Nolan is so ridiculous

[Elok]

I'm not approaching this from the angle of "is this a period-faithful retelling of the story?" but of "is this immediately immersion-breaking for the typical American whose butt is expected to fill the seat?" You could certainly make a movie starring only plausibly Greek actors who look like they came off an Athenian vase, though it would have none of the A-listers Hollywood likes to cast. Given La-La Land's usual priorities, I would be a fool to expect this. Do you remember Troy, starring Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom? It took a story about a hardened warrior-aristocrat sulking in his tent because his boss stole his rape victim, and somehow warped it into a preachy antiwar parable, because George W. Bush. They do not care about the source material except as a recognized intellectual property. They don't care what I think either, I am only registering my annoyance with the disingenuous way we have discussions about race and representation in film.

A fellow I know on Discord notes that the intention here may have been simply to make Helen as visually distinct as possible from the rest of the cast. This fits with Nolan's usual style. It's still dumb.

[Bereta_Eder]

hahahaha yeah I agree about Troy
I remember thinking: why do they make us (greeks) look like the bad guys and also what is olaf the viking doing wearing agamemnon's helmet.

although I do believe that as the blible says. the last will become first, and brad pitt having a reputation of being just a phalic heart throb of no other notable atrtibute completely nailed the indestrctubility arrogance and lust for ambition that achilles had. Then, again, maybe he didn't need to act that much

[Elok]

Re: the Nolan movie, I have heard that it actually has or can be taken to have a surprisingly right-wing subtext (the suitors are taking unjust advantage of our culture's tradition of hospitality, clearly we need to drive them out with extreme violence, HINT HINT). Ordinarily I would disregard this as just some internet edgelord's take, the powers-that-be wouldn't sell that message, but again, Nolan. The Dark Knight came out at the end of the Bush years, and it depicted civil rights and due process as kind of a nuisance which virtuous people can temporarily set aside without consequence when they need to, and everybody loved it. Sometimes America is just really frickin' weird.

[Bereta_Eder]

There were some ancient greek aspects in nolan's film that he tried to display and not just make a movie about contemporary america. and indeed the fear or the dismissal of the gods (and its consqeunces) were very real but it just ddin't come through, for me at least.

the black helen didn't bother me in the slightest. it was historically wrong just as the german helen in troy was historically wrong.

I will be very candid and maybe be labeled as a racist? or smothing? I hope no but here it goes.

DO you know what really broke immersion for me? I mean even more than odysseus looking like an american veteran with PSDT than anything relationg to greece?

the black athena. This to my mind broke immersion completely and I tought it was a sacrilege. And that's because I grew up with a very clear image of what the goddess athena looked like. I mean EXACTLY what she looked like. I have no idea what helen looked like apart that she had white arms but everyone knows athena. way better than any photograph. and ai'm mainly talking about facial and body characterists. that little girl had nothing in common wih it.

I think nolan just wanted to shock/provoke play in the hands of whatever today's culture wars are and that's it. but to my midn that was not the msot important problem of that very mediocre film.

of course he's going to cash on the odyessay tale. homer made sure about that. but really. meh

[Elok]

I mean, Athena is a literal goddess and can presumably manifest as any number of boring actresses with RBF if she pleases, regardless of their ethnicity. Also Zendaya is in a lot of things now for reasons I am not clear on. I'm going to assume she was the one sober person who thought to use her phone's camera at a very, very wild party in Malibu some years back.

[Bereta_Eder]

hahahahaha

as any number of boring actresses with RBF

exactly

she looked like she was cosntantly consuming entire harvests of lemon trees.

athena, same, as any god, could appear as anything she wanted but her "true" shape was immortialized. the proudness of her stature, the ideal proportions of her feminine and strong body, her straight nose and eyes looking down on you. that's not equivalent to RBF and has absolutely nothing to do with that actress whoever she is.

i mean I am in front of the divine it would be a bit of a let down to see it ressemble my adorable(?) but very mortal next door neighboor

[Lorizael]

There is a certain amount of pissing on my head and telling me it's raining here (on Christopher Nolan/Hollywood's part). I give it roughly 0% odds that Nolan just put out a casting call for "youngish pretty woman with prior SAG credit" and the black lady just happened to put in the best audition. This is not community theater where you have to take what you can get; he could have called for brown-eyed redheads, twenty to twenty-five, hold the freckles, like he was ordering Chinese takeout. He consciously chose to assign a black woman to the part of, famously, the most beautiful woman ever, presumably to make some kind of statement about beauty and racial standards etc. I don't know whether Mycenaean-era Greeks would have found her attractive, though I suspect not (our beauty standards are, in my experience, heavily informed by what we're used to). But it does annoy me that Nolan is allowed to make a statement, but we as the audience are not allowed to say that making that statement in the context of this particular film can only weaken it. Yes, yes, black women can be pretty, but this is simply distracting on a Watsonian/diegetic level; the Queen of Sparta is Kenyan and everybody is awkwardly pretending not to notice. Damon, Hathaway, or Holland do not look particularly Greek as such, but I suspect if you dropped any of them into Ithaka in 1000 BC they would be more or less visually unremarkable (unsure about prevalent hair colors prior to centuries of immigration in the Byzantine era followed by Ottoman rule, but IIRC the works of Homer refer to golden-haired Hellenes), whereas Lupita Nyongo'o would be comically conspicuous at 500 feet and people would assume she was foreign. While the average viewer is not going to have a firm idea of what phenotypes Homer was familiar with (before he went blind) it is plain on a gut level that ancient Greece didn't have a lot of black girls. This is obvious and I should not need to spell out the distinction.

I have never seen this movie and don't intend to, but this is an ongoing thing in Hollywood. Compare the second Dune, where the Fremen are cast as all different kinds of nonwhite people. I get the concept Villeneuve was gesturing at--we're serious artists doing a metaphor for Western colonialism, give us a cookie--but I saw them and immediately wondered why the people in this smallish, insular, largely endogamous community looked so drastically different from each other. The hoity-toity artistic statement makes the story worse on its own terms. Perhaps this is because we live in such an ironic, meta-aware, modern society or something, and expecting unbroken immersion is naive, but seriously, it's dumb.

Exactly, it's about skin color.

[Lorizael]

..."is this immediately immersion-breaking for the typical American whose butt is expected to fill the seat?"

Well through the first weekend it appears to be wildly successful and popular, so apparently not. Maybe only subversive, snickering coastal elites have seen it, though, and not the simple, hardworking coal miners of Mingo County, WV.

[Bereta_Eder]

in greece some people are just being racist as expected

and others are being very "enlightnened" as expected.

they are both irritating

now for the hard truth: do you know how manhy greeks or any other country for that matter has actually sat their butts down and actually READ the whole odyssey?

A small fraction and that doesn't include me either!

One thing that this film did and it's great I think if I can follow it through is that I will actually plan to put the odyssey in my reading list and hardcore read it from start to finish

[Lorizael]

At least for my generation and earlier, nearly every American is supposed to have read The Odyssey; it's almost always part of the high school English curriculum.

[Bereta_Eder]

apparently us too (I googled it) at 1st grade of gymnasium
i remember nothing of it but that is possibly because I approach vampire volume years of old

[Elok]

Nobody reads the Odyssey. Like I said, the pacing is pretty awful. Didn't read it in high school. I'm going to guess it was more gripping to ancient Greeks who got a lot more subtle details out of it.

Well through the first weekend it appears to be wildly successful and popular, so apparently not. Maybe only subversive, snickering coastal elites have seen it, though, and not the simple, hardworking coal miners of Mingo County, WV.

If you could engage with what I'm actually saying seriously that would be peachy-keen. If you are too angry at red-staters whose arguments are superficially similar to mine to engage with it seriously, you might as well leave off entirely. A bit of bad casting is not, by itself, going to sink a movie, especially in an irrelevant role. It probably modestly helped him by generating controversy buzz. That does not make it a good choice from an artistic perspective.

[Lorizael]

If you could engage with what I'm actually saying seriously that would be peachy-keen. If you are too angry at red-staters whose arguments are superficially similar to mine to engage with it seriously, you might as well leave off entirely.

I stopped when you didn't bother to respond substantively to my earlier points. Re: anger, you've got multiple very long paragraphs about how a single weird casting choice in a movie you haven't seen and aren't going to see is clearly, obviously, necessarily another salvo in the all-consuming culture war aimed at people like you and not just, like, a decision made in the context of casting a Hollywood movie, where personalities, who knows whom, who's on the rise, etc. are paramount.

[Bereta_Eder]

seeing as the greek state in its infinite stupidity financed this film for some obsure reason and it is my tax money that paid for some of that, I find it that I should have a say in that. The black helen was so out of place like seing a duck in outer space. it is utterly ridiculous and is taken as such. no point there.

but seeing that little black girl it took me a long time to even understand that she was supposed to be athena. she looked nothing like her. and it is true that daemon makes me think the martian austranaut somehow got standed in the aegean it didn't irk me s much. I don't know. it did feel like someone was trying hard to press a point. Against me.

also faithful penelope the one name guaranteed to make feminists enter into manic siezures, somehow became a suffragette? unless it was like that in the text? I doubt it.
and it's not like ancient greece didn't have a lot of women tales playing strongh parts (amazons amongst others).

at the end of the day

you have a clever guy trying to get home to his wife. sure he went around and slept around a bit but that's what happens you know. and it is riveting for a son to wait for his father and together slaughhtering all the sleazy suitors. and of course the woman remained faithful.

what's so wrong about that? too patriarchical? that's the odyssey though

[Bereta_Eder]

In short, africans asians rappers pakistani warriors are the american society, the american melting pot. it has nothing to do with ancient greece.
It's like people are stupid and can't understand anything that doesn't complettely conform to their reality.

or as potrokalos said: there are two kind of people in this world. Greeks and those wanting to be greek