The Odyssey

We went and saw The Odyssey last night. It was a watershed moment for me.

During that interminable movie, I decided I just don't have to pretend to be a part of the Hollywood cult. The movie felt, in many ways, not like a movie at all, but like a chorus of everyone on the film crew chanting their creed over and over and over for 3 hours. You know the one - men are pigs, women are oppressed, trans men are men and, most loudly of all, the Greeks were black, the Samurai were black, Cleopatra was black, King Arthur was black, the Eskimos were black, the Tsar was black and the Mayans were black.

I just don't have to do that and I'm not a racist for not playing along.

Hollywood's rules say that every film has to have a certain percentage of oppressed peoples (read: non-white, non-Jewish) in order to be considered for an Oscar. Presumably, no one from the A-list of actors or film crew talent would work on, say, a retelling of Le Morte D'Arthur that was 100% white. They'd lose access to future work and be howled out of Hollywood for being racists.

Well, I don't work in Hollywood. My job isn't threatened by this and I think it's all not just ridiculous but off-putting and wrecks the film. Ellen Page, who looks like a 10 year old boy, shows up early in the film and is used by Odysseus as a decoy guarding the Trojan Horse. The little idiot gets skewered right away, but her death is comic and not tragic. She's clearly a girl and would never have been given that job. She's there because Hollywood is a cult and casting a mentally ill woman who thinks she's a man is part of the movie's background chant of the progressive creed.

It's a bad movie that gets worse from there.

Short review: Imagine sitting for 3 hours and watching a video of a bunch of grown men yelling at each other in a foreign language while they work vigorously in a butcher shop. That's the movie. There's no variation of mood or pace, it's just 3 hours of sausage-making, beef shredding, hams going through slicing machines and chickens being shot out of cannons into Cuisinarts where they are pureed, all while burly men shout at each other in, what, Greek? No, not Greek. There aren't any Greeks in the movie. How about a mix of Russian and Bantu.

There's a black person in nearly every shot. They aren't explained at all, they're just there, all the time, everywhere. It looks a lot like this.

Djimon Hounsou as Sir Bedivere in King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017)

Like I said, I am not going to pretend this is improving the movie any more. It just isn't. Movies like this have a constant background hum of that bloody creed being chanted over and over and over.

A little more about the black people cast in the film. At the beginning of the movie, I think the first person we meet is Travis Scott. He's a bard, you see. He's also a rapper. His song about Odysseus the hero is terrible. I'm not going to pretend any more. It's just horrible.

He's a bard. If you don't think he's a really good bard, you're a bigot.

Finally, there's Helen of Troy. She's played by Lupita Nyongo for reasons that make all the sense in the world to the cult.

The face that launched a thousand ships.

I'd never seen her before, but I knew she was in the movie. Was she going to be pretty?

No. Not even close. When we first meet her, she's with her husband Meneleus, having been brought back from Troy. On her absolutely best day ever, this girl is a 3. She's not filmed on her best day. She's not the face that launched a thousand ships, she's just a particularly loud round of the progs' chorus.

I'd made my decision about Hollywood long before she showed up so having some nasty, ugly DEI chick shoved in my face as Helen was exasperating, but not terminally so. The patient was already dead.

As for the movie aside from those mortal failings, I didn't like anyone except Anne Hathaway's Penelope and Charlize Theron's Calypso. Those I could relate to. Everyone else was despicable or dismissible. I had no idea at any time why anyone was doing anything. I like Matt Damon, but his Odysseus was just kind of a semi-loser. He's trying to get back home, but everything he does goes sideways. He would have been a sympathetic character in a different movie. In this one, he's just another guy slicing, blending and grinding meat while shouting in Urdu at all the other men.

The biggest problem with the film was that there was nothing for Odysseus at the end of his voyage. Because nearly every scene was encrusted with gore and violence, it wasn't like Odysseus was traveling to find peace and tranquility and beauty. There wasn't any in the whole film. It was an unrelenting grind.

Finally, the ending was comical, reminiscent of a scene from the Marx Brother's Monkey Business. In that scene, which I can't find on YouTube, the Marx brothers are trying to get off an ocean liner where they've been stowaways. To avoid getting caught, Groucho steals some clothes from a doctor who is asleep on a deck chair. He shows up in the gangplank exit line right after another passenger has passed out, yelling about how he can't take another moment on this ship and is having a nervous breakdown and he'll die if he spends another day at sea. Groucho pushes his way to the front of the line, makes like he's examining the man and then writes a prescription on a pad and hands it to the officer managing the exit saying, "His nerves are shot! What this man needs is an ocean voyage!"

If you've seen The Odyssey, you'll know what I mean.

It wasn't a good movie and I'm pretty turned off on Hollywood in general these days. I'm just not going to be part of their cult. Well, not until they cast a Hispanic dude as Nelson Mandela.

Hey, diversity is their strength.