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An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

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Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#91

Post by traes »

phoronixrly wrote: post #68
jf wrote: post #49

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try". Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't ab…

> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey . It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

Writing a screenplay adaptation of a poem and writing a translation in contemporary language are entirely different endeavors.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#92

Post by traes »

antonvs wrote: post #47
nickcw wrote: post #39

[after a pretty scathing review which I mostly agree with] > Despite all this, the release of The Odyssey is still an event to celebrate. In what we are told is the streaming era, this epic is bringing audiences back to cinemas. In what we are told is a time of declining literacy and the ‘death of the humanities’, translations of The Odyssey, including mine, are flying off the shelves. Some of those who buy the book…

> "doing his best to get the general public reading again" This seems very detached from reality. I very much doubt that many people seeing a movie like this will think "oh, I should read The Odyssey", or "I should read more." And most people who try the former are unlikely to get very far.

The author recently published a retranslation of the Odyssey, that has rocketed to the top of best seller lists thanks to the movie. I'm sure her bank account provides her plenty of direct evidence that this is happening.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#93

Post by JsonDemWitOster »

jrimbault wrote: post #62
jf wrote: post #49

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try". Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't ab…

How do you get 'roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"' from this critique? Nowhere does she say something vaguely like that.

[dead]

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#94

Post by netsharc »

forgingahead wrote: post #44

It was a good entertaining movie. I found all the online right-wing hysteria about this really silly and stupid. The moral of the story should actually appeal to reasonable moderates everywhere: Zeus's Law, whereby strangers (refugees/immigrants) are welcomed, should not be taken advantage of, ie when the strangers (refugees/immigrants) misbehave and spit in the faces on their hosts, lest they break the culture and t…

> But there were unspoken conditions to our acceptance, and that was the secret we were meant to glean on our own: we had to be grateful. The hate wasn’t about being darker, or from elsewhere. It was about being those things and daring to be unaware of it. As refugees, we owed them our previous identity. We had to lay it at their door like an offering, and gleefully deny it to earn our place in this new country. There would be no straddling. No third culture here.

> That was the key to being embraced by the population of our town, a community that openly took credit for the fact that we were still alive, but wanted to know nothing of our past. Month after month, my mother was asked to give her testimony in churches and women’s groups, at schools and even at dinners. I remember sensing the moment when all conversation would stop and she would be asked to repeat our escape story. The problem, of course, was that they wanted our salvation story as a talisman, no more. No one ever asked what our house in Iran looked like, what fruits we grew in our yard, what books we read, what music we loved and what it felt like now not to understand any of the songs on the radio. No one asked if we missed our cousins or grandparents or best friends. No one asked what we did in summers or if we had any photos of the Caspian Sea. “Men treat women horribly there, don’t they?” the women would ask. Somehow it didn’t feel OK to tell them about my funny dad with his pockets full of sour cherries, or my grandpa who removed his false teeth when he told ghost stories.

From https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/04/dina-nayeri-un...

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#95

Post by vintermann »

traes wrote: post #91
phoronixrly wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Emily Wilson is a professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton, The Death of Socrates and a biography of Seneca. She has also translated Seneca and Euripides as well as both the Iliad and the Odyssey . It seems to me they did indeed try, and you didn't even check who the author was.

Writing a screenplay adaptation of a poem and writing a translation in contemporary language are entirely different endeavors.

They're pretty related endeavors. Not literally the same of course, but in both cases you're trying to convey something profoundly alien (because of its age) to a modern audience.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#96

Post by Kon5ole »

The most surprising to me was that a movie famously shot entirely on IMAX with real practical effects looks so bad. The shots are very often close-ups, with shaky action and extremely short DOF. Nothing is in focus for long enough to discover it.

When the rare wide panoramic shot appears it's flat sunlight on a featureless beach. Greece surely has great nature but it was not on display here.

Overall a very weird decision for the equipment being used IMO. Any quality IMAX brings is lost, or even hurts the experience due to the DOF or lack of light.

That's just my impression of course. I'm aware it has gotten praise for the visuals but can't understand why.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#97

Post by watwut »

modo_mario wrote: post #85
jrimbault wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not controversial. It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. There has been some critics* of her translation among classicists, but not _controversies_. *: which is only natural, that's their job to criticize each others' translations

>It's only controversial in the culture wars part of the world. I haven't read her version but I believe that's why I heard it criticised? That the culture war speeps into it. In fact she keeps at it here "The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio H…

The culture war does not speeps into the translation itself. There is literally no culture war in the book itself. Not even a hint of it.

What she wrote in the last paragraph in the review is response to the usual suspects working hard to make the casting into culture war. You know, that black actor being in the movie is a great offense to the classic argument. It is ok to respond to it once that argument was made by powerful people with a lot of following.

The "she keeps at it" is weird considering this a review where commentary fully belongs and culture war thing was not started by Willson or even Nolan. They just made their things. Then other people made it into culture war. Then Willson responded to existing culture war claims in her review of the movie. Is the underlying assumption that only Musk gets to broadcast his opinions? And that if others respond then it retroactively invalidate their previous work?

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#98

Post by TFNA »

4gotunameagain wrote: post #48

The race-neutral casting of Nolan’s Odyssey was inevitably deplored in some quarters. But there is nothing progressive about it. Most of the non-white actors – Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o, Himesh Patel, Corey Antonio Hawkins, Travis Scott – play versions of the Black best friend, whose only role in the drama is to provide aid to the white protagonist. It wasn't enough for Emily Wilson (an upper class white British Americ…

French filmmakers have been criticized within France for white-only casting going back to at least the 1980s. By the time that sub-Saharan African, Arab and Southeast Asian faces were a normal feature of French city streets, white-only casting struck many as tone-deaf and stuck in the past.

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#99

Post by remus »

jf wrote: post #49

When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better" my response generally falls somewhere between "you should" and "I'd like to see you try". Not everyone understands just how hard it is to create something from nothing, so I can excuse a certain level of ignorance in a critic. But I find it very disappointing when a critic does understand how hard it is in their domain, but isn't ab…

> When I read a critique that could roughly be summarized as "I could have done better"

This feels like a pretty shallow take on a what seemed to me like a pretty in depth and interesting review. Clearly there's a huge amount of potential ground that could have been covered in a film like this, so a critical look at what was and wasn't included, the angles that were chosen, the parts that were glossed over etc. can be revealing. Put another way, I think the review is a pretty in depth look at the questions "what was the artist trying to achieve?" and "Did they succeed?".

Re: An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

#100

Post by foldr »

> The Homeric epic was already an adaptation. The poem used a relatively new technology – the written alphabet – to rework existing mythical traditions [...]

Can someone explain this one? I understand that 'The Odyssey' as a canonical work of literature can't predate the alphabet. But what she writes here makes it sound as if the written poem is just a loose adaptation of existing mythical traditions. I thought the consensus was that the poem had existed in a reasonably fixed form as part of an oral tradition prior to being written down (and that this is why it contains various features making it easier to memorize).

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