Did the earth move?

HS says you guys had an earthquake around Baltic Sea. Golly! So did you feel it?

Here the weather is sunny and warm and the last of Ivan's wind and rain blew away already on Sunday. Flying in on Saturday was less fun as there was fair bit of turbulence. Which reminds me, one of the in-flight movies was Troy. And I watched it. Well, almost all of it. I suppose that watching the movie from the tiny screen on aeroplane does not do justice to the movie but even so, that was torture beyond words. Silly scenery, awful acting, still more awful dialogue, crappy plot obviously "based on some of the things this Homer-guy wrote about but not really", and if that was the face that launced a thousand ships...

NY review of books has an erudite if a bit long-winded review of the film which nontheless sometimes hits the nail right on:

What sets the climax of the Illiad in motion is the killing of Achilles' beloved companion, Patroclus, at the hands of Hector—another loss, but this time one that propels the sulky hero back into vengeful action. Fueled, no doubt, by a desire to expunge the vaguest hint of homoeroticism from the proceedings —by classical times, the debate wasn't so much whether Achilles and his beloved Patroclus were doing it, as rather, as in Plato's Symposium, who was doing just what to whom—Benioff makes Patroclus Achilles' "cousin," a bizarre choice that (particularly in an era when family ties have never counted for less) has increasingly hilarious results as the action progresses. Watching Troy, you'd think that there was no higher value for the Bronze Age Greeks than cousinage. "He killed my cousin!" Achilles shrieks at Priam when the latter comes begging for his son's body at the end of the story. "You've lost your cousin, now you've taken mine," a mournful Briseis (in this version, Hector's cousin) tells Achilles. "When does it end?" This film's notion that entire civilizations were destroyed because of excessive attachment to one's collateral relations is, surely, a first in world myth-making.

Comments

[jukkahoo]

Spot on, dahling! The making of Troy truly was a myth-take of Homerian proportions!