Tag: Christopher Nolan

I Feel So Free

It’s Tuesday morning, with a tropical storm out there and heading this way. Eek! It seems to be moving slow, with potential landfall tomorrow in the afternoon some time…which will be fun since I will be at work and will have to figure out how to get home in a downpour, but hey, you never know. Best thing will be to take I-10 to the I-90 exchange and get off at St. Charles. Ah, well, don’t have to worry about that until tomorrow, so why borrow trouble today? Besides, New Orleans/tropical weather forecasts are often wrong; it could be cloudless and sunny while Bertha works her wiles along the coast before coming in. We’re in both a heat advisory and a tropical storm watch at the same time; how New Orleans in July is that? I also slept really well last night–I was tired when I got home from running my errands, for some reason. Tonight I am going to stop on my way home to pick up a few things, but it’s on my way home and thus not a big deal or detour.

I’ve viewed The Odyssey with a skeptical eye since it was announced and previews/clips/still photos started showing up everywhere. As I mentioned before, I always thought Odysseus was kind of a dick, as were the rest of the Greeks; despite knowing the outcome of the Trojan War and what happened to Odysseus on his way home, I always was on Troy’s side. (case in point: Achilles the great warrior. Um, it’s easy to be a brave killing machine when your skin all over your body is invulnerable like Superman. How are you a hero when you literally can’t be killed or injured? Make it make sense, Homer!) However, over the past few days I’ve seen some discussion on the film that makes it seem more interesting to me; I’m not going to see it in a theater (no way am I sitting anywhere for three hours), and had always planned on streaming it. I was going to watch more out of a sense of obligation, really, but it sounds like Nolan’s take on the story is different…it never occurred to me to ever link Troy and the Sea Peoples and the Bronze Age collapse together, and I have to say I am now interested in reading Emily Wilson’s translations of Homer and Virgil. I read the three epics when I was in junior high, and may have been too young to absorb, understand, and interpret. (The Achilles/Patroclus relationship fascinated me; even though the myth was so cleaned up for kids…somehow, I knew.)

I’ve always wanted to write about the Trojan War but was confused by so much. If Troy was a major city and in control of trade routes, where was their fleet? Their merchant ships? Their port? I have this image in my head of an old man, seated by a fire, telling the story of Prince Ganymede of Troy, one of Priam’s bastards, but very close to my favorite Trojan, Cassandra.

I hate my brain sometimes.

Yesterday wasn’t a bad day, but mother of God, it was hot. It was 103 when I got into the car after work, and yes, it felt every degree of it. I listened to the new Madonna album on the way uptown yesterday as the a/c in the car finally began blowing cold, deliciously cold, and got the mail. I also stopped and made groceries (still no Creole tomatoes) and yes, bringing everything into the house from the car was exhausting and sweat-inducing to the point that I needed to sit in my chair once everything was put away. I watched the news–the World Cup trophy presentation thing made me laugh, cruelly, and almost as hard as I laughed at the booing. Bravo, Spain! Bravo! How pathetic and pitiable was that display of childish self-centering? “My trophy! Cameras on ME! I’m the best boy!” I mean, I totally get why his parents didn’t love him (who could?), but I also don’t see why we have to be the ones to suffer from his lifelong trauma of Not Being The Best Boy. The first hints of rain from Bertha aren’t supposed to (last time I checked, anyway) get here until tonight, once I am safely home from work and have a purring kitty in my lap while I write and I catch up on the news. I did the dishes this morning and will turn on the dishwasher once I am on my way out the door. It’ll be nice to come home to a cleaned up kitchen without a sink full of dirty dishes and dirty dishes and assorted debris all over my counters.

Sigh.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for the day. Hope you have a great day, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning.

Professional wrestler and Greek god-like Finn Baelor

I Know There’s Something Going On

Yesterday I got notified that one of my favorite comic book runs, DC’s 1988-1992 Starman, is now available digitially on Comixology. I may have squealed like an excited little gay boy. This version of Starman, which came after the Crisis on Infinite Earths reboot, was one of my absolute favorite comic series of all time. As a birthday gift to myself, I bought and downloaded the first two issues. I am really looking forward to reading this series again in its entirety. I hope it’s as good as I remember. It never really took off, and was eventually cancelled for low sales, which was a real pity. I’m curious to see what I think about it now that I’m older.

Yesterday was one of the most miserably hot and humid days in New Orleans that I can remember. I took a shower after my workout yesterday morning–and then another after running errands. The thing about humidity that you tend to forget is how it sucks the life right out of you; it’s exhausting navigating and operating and trying to function in it. I have nothing but the utmost sympathy for those who have to work outside in August in New Orleans–meter maids, mail carriers, construction workers, etc.

And last night, we went to see Dunkirk.

Dunkirk_Film_poster

The story of the mass evacuation of the Allied forces at Dunkirk is one that has always stirred me; had the evacution/rescue of the British/French forces there not happened, the war would have been over and Nazi Germany would have won. The way the ordinary British people stepped up, in the face of incredible danger and possible death, and sailed personal boats across the English Channel to help rescue their army is one of the greatest war stories of all time. As soon as I heard that Christopher Nolan was making a film about it I knew I wanted to see it.

And while it took a while for me to go, we finally saw it last night.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more affecting film about the horror of war before.

Nolan’s film is a completely immersive experience, and everything about the movie is designed to keep you anxious and on the edge of your seat the entire running time of the movie. There are only a few, brief moments where you can actually sort of relax; and those brief seconds of respite immediately fade into another rush of tension and adrenaline and anxiety. There is very little dialogue in the movie, and almost all of the emotion is conveyed by the faces of the actors, which is even more affective than over-the-top histrionics would have been.

One of the things I learned from the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina was that the reality is far harsher and much more horrifying to witness in person than to see on television or on film; the reason Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke is so affecting is the film of the aftermath, after the water was gone and what was left behind, triggers the memories inside my own mind from when I returned and drove around to see the  devastation for myself. A film camera is limited–even in IMAX–to how much it can capture in a shot; the reality of the flood aftermath was immersive; you couldn’t look another direction and not see horror.

As immersive an experience as Dunkirk is, it therefore stands to reason that the horrors faced by the soldiers and sailors and the British citizens in their pleasure boats sailing the channel and watching as war planes flew overhead, witnessing ships being bombed and torpedoed in front of them, was at least a thousand times worse than watching a fictionalized film version in an IMAX theater in Harahan. The choice to show the story from three different perspectives–a soldier wanting to get home, an RAF pilot, and the crew of the private boat Moonstone crossing the channel to answer the call–and to not show those stories unfold in the usual timeline but rather at different times–was a calculated risk that could easily could have failed, turning the movie into a mess that made no sense–but superb editing and cross cuts made it quite effective in unsettling the viewer and ramping up the tension and terror. (I predict many, many technical Oscar nominations for this movie–from sound editing to editing to cinematography–and it will probably win more than a few of them.)

It’s an amazing achievement in film.

Is it historically accurate? Probably not; it leaves the viewer with the sense that it happened over the course of a day or so when it was really a little over a week; all the soldiers and sailors seen on camera were all  white; and obviously some of the characters, if not all of them, were fictional. But…when the credits rolled I was emotionally drained and exhausted, and I am still processing the images I saw.

It also occurred to me, as we drove home in a downpour, if ever there was a time for TCM to schedule a World War II film festival–after the events of the last week or so, it’s now, as some people need, apparently, to be reminded of the horrors that were Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Have a lovely Sunday, every one.