Polemisti

ok brief context first for any readers not aware: in the Odyssey, the unfaithful maids are a group of enslaved women in the house of Odysseus who are hanged for 'betraying' Odysseus by having sex with Penelope's suitors. In the Penelopiad they are instead Penelope's most faithful and trusted maids who she enlisted to spy on the suitors.

my issue w the Penelopiad on this subject is just that I think making it so the maids weren't actually 'unfaithful' carries the implication that if they had done all the things the Odyssey says they did then in some sense they would have had it coming.

yeah I haven't seen the Nolan film but i read the summary bcos i was interested to see if they kept in the Unfaithful Maids and not only are they out but the film also seems to have really played down the massacre of the suitors?

which is another thing where like, even in the original context, we are not supposed to 100% agree with that!! its followed by a sequence where the suitors' families are all like 'dude what the fuck'

part of the emotional impact, to me, of the Odyssey is that we spent the whole epic being encouraged to sympathise w Odysseus as this almost everyman-type main character who just wants to go home and then at the end of the poem he murders a bunch of people. yikes!!

His family was the last surviving population of the Yahi tribe and when they died he came into contact with US Americans for the first time looking for food and help. They held him in jail until they could figure out what to do with him because nobody spoke his language. Then they brought him to the UC anthropology museum because they at least had some documentation of his language. Alfred Kroeber (father of Ursula K LeGuin, so she would have grown up around Ishi and had family dinner with him) pretty much took care of him, had him living in the museum, and made his life’s work documenting everything about Ishi and his culture and knowledge as possible. They were able to record and document so much and had him doing public demonstrations of various traditional skills and crafts.

And he spent the rest of his life living in a museum. He wasn’t held against his will or anything and he got paid for his work, but still so tragic to be the last of your people and solely responsible for making sure that knowledge and culture doesn’t die with you. I think all this is at the anthropology museum at UC Berkeley now, but UCSF might still have some archives.

i loved the opening in ithaca, unabashedly (and i love THAT the film opens in ithaca, being who i am). travis scott as the bard is captivating. penelope's entrance was literally showstopping, as she also does in the poem.

anne hathaway was the strongest performance by far. don't think there was a penelope scene that didn't hit for me. the use of the screen in the great hall and the loom as shields showed her isolation and opacity while letting her also be present for the action.

eumaeus & eurylochus are the standouts of the supporting cast.

the scenery looked a lot better than i feared from the trailers; circe's island was my favorite set/location.

i liked the pacing, broadly speaking. i saw it with two people with no background knowledge and neither were bored or thought it dragged, for the length. any feature film even at 3 hours was always going to be a brutal struggle for adapting epic poetry; it's not the medium i think is best suited. but for what it was, the choices of what to cut, abridge, and include largely feel correct to me.

i got jumpscared once by clytemnestra and once by scylla and that was crazy

my personal favorite moment(s) of the film: stringing and plucking the bow to make it sing. the sound design on that alone was worth the imax ticket, but man, to find a way to call back to that... from the first scene i knew how they were gonna do the climax and it hurt my fucking feelings!!!!

the bad and the ugly:

whether by natural inclination or direction, matt damon plays odysseus as an everyman, and the thing about everymen is they can't have strong personalities. the range goes from "kind of despondent" to "even more despondent," in the words of one of my companions my (who, again, went in blind). he's bland as hell. the most fun i had with him was in the palace as a beggar and his face was covered. the lead is the film's most significant problem, and that's not something i can forgive.

like it's to the point that when he wants to hear the sirens, it feels out of character

the costume design is exactly as bad as it looked in the trailers. mostly i can ignore this because it's really not my bag, but in some cases (the trojan armor, notably) it inhibits the messaging

and, to a lesser extent, the monster character design. the laistrygonian giants truly should have been cut for time anyway. goofy ass

i will join the popular stance against a cyclops encounter with no "nobody," but for me it's not so much about that exchange, iconic as it is, as the loss of all humanizing traits of polyphemus. it doesn't sit right with me to treat him as a mindless monster encounter instead of a chance to probe odysseus' xenohobia.

i have long noted that no one is interested in portraying agamemnon as a human being, but never before to THIS extent, oh my god. he kept making me laugh which was not the intended effect

helen and clytemnestra not actually having much screentime was a letdown for me, since that was what i was looking forward to most.

since they bothered to cast mia goth you might think melantho would have anything to do, but you would be wrong.

slavery is generally glossed over. antinous makes one reference to slaves having no choice but to be loyal to who's in power; that's truly it. as usual (with the return 2024, for instance, which has much stronger theming) i thought the message would have hit harder if the hanged women were included

if i had a nickel for every time someone cut all the sex from my beloved sex object i would have 2 nickels

inconsistent diction. every time telemachus said "mom" or "dad" it broke my immersion

the interesting, what's missing, and whether it worked for me: