I’m all for seeing Odysseus as flawed and not an unambiguous hero. He often strikes me as a self-serving con man who’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is. But we already have an adaptation of the Odyssey that nailed this aspect of Odysseus. It’s some of George Clooney’s finest comic work and it’s got a killer soundtrack to boot. Seriously though I haven’t seen Nolan’s Odyssey but the air po faced reverence that hangs over most of his movies makes me worry. That works for a movie about Dunkirk maybe but not so much for many other subjects.
I loved the NYT piece! And agree that the dialogue in the movie is bizarre, even farcical, at points... when Odysseus says "I'm going to assess the situation" a bunch of the audience (me included) burst out in nervous laughter. Even more than "Dad" or the lines about the age of bronze coming to an end, I think that's what got me. But I had fun and that's (honestly) what matters! (And I had the most fun when Antinous is screaming "get the spears!! the spears!!" like an adult baby, in the almost-nasalish manner that only Pattinson can do.)
As for King Rao--I'm curious what you thought! Been a while since I last read it, but I feel like Athena and King Rao fit somewhat weirdly (but maybe productively?) into the halfway hero scheme--mostly because Athena has to clean up the mess (and the promises) that King Rao left behind, acting in his stead not to clear his name but to contextualize him and his life's work (her) to the Shareholders.
Robert Pattinson was soooo good. I feel like as an actor it must be kind of fun playing a character to whom you're not meant to give a single redeeming trait.
I liked King Rao a lot, though (which seems to be happening to me a lot lately, hence the slowdown in reviews on here) I kind of feel like I need to read it twice to have better comments on it. I think my main criticism is that I thought Shareholder life was not really envisioned in a convincing way—which can be partly but not totally put down to the way Athena herself is never in the mix of Shareholder life. I think this stood out to me because I've been going through all this stuff about The Dispossessed, and the societies on Urras do really feel like places people live. But that's really a bit of a nitpick. One thing that also really worked for me about the book is the way you really can't help but cheer on King Rao in the past timeline, even though you know that this is going to end really badly.
re: the halfway hero thing, I think it fits, not only because King himself just bolts to the Blanklands, but also the attitude Athena has by the end of the story, even before she ends up in some kind of (dying?) hallucination, is basically that human life is over within three generations. And the revolutionaries in the Blanklands are similarly paralyzed, since they can't (also won't) use violence but can't escape ecological catastrophe either. So nobody knows what to do… but even if they did, they probably lack the nerve to do it.
Regarding placing ads before movies: you probably can!
I've poked around a bit on pricing for stuff at cinemas (I was looking at putting together a film festival with a coworker). My memory is that pre-show ads are paid for on a per-screen-per-week basis, so it might be $50 per screen-week, so if you want to advertise before the movies at a 4-screen multiplex for a month, it'd be $50 x 4 screens x 4 weeks = $800. (I have no idea if $50 is the right price point here; my memory is that when I was looking a few years back it was a bit lower than that for the local theater I was looking at, and it would almost certainly be higher at a fancier theater, or might be even lower at a theater in a less affluent region).
They might refuse you if they think your ad would look too unprofessional - like I don't think there's first amendment protections for your ability to place ads at theaters. But also they might just be like "hey, cool, free money".
Because I'm a philistine I didn't know that Ulysses is in Dante, but there is a lot of that version in the movie. He is in hell for 1) the deception of the Trojan Horse 2) sailing too far west after the end of his journey. I guess drawing on the Divine Comedy can't be too objectionable to the classical purists. However it seems Dante had not actually read the Odyssey, so maybe it is?
yeah I’m not totally sure what versions of the Odyssey or general Odysseus stories Dante would have been able to read, but I don’t think (?) he could read Greek.… I feel like Dante’s Ulysses is still more basically driven by curiosity though—like my memory is that he goes too far because he wants to see something more clearly.
i read an interesting essay by Diana Wynne Jones recently where she makes the case that she chose to write children’s literature because it was the only genre in which she could be free to write the Spenserian heroic narrative she wanted to…Alan Garner is a similar writer to me in the sense that even his adult work gets classed as “children’s literature” because of his pursuit of an extremely private and unusual vision of heroic narrative…if we are fancasting Nolan adaptations that will never happen I vote for those two writers. specifically, I think, Fire and Hemlock and Boneland, which have all the timeline nonsense he loves. (great piece, by the way! gave me some new things to chew on with nolan, an artist i mostly rejected when i stopped being a teenage boy.)
I need to read Fire and Hemlock! My DWJ knowledge is mostly limited to things the library I used as a kid had. (Alan Garner is also a writer I keep meaning to read but haven’t.) But I like this direction… Mr. Nolan hire this commenter as the consultant!
🙏🙏 Chris my man hit my line. Fire and Hemlock specifically ties into your idea of the halfway hero because it’s a Tam Lin riff and DWJ’s Tam Lin figure is exactly that kind of sin eater, a sacrificial figure…but of course, he’s not the real hero! the book is about Polly’s refusal to forget him, to draw him out of the shadowy embrace of the Queen of Fairies that he would maybe prefer to be in. it’s sort of like if Nolan’s inevitable tragic wife character had an actual role in the story so maybe that is another reason why he will never adapt it haha
unrelated but I’ve thought on and off there’s probably an interesting sibling book to Weird Sisters with children’s fantasy books, but it’s not a book I think I’d want to write because inevitably Neil Gaiman seems so mixed up in the scene (really, in any genre scene post-Sandman I guess)—and Coraline aside I didn’t really like his work pre-allegations and I don’t imagine reading them post-allegations would make me more happy to be reading and rereading them.
i have thought about this also! i ultimately think the center of science fiction, before about the 1980s (?), was magazine writing, and that enabled its writers to have meetings of the minds and talk shop and build relationships, leaving a good foundation for a biographer to work their magic. i do not think similar venues exist for fantasy a) because it is a largely novel-based genre and b) because the idea of “genre fantasy” was sort of invented post hoc by Ballantine Books in 1969, which is not true for science fiction. is there such a thing as a New Wave movement of fantasy writing that can’t be reduced to various waves of reaction to Tolkien? (this argument is admittedly based on an adult conception of “genre fantasy”; children’s writing is probably a closer-knit field, but i have no real knowledge there.)
gaiman’s work i think is of historical interest because of how trend-hoppy he tended to be. as someone who unfortunately has read most of his writing i can say that a lot of it is very much in dialogue with his heroes (his best story, “bitter grounds,” is gene wolfe cosplay), so it would be interesting to trace his work as a kind of history of the genre market from the 80s to the present. (i also will not be doing this because he and his books can rot in hell!!)
it’s true though she’s also kind of a nightmare psychiatrist who drugs you without your knowledge and then tells you that the effects of the drug really manifest your true feelings lol.
I’m all for seeing Odysseus as flawed and not an unambiguous hero. He often strikes me as a self-serving con man who’s not quite as clever as he thinks he is. But we already have an adaptation of the Odyssey that nailed this aspect of Odysseus. It’s some of George Clooney’s finest comic work and it’s got a killer soundtrack to boot. Seriously though I haven’t seen Nolan’s Odyssey but the air po faced reverence that hangs over most of his movies makes me worry. That works for a movie about Dunkirk maybe but not so much for many other subjects.
I loved the NYT piece! And agree that the dialogue in the movie is bizarre, even farcical, at points... when Odysseus says "I'm going to assess the situation" a bunch of the audience (me included) burst out in nervous laughter. Even more than "Dad" or the lines about the age of bronze coming to an end, I think that's what got me. But I had fun and that's (honestly) what matters! (And I had the most fun when Antinous is screaming "get the spears!! the spears!!" like an adult baby, in the almost-nasalish manner that only Pattinson can do.)
As for King Rao--I'm curious what you thought! Been a while since I last read it, but I feel like Athena and King Rao fit somewhat weirdly (but maybe productively?) into the halfway hero scheme--mostly because Athena has to clean up the mess (and the promises) that King Rao left behind, acting in his stead not to clear his name but to contextualize him and his life's work (her) to the Shareholders.
Robert Pattinson was soooo good. I feel like as an actor it must be kind of fun playing a character to whom you're not meant to give a single redeeming trait.
I liked King Rao a lot, though (which seems to be happening to me a lot lately, hence the slowdown in reviews on here) I kind of feel like I need to read it twice to have better comments on it. I think my main criticism is that I thought Shareholder life was not really envisioned in a convincing way—which can be partly but not totally put down to the way Athena herself is never in the mix of Shareholder life. I think this stood out to me because I've been going through all this stuff about The Dispossessed, and the societies on Urras do really feel like places people live. But that's really a bit of a nitpick. One thing that also really worked for me about the book is the way you really can't help but cheer on King Rao in the past timeline, even though you know that this is going to end really badly.
re: the halfway hero thing, I think it fits, not only because King himself just bolts to the Blanklands, but also the attitude Athena has by the end of the story, even before she ends up in some kind of (dying?) hallucination, is basically that human life is over within three generations. And the revolutionaries in the Blanklands are similarly paralyzed, since they can't (also won't) use violence but can't escape ecological catastrophe either. So nobody knows what to do… but even if they did, they probably lack the nerve to do it.
Regarding placing ads before movies: you probably can!
I've poked around a bit on pricing for stuff at cinemas (I was looking at putting together a film festival with a coworker). My memory is that pre-show ads are paid for on a per-screen-per-week basis, so it might be $50 per screen-week, so if you want to advertise before the movies at a 4-screen multiplex for a month, it'd be $50 x 4 screens x 4 weeks = $800. (I have no idea if $50 is the right price point here; my memory is that when I was looking a few years back it was a bit lower than that for the local theater I was looking at, and it would almost certainly be higher at a fancier theater, or might be even lower at a theater in a less affluent region).
They might refuse you if they think your ad would look too unprofessional - like I don't think there's first amendment protections for your ability to place ads at theaters. But also they might just be like "hey, cool, free money".
filing this away…
Because I'm a philistine I didn't know that Ulysses is in Dante, but there is a lot of that version in the movie. He is in hell for 1) the deception of the Trojan Horse 2) sailing too far west after the end of his journey. I guess drawing on the Divine Comedy can't be too objectionable to the classical purists. However it seems Dante had not actually read the Odyssey, so maybe it is?
yeah I’m not totally sure what versions of the Odyssey or general Odysseus stories Dante would have been able to read, but I don’t think (?) he could read Greek.… I feel like Dante’s Ulysses is still more basically driven by curiosity though—like my memory is that he goes too far because he wants to see something more clearly.
i read an interesting essay by Diana Wynne Jones recently where she makes the case that she chose to write children’s literature because it was the only genre in which she could be free to write the Spenserian heroic narrative she wanted to…Alan Garner is a similar writer to me in the sense that even his adult work gets classed as “children’s literature” because of his pursuit of an extremely private and unusual vision of heroic narrative…if we are fancasting Nolan adaptations that will never happen I vote for those two writers. specifically, I think, Fire and Hemlock and Boneland, which have all the timeline nonsense he loves. (great piece, by the way! gave me some new things to chew on with nolan, an artist i mostly rejected when i stopped being a teenage boy.)
I need to read Fire and Hemlock! My DWJ knowledge is mostly limited to things the library I used as a kid had. (Alan Garner is also a writer I keep meaning to read but haven’t.) But I like this direction… Mr. Nolan hire this commenter as the consultant!
🙏🙏 Chris my man hit my line. Fire and Hemlock specifically ties into your idea of the halfway hero because it’s a Tam Lin riff and DWJ’s Tam Lin figure is exactly that kind of sin eater, a sacrificial figure…but of course, he’s not the real hero! the book is about Polly’s refusal to forget him, to draw him out of the shadowy embrace of the Queen of Fairies that he would maybe prefer to be in. it’s sort of like if Nolan’s inevitable tragic wife character had an actual role in the story so maybe that is another reason why he will never adapt it haha
unrelated but I’ve thought on and off there’s probably an interesting sibling book to Weird Sisters with children’s fantasy books, but it’s not a book I think I’d want to write because inevitably Neil Gaiman seems so mixed up in the scene (really, in any genre scene post-Sandman I guess)—and Coraline aside I didn’t really like his work pre-allegations and I don’t imagine reading them post-allegations would make me more happy to be reading and rereading them.
i have thought about this also! i ultimately think the center of science fiction, before about the 1980s (?), was magazine writing, and that enabled its writers to have meetings of the minds and talk shop and build relationships, leaving a good foundation for a biographer to work their magic. i do not think similar venues exist for fantasy a) because it is a largely novel-based genre and b) because the idea of “genre fantasy” was sort of invented post hoc by Ballantine Books in 1969, which is not true for science fiction. is there such a thing as a New Wave movement of fantasy writing that can’t be reduced to various waves of reaction to Tolkien? (this argument is admittedly based on an adult conception of “genre fantasy”; children’s writing is probably a closer-knit field, but i have no real knowledge there.)
gaiman’s work i think is of historical interest because of how trend-hoppy he tended to be. as someone who unfortunately has read most of his writing i can say that a lot of it is very much in dialogue with his heroes (his best story, “bitter grounds,” is gene wolfe cosplay), so it would be interesting to trace his work as a kind of history of the genre market from the 80s to the present. (i also will not be doing this because he and his books can rot in hell!!)
I did not realize that Fire and Hemlock is a Tam Lin riff it's going way up the list of to reads now!!!
Emily Wilson perfectly described calypso in this movie as Odysseus’s psychiatrist, giving him drugs and talking about his feelings
it’s true though she’s also kind of a nightmare psychiatrist who drugs you without your knowledge and then tells you that the effects of the drug really manifest your true feelings lol.