as historiography. Never was.
Think it, be it.
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@endo true. Homer “himself or themselves,” I should have said.
