‘The Odyssey’ Should Have Done Better by This Character

 

By Maya Phillips

 When the men under the charge of the brave Odysseus arrive at Circe’s home in Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey,” the film shifts from seafaring epic to body horror. Circe, played with rawness and mystery by Samantha Morton, is a witch who turns the men into swine, but fear not — she’ll soon be outsmarted by Matt Damon’s late-arriving Odysseus, like all the other monsters he’s encountered on his way back home. She is just another obstacle to be vanquished on the hero’s journey.

That’s not exactly how things unfold in the original text. When Homer introduces Circe, she’s described as a beautiful, enchanting woman singing and weaving at a loom — drawing a parallel to Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who is forever weaving as she waits for her husband to return home.

Circe’s domicile is a kind of palace where she reigns supreme. In Emily Wilson’s 2017 translation — the first into English by a woman — it is a place of “polished stones, on high foundations,” where nymphs carry fancy cloths, gold cups and silver bowls for guests and where wild animals fawn around her like house pets. She was a memorable presence in the most enduring of tales, a character as wily as the hero, and more knowledgeable. This latest portrayal feels like a particularly disheartening disservice to one of the earliest examples of a powerful, sexually autonomous woman in literature.

Many translations refer to Circe as a goddess who executes her transformations with a potion and the flick of a wand; that’s a far cry from the gruesome, torturous process onscreen now. As the men gorge themselves on the food she serves, she stretches and molds their heads like putty, sticking her hands into their mouths and shaping their faces into pig snouts. It’s horrific, and the movie seems to cast it as unwarranted, as though it’s so unlikely that a woman living alone, accosted by a group of soldiers we’ve seen loot and kill in another city, would feel threatened.

This Circe seems cruel and crazed. In Homer’s telling, Odysseus becomes so enamored of her that she becomes a kind of substitute wife. In the story, when Odysseus goes to Circe’s home to save his men, he uses an antidote given to him by the gods, threatens her with his sword and then sleeps with her. When she changes Odysseus’ soldiers back, Homer notes that they’re even more handsome than before, and are bathed in oil and dressed in nice clothes. Odysseus and his men spend a year living happily with Circe and her nymph servant girls, as Wilson writes in her translation: “Then every day / for a whole year we feasted there on meat / and sweet strong wine.” In fact, after that year of leisure it’s Odysseus’ men who bring up that they should probably get back on the road to Ithaca; only then does it seem to occur to Odysseus that they should leave their cozy vacation spot and now welcoming host.

Of course every adaptation offers its own twist on her. This has been true dating back millenniums, to early classics writers like Ovid and Hesiod. In some versions, Circe bears Odysseus’ children; in others she is an obsessive, vengeful predator. Contemporary authors like Madeline Miller reclaim the character as more than a brief detour in Odysseus’ journey and offer a more sympathetic, well-rounded version of her.

Over the years Circe’s transformations of Odysseus’ men have been read in various ways depending on the cultural context and sexual politics of the time: as a commentary on etiquette and social behavior, as a philosophical critique on the inherently beastly nature of men, as a misogynist cautionary tale against a sexually liberated woman. One can often determine the politics and perspectives of an “Odyssey” adaptation by how Circe is depicted.

So what does that say about Nolan’s dark, succinct telling? In this film of majesty and scope, of star power and visual appeal, Circe helps show how Nolan’s “Odyssey” ultimately takes the epic at face value, reducing it to terms the director is most comfortable with: Odysseus is a man burdened by the weight of his brilliance. Circe is an obstacle he must overcome, just like the other women in the film have very specific ways to round out the hero’s tale of triumph. Calypso’s role is to trap Odysseus. Athena’s to act as his (mostly silent) conscience. Helen and Clytemnestra are simply disloyal women at the periphery of Odysseus’ journey. And Odysseus’ faithful wife, Penelope, isn’t shown doing much of anything, but gets an adamant speech about her queenly autonomy to telegraph her as a more modern, empowered hero-wife. None are fulfilling, but none feel as dismissive as the evil witch treatment of Circe.

At the end of the day, this is a man’s story of greatness. Even in Odysseus’ questionable moments, there’s never any question that he is still the noble warrior, the honorable leader. As for the women — the lovers, the betrayers, the goddess and, of course, the witch — they’re no more than the trimmings on our hero’s armor.

NEW YORK TIMES  

Oil, Hunters and Dr. Phil: How a Long-Shot Project Is Shaking Up Greenland

 

 

 

A U.S. oil company says it could be on the verge of a major discovery in Greenland. The proposal comes at a tricky time for the Arctic island, and locals are lining up against it.

Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli

In one of the most remote towns on earth, on the frozen crust of Greenland’s east coast, the American oilman made his pitch.

Near to the very room where they were all sitting, he told a crowd of Greenlanders, could be as much as 13 billion barrels of oil. His company planned to drill two exploratory wells, and if it struck oil, it could be a major worldwide discovery bringing much-needed jobs, loads of tax money and relief to world energy markets.

The people who attended the meeting, which was held in June in an isolated town called Ittoqqortoormiit, had some questions.

Why would Greenland get only 15 percent of the profit?

What kind of chemicals would be used?

And what about the musk ox?

(Musk ox hunting is a big deal up there.)

Image

A store selling items made with sealskin and musk ox furs in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. The area believed to have vast oil reserves, known as Jameson Land, is a protected environmental zone home to musk ox, foxes and migrating birds.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times

The meeting wrapped up with a lot of unhappy people filing out, according to a video of it that was shared with The New York Times, and a showdown over oil exploration has now joined the cloud of issues swirling over Greenland.

The wildcat oil project is being pumped up by Dr. Phil McGraw, the TV personality known as Dr. Phil, and Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana, both powerful allies of President Trump. It’s the latest push by the MAGA camp to close in on this gigantic Arctic island that Mr. Trump threatened to annex and remains a fixation of his.

If the discovery is anything close to what the company says, and if it makes economic sense for major production — and those are two enormous ifs — this project could thrust Greenland into a radically different future, possibly as an Arctic petrostate.

But it’s off to a bumpy start. After a wave of negative publicity, protests by Greenlanders and a slip-up by the project’s organizers who have a drilling license, Greenland’s authorities tapped the brakes. This week the government pushed back the timeline for granting final approvals, saying that it’s unlikely any drilling would be authorized before 2028.

The Texas-based firm leading the project, Greenland Energy Company, now says it will focus on drilling only one well, not two. And the delays are expected to cost millions. As a result, Greenland Energy’s share price has plummeted, trading at little more than a dollar, half its value from just days ago.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Greenland? , and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

A few years ago, Greenland declared it was suspending oil exploration. The Arctic is among the fastest-warming regions in the world, and the Greenlandic government felt it was wrong to contribute more fossil fuel pollution.

Image

The landscape near Ittoqqortoormiit in 2024. Warming temperatures mean less ice on Greenland’s coast, making any oil discovered cheaper to export than it would have been decades ago, an executive said.Credit...Olivier Morin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

But the oil prospectors in this case are operating with a valid license granted before the policy changed, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times. So Greenlandic officials, who have been trying to navigate the intense pressure Mr. Trump has put on them, find themselves in a tight spot.

They are more than aware that if they reflexively block Americans from drilling, especially at a time when world events have squeezed the global oil supply, that could give Mr. Trump the pretext he needs to return to his threats to “get” Greenland, “one way or the other.” At the same time, there’s obvious resistance from ordinary Greenlanders and government officials to the project.

“In a world where Donald Trump has pursued such a confrontational policy toward Greenland, you can’t help but be a little concerned,” said Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies. “If you suddenly throw a major oil discovery into the mix, who knows what might happen.”

For months, the United States, Greenland and Denmark — the island’s former colonial master that still controls many of its affairs — have been locked in sticky negotiations over the island’s future. One key issue has been American access to Greenland’s natural resources.

Ever since Mr. Trump set his sights on the island, Greenland has become a magnet for investors and allies chasing Arctic resource dreams. But oil has never been easy.

Chevron and Shell prospected decades ago with no success. It’s incredibly expensive to build an oil industry from scratch in one of the most remote and inhospitable places on the planet. Most of Greenland is covered in ice. One major U.S. company, ARCO, decades ago sank today’s equivalent of $250 million — far more than the $80 million the current players have raised — into seismic studies in the same area, only to abandon the project in 1990.

“There are so many red flags here,” said Naaja Nathanielsen, Greenland’s former minister of natural resources and now a representative in Denmark’s Parliament. She says she hasn’t seen any hard data supporting the project’s tantalizing claims, adding, “I think they are selling hot air.”

Not so, say the backers of the project, a joint venture between Greenland Energy, the small, publicly traded U.S. company that raised the money, and 80 Mile Plc, a British outfit that acquired the drilling licenses several years ago.

Roderick McIllree, 80 Mile’s executive director and a board member of Greenland Energy, said this stretch of Greenland had the same geology as the North Sea oil fields, where European countries have extracted billions of barrels. And climate change is working in their favor, he said.

Warming temperatures mean less ice clogging Greenland’s coast, making any oil discovered cheaper to export than it would have been decades ago, he said.

One investor is the Citadel hedge fund, run by the investment titan Ken Griffin, and the Trump administration fully supports the project.

“Greenland could be exporting two million barrels of oil a day,” said Governor Landry, Mr. Trump’s special envoy to Greenland, in a Fox News interview in May. He added, “Think about what kind of pressure that would relieve in the Straits of Hormuz.”

Image

Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana was appointed by Mr. Trump to be the special envoy to Greenland.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

Before the project is allowed to start, its plans, including a detailed environmental assessment, must be approved. But the organizers have been moving ahead anyway and recently carried out two disputed equipment transfers.

First, they brought in a barge of equipment from another part of Greenland on what authorities said was an expired permit. Jorgen Hammeken-Holm, the head of Greenland’s mineral resources department, called the move “naughty, naughty.”

Then, a few days later, they unloaded another piece of heavy equipment without proper notification, the authorities said.

“We have the police and the military,” Mr. Hammeken-Holm warned. “They can assist in dealing with unlawful activities if necessary.”

Mr. McIllree, the 80 Mile executive, admitted, “We kind of fell down.” He said the company apologized to Greenlandic officials.

The potentially oil-rich area, known as Jameson Land, is a highly protected environmental zone, an Arctic swampland of sorts, home to tenacious shrubs and musk ox, foxes and migrating birds like the pink-footed goose. The musk ox is prized for its meat and its fur, which is turned into a luxurious yarn.

All this has attracted Dr. Phil, who did a recent 44-minute podcast on the project. He titled the episode “Frozen Gold,” and according to documents on Greenland Energy’s website, the company has established “a wide-ranging partnership” with him to make a six-episode series on “this modern-day treasure hunt.”

Image

Dr. Phil McGraw, the television personality known as Dr. Phil and an ally of President Trump, dedicated a recent episode of his podcast to talking up the oil project in Greenland. It was titled “Frozen Gold.” Credit...Phelan M. Ebenhack/Associated Press

His company did not respond to requests for comment about his involvement in the project. But on his podcast, Dr. Phil said he would soon head to the Arctic.

“I’m going to have to mug a kitten and get some mittens because I’m going to go up there and see this firsthand,” he said.

Ittoqqortoormiit (It-tok-kor-TOR-meet), population 329, is trying to make sense of what’s happening. This spring, members of the local council seemed ready to negotiate and drafted a list of things they wanted from the oil company: a heated community pool, new hunting cabins and funding for residents to fly over Jameson Land in helicopters one last time before their hunting grounds were turned into an industrial site.

But the public meeting in June changed the mood.

Mr. McIllree conceded that the team that led the meeting didn’t show enough respect.

“They forgot whose house they were in,” he said.

Still, some residents support the project.

Aage Uugi Pike Barselajsen, a construction worker, said in a telephone interview that Ittoqqortoormiit desperately needed jobs.

“You have to think about the future and the money,” he explained. “Maybe Greenland could become like Dubai. That’s my dream.”

  NEW YORK TIMES

 

Capacho

AROEIRA 

 

Cuba to Trump: We’re Open for Business

 

 

JACK NICAS

Since a band of rebels led by Fidel Castro pushed out Cuba’s dictator in 1959, the island’s government has largely been defined by its defiance of its far larger neighbor to the north — and its ability to survive the intense pressure that friction has provoked.

But the current U.S. campaign, led by an effective oil blockade, is the most intense in a half-century. And it is pushing the Cuban government to the brink.

Tourism has cratered. The energy grid collapsed three times over nine days this month. And other than a single Russian oil tanker in March, Cuba’s allies have not been willing to test President Trump’s order that no fuel be delivered to the island.

Yet, more than six months later, the government is still intact, and Cubans are finding ways to get by.

This month, we visited Cuba on the first journalism visa granted to The New York Times in nearly eight years. In Havana, I interviewed Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Carlos Fernández de Cossío, one of the Communist government’s interlocutors with the United States.

He said Cuba’s main strategy to escape the Trump administration’s ire was to enact a series of economic policy changes, including opening the country to foreign investment. Mr. Trump could even invest himself, Mr. Fernández de Cossío said.

White House and State Department spokespeople called Cuba a national security threat and accused it of harboring terrorists, which Cuba denies. They blamed Cuba for the energy crisis, saying it sold off fuel to enrich elites and failed to maintain its electric grid. And they said Cuba’s political and economic system are broken and must change, though U.S. officials have not clarified what would be required to lift the blockade.

The two sides acknowledge that their talks have made little progress. Many people, especially Cubans, are now watching closely for signs of what is next.

---

The Trump administration seems to be demanding changes to Cuba’s political system. Your government has said that is not on the table. What is?

I can be sure that the government of the United States would not negotiate its Constitution and political system with another government. So there should be no surprise that Cuba is not ready to discuss its internal political issues with the United States.

So what is the Cuban strategy then?

We introduced some changes in our economy a few weeks back. We believe they can allow us to cope.

Yet, if the United States is trying to provoke humanitarian difficulties in Cuba, unfortunately it has the power to. There’s nothing Cuba can do.

And if they lead to military action against Cuba, we will suffer thousands of deaths. Probably there will be a blood bath in Cuba. There will also be deaths of young Americans.

But after all this damage is caused, what is the goal gained by the United States? That is where we believe there should be some common sense within the American people.

Image

A Russian-flagged oil tanker arriving in Matanzas Bay, off the coast of Cuba, in March.Credit...Norlys Perez/Reuters

Russia delivered a single tanker of fuel in March, but no other country has challenged Trump’s threats to not ship fuel to Cuba. Where are your allies?

The coercive arm of the United States has proved to be very successful. To tell a European, a Latin American, an Asian company that you cannot export your national resources to Cuba, it’s a new world order.

Do you expect more oil coming from Russia, Mexico or Brazil?

We do expect some oil to come from some part of the world. We believe that the capacity of the United States to isolate Cuba and deprive countries of their right to export their own products cannot be forever.

Trump has discussed “taking Cuba.” Is Cuba preparing militarily?

It’s absurd. What excuse can there be to carry out a military action that will cause death and destruction against a peaceful country?

Now, regardless of how irrational it is, we would be naïve if we did not prepare ourselves, if we did not update our military strategy, which is based on the involvement of the population as a whole. We understand the asymmetric reality in terms of technology and firepower, but our people will defend our country. We have weekly preparations for that.

Image

Young members of the Cuban military during a May Day celebration this year.Credit...Lisette Poole González for The New York Times

There have been reports that an Emirati developer is building a luxury resort on a Cuban island and wants to pitch it to the Trump Organization as Trump Island. Is the Cuban government entertaining a Trump Organization project on Cuban soil?

We’re not entertaining specifically, I would say, anything like that. But we are trying to attract foreign investment from any country. And that does not exclude the United States.

Does it exclude President Trump?

If he wants to do it peacefully, we see no specific reason to exclude.

Have you heard of this Trump Island proposal on this part of Cuba?

I saw the news. There are many developments there already in place and some projected, and we’ve presented this to business people in several parts of the world. If somebody comes and says they have connections with important business people in the United States, we’re ready to engage. If it’s with the Trump administration, in principle, there’s no reason for us to say no.

What prohibits Donald Trump from investing in Cuba are U.S. laws. We don’t exclude him or his organization from doing business in Cuba, if it does it respecting Cuban laws.

NEW YORK TIMES  

 

  

8 Matisse Works, Looted from Library in Brazil, Are Recovered

 

 

The prints by the French master were taken in São Paulo last year in a brazen daylight heist.

 John Yoon 

The police in Brazil recovered eight stolen works by Henri Matisse on Thursday, officials said, months after armed men made off with them from a library in São Paulo.

The police tracked the pieces, which belong to the French master’s 1947 series called “Jazz,” to an apartment in the suburb of São Bernardo do Campo, the São Paulo city government and the police said.

One person was arrested at the apartment on suspicion of receiving stolen goods, according to the police.

The pieces were stolen in December from the Mário de Andrade Library, São Paulo’s largest, during public viewing hours. Along with the eight Matisses, the thieves also took five works by the Brazilian modernist painter Candido Portinari, the authorities said.

In the heist, the men overpowered a security guard and two bystanders, according to an emailed statement from Rodrigo Bezerra, a police spokesman. Soon after, they were seen carrying the pieces around on the street in security camera footage released by the authorities. At one point in the video, a man places a stack of frames next to a pile of garbage on a sidewalk, then returns to pick it up.

The authorities in Brazil alerted Interpol after the heist because they were concerned that the pieces might be smuggled out of the country.

The police said that they had arrested one suspect in the robbery the day after it took place. It said that two other suspects in the library heist had been arrested in April in a separate art-theft case: a woman and a man described as the organizer of the crime.

Totó Parente, an official in the São Paulo government, said on Thursday that recovering the Matisse works was of “enormous importance” to the city. The police said that they had yet to locate the Portinari pieces.

Matisse’s works are coveted by galleries, museums and collectors around the world. And by art thieves.

His “Odalisque on the Terrace” was one of three paintings stolen from a private art museum in Italy in March. The thieves broke into the Magnani-Rocca Foundation and made off with the three artworks in just three minutes, the police said.

And “Odalisque in Red Pants,” taken from a museum in Venezuela, was recovered in 2012 by F.B.I. agents in Miami, who arrested two people and said they were trying to sell the painting.

It was not clear when “Odalisque in Red Pants” was stolen from the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas because a fake version of it was placed after the theft.

The eight pieces recovered in Brazil on Thursday were “The Clown”; “The Circus”; “Monsieur Loyal”; “The Nightmare of the White Elephant”; “The Codomas”; “The Swimmer in the Aquarium”; “The Sword Swallower”; and “The Cowboy.”

NEW YORK TIMES 

 

Sambalanço Trio - O Morro Não Tem Vez (1964)

 

César Camargo Mariano (piano), Humberto Clayber (bass), Airto Moreira (drums)

NINA

 

'A Viagem de Chihiro' e a psicodelia de sonhar acordado

 

"A cena do trem atravessando o mar ao entardecer concentra tudo isso. Não acontece quase nada. O silêncio ocupa mais espaço do que os diálogos. A água parece não ter fim. Os passageiros embarcam e desembarcam sem dizer uma palavra. Há uma tristeza serena naquela viagem, como se todos soubessem que certas travessias não permitem retorno. É uma das cenas mais belas do cinema, justamente porque não tenta explicar o que sentimos.

Toda transformação guarda um instante assim. Aquele momento suspenso em que já não somos quem éramos, mas ainda não sabemos quem seremos. "

leia resenha de Nikkole Presotto.. 

'A Viagem de Chihiro' e a psicodelia de sonhar acordado – CartaCapital

FlaVio

CRIS VECTOR

 

‘Farra dos cachês’ evidencia o fracasso da política cultural nos municípios

 

 

"Chamam a atenção as ligações dos municípios com a chamada “farra dos cachês”. Das 2.006 cidades que tiveram shows públicos dos 40 artistas que mais receberam no período analisado, 1.069 decretaram situação de emergência (comprometimento parcial dos recursos locais) e outras 13 formalizaram estado de calamidade pública (incapacidade total) — por seca, inundação ou outros motivos. Um disparate de gestão pública.

Muitos dos pagamentos de shows também “comeram” os orçamentos no período. Em Estrela do Norte (GO), os gastos com alguns dos tais 40 artistas alcançaram 2,9% de seu orçamento de 2024. Enquanto isso, o índice de mortalidade infantil do município é o dobro da média nacional, segundo o documento."

leia reportagem de AUGUSTO DINIZ 

‘Farra dos cachês’ evidencia o fracasso da política cultural nos municípios – CartaCapital

'Não fazia ideia do buraco': jovem perde bolsa de estudos do Prouni devido ao vício da mãe em apostas online

 

 

  "“Eu não fazia ideia do buraco em que ela estava se enfiando. O celular dela é de uma pessoa completamente adoecida”, disse Eduardo, que chegou a contabilizar apostas em mais de 500 endereços de cassinos on-line.

Para o jovem, fica a frustração, além de um sentimento de ‘raiva’. “Não da minha mãe, a questão não é sobre quem joga, mas sobre quem está lucrando com isso, como as plataformas e os influenciadores que vendem esse discurso de que é possível ganhar dinheiro fácil com as apostas. Isso é um descompromisso com a população, com a saúde pública”, critica"

leia reportagem de Ana Luiza Basilio

'Não fazia ideia do buraco': jovem perde bolsa de estudos do Prouni devido ao vício da mãe em apostas online – CartaCapital

Abbe Lane & Xavier Cugat "¿Quién será? (Sway)"

 

IN MEMORIAM ABBE LANE 

QUINHO vs Donald Trump

QUINHO

 QUINHO

Make Cinema Great Again

  

 Jeffrey St. Clair >

It was 92 in the shade and we fled to the nearest theater to escape the heat and the shrouds of smoke from distant fires that had drifted across the Cascades into the Valley. The movie was “The Odyssey.” Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, not Homer’s, which quickly became apparent. The screen was 28 meters wide, roughly the width, by the way, of the theater of Dionysus on the south slope of the Acropolis in Athens, where many plays depicting episodes from the Trojan War and the homecoming were performed. The cost of the ticket was $35, much cheaper than the $1,000 some New Yorkers have shelled out for the chance to watch the three-hour epic on 70mm IMAX screens, through the latest innovation of late-capitalism, dynamic pricing. (Thank you, Bruce Springsteen.) In 4th-century Athens, the city-state comped entry fees for the 25,000 people who would assemble to watch the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Maybe Mamdani will provide a city subsidy for at least a bag of popcorn, which now costs more than a movie ticket did a decade ago, when there was still a film industry in the US.

The less said about Nolan’s film, the better. Frankly, there’s not much to critique. It is what it is, a spectacle in search of a reason to exist, like Cleopatra or Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind. It’s not history. It’s not literature. It’s an entertainment. It’s, in the words of a pretty astute cultural critic: “a joke.” 173 minutes summed up in two words. Top that, Pauline Kael. It is a joke, but alas, not a funny one. Christopher Nolan has no sense of humor. Neither did his hero Stanley Kubrick, but Kubrick at least had the smarts to hire screenwriters like Terry Southern, who did, and actors like Peter Sellers, who could inject a jolt of life into an otherwise dreary exercise in literature-to-big-screen hokum like Lolita.

The funniest thing Nolan did was to cast Matt Damon as Odysseus, the great prankster of Greek literature and not give him one funny line, not even a pun. Nolan has populated his films with recognizable faces, an all-star lineup of Hollywood celebrities. Some of them are fine actors. But not in this film. None of the actors act. They pose and speak, stilted words, arthritic phrases. (In a revealing casting choice, Menelaus, Helen’s cuckolded and abusive husband who scars her face to despoil her legendary beauty, was played by John Bernthal, an outspoken defender of Israel’s genocidal rampages in Gaza, who invited ex-Israeli special forces soldiers onto his Call to Arms and praised their “wet-work”.)

Nolan doesn’t need actors. There’s little room for acting here. Nolan said that because he insists on shooting with 70 mm IMAX cameras, he can only film for three minutes at a time.   The demands of character development and emotional depth must be sacrificed to the demands of action. How can Odysseus have the time to think about what he has done or what he will do, when a jump cut must be made every couple of minutes to a new scene of peril? In fact, Nolan doesn’t even need much of a script. It’s all about the images, even when the montage of images is inchoate. The classics scholar Emily Wilson, whose vivid and energetic new translation of The Odyssey Nolan claimed to have consulted for his film, scorched the film, saying she would have been “ashamed to have written any part” of the screenplay.

The heresy, if that’s what you want to call it, in casting Zendaya as Athena and Lupita Nyong’o as Helen (and her sister Clytemnestra) isn’t that they are black actors but that the allegedly “woke” Christopher Nolan gave these black actors so little to do. Like Helen, Nyont’o is one of the world’s most beautiful humans, a rarefied model of the perfection of the species. And that captivating allure shines through her scar-riven face. Nolan gives her a handful of lines, merely to advance the plot. But how does Helen feel about being dragged back to Sparta, bound as a sex-slave and war trophy to the dull-witted man who shredded her face and killed her lover? We’re left in the dark.

Athena may well have been black (see: Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization). As one of the supreme Olympian deities, she was certainly capable of assuming whatever form or skin color she desired and Zendaya may well be the closest living human to a goddess on Earth. But Nolan has her do little more than console Odysseus, while wrapped in a drab woven cloak, looking like Mary Magdalene, patting Jesus on the back. But this is Athena, the great intellect and warrior goddess, who, consumed by petty jealousy (See: the Judgement of Paris), plotted and enabled the sacking of Troy and the genocide of the Trojans and provided a shield of LAPD-like impunity for her favorite killer. We’d like to hear her explain herself.

I’m a little dismayed at MAGA’s hostility toward Nolan. After all, he shares their rosy nostalgia for a past that never existed. He wants to Make Cinema Grand Again in the tradition of Griffith, DeMille, and Ford. Big pictures with big budgets made only on film (despite its environmental consequences) projected onto big screens in big movie palaces. Big, big, big. All of it backed by bankers, private equity, insurers and reinsurers. Nolan’s megalomania is almost Trumpian. But surely the future of movie-making, if it has a future, is elsewhere. At the end of his life, Jean-Luc Godard was making movies shot on his iPhone and found it liberating. The two breakout films of the summer, Obsession and Backrooms, were made by former YouTubers. Why go back? Why chain yourself to the demands of the money men and cinema owners?

COUNTERPUNCH 

 

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band - Detroit Medley, Tempe 1980 h

 

 

Young Cardamom (a.k.a. Zohran Mandani) - P. S. V.

 

 

(sem filtro)

Nolan’s Zero-Eros ‘Odyssey’

 

 

 MAUREEN DOWD

Medievalists must be jealous.

Classicists are having a moment on social media, happily discussing whether Odysseus was “polytropos,” “polymetis” or “polymechanos.” And that’s very cool. Thank you, Mr. Nolan.

Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is a throwback to the days when Hollywood big shots fearlessly took on literary classics, undaunted by the challenges of bringing vast, thorny tales to the screen.

Conjuring the Civil War in “Gone With The Wind”? Recreating the desert battlefields of World War I in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Depicting the Russian Revolution in “Doctor Zhivago”?

Why not?

Nolan’s portal to ancient Greece has lured audiences back to theaters and spiked book sales of Homer’s “The Odyssey,” over 12,000 lines of dactylic hexameter verse composed in the seventh or eighth century B.C.E. Nolan has turned one of the foundational works of Western literature into an entertaining adventure saga.

Nolan told Stephen Colbert that he used every trick in the book to achieve his stunning visual effects. (The Mediterranean was ready for its close-up!) Yet the director failed to capture the essence of the man of tricks and twists, Odysseus, who delighted in storytelling and feigned identities.

Much of the moral ambiguity has been drained to make Matt Damon’s protagonist more likable. Except for a few mournful appearances by Zendaya’s Athena, who seems more like Odysseus’s conscience than his shape-shifting partner in deception, Nolan doesn’t depict any of the major meddling gods from the story. Besides being rich, fascinating characters, the gods are the framework for everything that happened in the ancient world. If you take the gods out of the picture, you just have people struggling within themselves. You lose the depth and force of the epic.

Nolan’s nearly three-hour masterwork, the classicist Mary Beard noted, does not have Homer’s “elusive sexiness.” In keeping with Gen Z’s waning interest in sex, the poem’s famous sex scenes have been excised, sapping erotic power from the female characters. As a headline in New York magazine wondered, “Is No One Horny in ‘The Odyssey’?”

Nolan brought the dark spirit of his last hit, “Oppenheimer,” with him to Greece, imbuing Odysseus with shame about his brilliant engineering invention that won the war: the horse that tricked the Trojans. His Odysseus is filled with remorse and haunted by the idea that his actions may lead to the end of civilization as they know it.

Homer’s guy, not so much. After Odysseus and his men sacked Troy, they went across the way and sacked another city.

Emily Wilson, whose popular modern translation of “The Odyssey” inspired Nolan, said the director turned Odysseus into an all-American hero weighed down by anxieties foreign to the ancient Greeks.

“He’s traumatized Jason Bourne,” she said of Damon’s portrayal on Derek Thompson’s podcast. “He’s an action hero who feels bad about being an action hero. He’s not that complicated. Unfortunately, he’s not ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ in this film. The Odysseus of the Greek poem is complicated.”

Nolan did not want his Odysseus betraying Penelope and enjoying his sojourns with other women. The director completely cut out the young princess Nausicaa, whom Homer’s Odysseus has a flirtation with, and neuters the text’s sexual encounters with Circe and Calypso.

In Homer, Odysseus sails to Aeaea, the island home of the enchanting sorceress Circe, “the nymph with the lovely braids.” (I named my kitten after that Circe.) When Circe drugs Odysseus’s crew and taps the men with her wand, turning them into swine, it’s witchy foreplay.

The messenger god, Hermes, also a trickster, comes down from Olympus to give Odysseus an antidote for when Circe tries to use her magic on him. Hermes also advises Odysseus: “Don’t refuse the goddess’s bed,” because that’s really what Circe wants in return for turning the swine back to men. Under no spell, Odysseus says, “I mounted Circe’s gorgeous bed.” He was so smitten with “the lustrous goddess,” who doted on him with “sides of meat and drafts of heady wine,” he didn’t leave for a year — despite pleas from his homesick men.

Nolan’s Circe, played by Samantha Morton, is like a vindictive feminist hippie making ceramic pots in Vermont, except she’s sculpting pigs. Her romance with Odysseus is scrubbed.

In Homer, Odysseus lands on the island of another luminous goddess, Calypso, and stays seven years. He’s imprisoned, but at the beginning at least, he enjoyed himself, even as Penelope was fending off her boorish suitors back home.

Nolan whitewashes Odysseus’s infidelity here by turning Calypso — played by Charlize Theron — into a fashionable beach therapist who gives him mood-altering lotus flowers to help with his PTSD. In Homer, Odysseus has no need to forget. He cries once over the human cost of the war when he hears a song about Troy’s fall, but mostly he’s proud of his war exploits. And the “scalawag,” as Calypso calls him, doesn’t partake in the lotus; his men become addicted lotus-eaters on a different island.

In the movie, Calypso graciously lets Odysseus go when he comes out of his lotus fog and insists on returning home. In the book, Athena has to ask Zeus to intervene to make Calypso give up her sex slave, and she complains that there’s a double standard, because the male gods have affairs with mortals but interfere when the female gods are similarly romping.

Penelope, a mortal, is expected to be faithful, no matter that Odysseus’s sexual liaisons have added eight years to his 10-year voyage home.

When Homer’s Odysseus finally gets home, there’s a charged scene where he is outraged to learn that the marital bed he built, crafted out of an olive tree that grew inside the palace, has been moved. It’s a test by Penelope. Nolan dispensed with that, too.

The director also sanitized Odysseus’s character by skipping the scene near the end when the hero orders his son to round up the 12 female servants who slept with suitors and hack them to death with a sword. Telemachus persuades his father that the women should be hanged instead.

Nolan’s IMAX Odysseus gives up the crown for his son and goes into exile with Penelope to redeem his actions during the war. Homer’s hero? No way!

Homer did not portray a world turning against violence. He limned a profoundly martial universe — interspersed with lots of magic and sex and cavorting, conniving immortals. If you smooth it out and modernize it too much, you lose what made it so important to begin with. And you’re just left with a guy finding his way home.

NEW YORK TIMES

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The Places Where the Bombs Have Rarely Stopped Falling in Iran

  

“I would like the world to know that ordinary people have never wanted this war and are not on either side of it,” he said. “Yet they are the ones paying the highest price.”

 In the early hours of that day, an enormous explosion rocked the island, rattling walls and windows like an earthquake. When neighbors and rescue workers arrived at the scene of the blast, they found a modest family house of mud bricks reduced to a pile of debris and a family of five trapped under the rubble. The bomb had created a giant crater.

A New York Times visual investigation found that the U.S. had dropped a 2,000-pound bomb, one of the most powerful weapons used in this war, on the house, located in a densely populated residential area in the village of Chah-Tangou. There were no military facilities in its vicinity."

 read report by Farnaz Fassihi and Shirin Hakim  

 

Terremoto na Colombia

THIAGO LUCAS

 

O ‘comunista’ de Trump

 

 Dorrit Harazim

Cassius Clay tinha só 22 anos e uma insolência já borbulhante quando proclamou, na histórica noite de 25 de fevereiro de 1964:

— Sou o rei do mundo! Sou lindo e malvado! Eu sacudi o mundo.

Era verdade. Ele acabara de derrotar por nocaute técnico o campeoníssimo Sonny Liston, favorito absoluto nas casas de apostas globais. O feito no ringue fez dele muito mais que um fenômeno do boxe — tornou-se força cultural duradoura. Nove dias depois, anunciou ao mundo sua conversão ao islamismo e passou a se chamar Muhammad Ali.

O sanitarista americano Abdul El-Sayed, nascido no estado de Michigan 42 anos atrás, não precisou trocar de nome — Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed é muçulmano de berço. Suas primeiras palavras ao saber que será o nome do Partido Democrata para disputar uma cadeira no Senado, em novembro próximo, foram inspiradas em Ali:

— Nós sacudimos o mundo.

O mundo, ele e seus eleitores não sacudiram, mas o neurastênico cenário político-partidário americano, certamente. El-Sayed saiu-se vencedor nas primárias da terça-feira passada montado num programa arriscado, por progressista e populista:

1) A favor da abolição do ICE (o Serviço de Imigração e Controle Aduaneiro que, sob o governo de Donald Trump, atua como caçador de imigrantes sem documentação regularizada);

2) A favor da ampliação do esquálido seguro hospitalar e médico, o Medicare, que nos Estados Unidos contempla apenas contribuintes com mais de 65 anos e portadores de deficiências;

3) Radicalmente oposto a qualquer ajuda dos Estados Unidos ao governo de Israel;

4) A favor de mais impostos para os mais ricos e contra o predomínio do dinheiro sobre o exercício da política.

El-Sayed teve por adversária Haley Stevens, uma experiente congressista moderada de quatro mandatos no Capitólio. Ela contou com o apoio ostensivo do establishment democrata — a mesma liderança partidária que, há anos encastelada, acumula erros e foi perdendo o pulso da nação. Não fosse o incontornável senador Bernie Sanders, que aos 84 anos continua sendo o grande ícone mobilizador do eleitorado jovem e progressista, El-Sayed talvez não tivesse alcançado o 1% de votos que faltou a Stevens.

Contudo coube ao poderoso lobby pró-Israel agrupado sob a sigla Aipac (Comitê Americano de Assuntos Públicos de Israel) o inglório papel de goleador contra a candidatura que apoiava. A derrama de mais de US$ 30 milhões na campanha da congressista que se orgulha de ser sionista bateu de frente com os itens 3 e 4 do programa de El-Sayed. Afugentou um eleitorado democrata cada vez menos disposto a defender Israel acima de tudo, como se a desumanização de Gaza e a metódica erradicação da vida palestina na Cisjordânia não existissem. A sigla Aipac começou a tornar-se tóxica quando acoplada a candidaturas democratas — segundo divulgou o New York Times na semana passada, a palavra “Israel” praticamente sumiu da maioria das peças de propaganda eleitoral financiadas pela entidade. A causa agora atende pelo nome de United Democracy Project.

Por ora, a maioria dos analistas dá como pouco provável a eleição do epidemiologista e Rhodes Scholar El-Sayed em novembro — ele seria o primeiro muçulmano a ocupar assento no Senado dos Estados Unidos. Até porque o estado de Michigan, como um todo, é um dos campos eleitorais mais imprevisíveis e cambiantes do país (Trump saiu-se vencedor em 2016, perdeu em 2020 e venceu em 2024, sempre com margens apertadíssimas).

Para o ocupante da Casa Branca, El-Sayed é “esse comunista que odeia os judeus e Israel”, fácil de ser derrotado pelos republicanos. O epíteto “comunista” tem sido usado por Trump a torto e a direito em suas postagens e discursos. Não raro, atropela e embaralha cruamente o que, exatamente, entende por “comunista”, “marxista” ou “leninista”. Compreende-se: quando até a centenária The Economist, que Lênin descreveu como publicação para milionários britânicos, admitiu em edição recente que empresas capitalistas têm poucas chances de competir com a China “ecoautoritária e leninista, governada por Xi Jinping, um pioneiro do capitalismo de risco”, o xingamento pode parecer elogio.

Pelo receituário de Trump, saúde pública é commodity, educação é mercadoria, moradia é mercado imobiliário, e pobreza é defeito do indivíduo. Privatizada a sobrevivência, dá-se ao que sobra da vida o nome de liberdade. Faltam três meses para o eleitor americano dizer do que tem mais medo.

GLOBO  

ILUSTRAÇÃO: MARCELO