achatun

It's fun stumbling across short movies while scrolling TikTok. This had a cute little concept. Conveys a small but relatable emotional journey mostly through its score and sound design.

This one's a downer. Heartbreakingly tragic and grim but full of empathy for the people and communities in the projects. A handful of montages in this movie that will stick with me for a while. In *Clockers, *Spike most notably plays with brightness, periodically forfeiting naturalistic lighting to create either very bright or very dark images in order to evoke visceral emotional reactions. The screen transcends the literal and captures emotional reality instead. It's wild coming from *Crooklyn *and comparing Delroy Lindo's performances. He is so scary here.

Accuracy is an overrated function of adaptation. This is not the poem. This is an interpretation. And for the most part, I really liked what it did with the material. Of course an adaptation will shuffle some things around and omit others, either for time or to tell a focused story out of the blueprint of the Odyssey. For instance, in this version Odysseus using the lotus flower on Calypso's island to forget reads as a broken war veteran fleeing from his guilt and his past. It's different. But it's meaningful in its own right in this version of the story. Not to say every decision this movie made perfectly worked for me, I found some parts to be a bit clunky to be honest. I just feel like a lot of the conversation surrounding this movie is unproductive in that it's too focused on comparisons. The interesting conversation would be about what's being told and why it's being told this way. Working with the material at hand and not measuring it up against a hypothetical version of itself, treating every difference as a negative to reinforce an arbitrary good/bad binary. I genuinely believe that it's ignorant and unnecessarily limiting to engaging with art that way. Nolan's Odyssey feels like an addendum to *Oppenheimer's *interrogation of the hero figure. His Odysseus is a regretful one, his journey one of self-torture, repentance and escape from his past. The movie's strongest moments focus on his pain, be it the fall of Troy (this movie's emotional centerpiece and its greatest scene) or his confrontation with his fallen men in the underworld. This is clearly a career highlight performance for Matt Damon. Nolan's interpretation of Circe is a clear highlight. Her scene is reason enough to check this out. There's a sense of pain and tragedy to her character and in the understatedness of her environment. The crew's transformation into pigs is actually a decent bit of practical body-horror. Confusingly, her island and some other spaces in this movie feel more nordic than mediteranian, which is an issue with location scouting. Elliot Page's Sinon left quite a big impression on me as well despite his short screentime. He represents the faceless mass Odysseus lost. He is Odysseus' personified guilt. Unfortunately the movie is just as much monumental as it is grey and dark and therefore after a while visually draining and uninteresting. There are only so many same-y dark palaces hulled in dim torchlight that I can take before I need some visual refreshment. This is a Nolan-ism that I struggled with quite a bit here. Actually most of the gripes I have with *The Odyssey *lie in its visual presentation. I don't mind how fragmented the scenes feel from one another as that somewhat mirrors the poem's structure. However, I do mind how choppy some individual montages feel. Specifically omitting the stormy scenes out at sea that are supposed to be disorienting, there are a handful notably hard cuts in this that drew me out of the action. At other times though, the edit finds a hypnotizing rhythm that I wished it had held for the entire runtime.