Tag: Matt Damon

And Through Me Tell the Story

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Christopher Nolan is filming the Odyssey.  And, of all people, Matt Damn will be Odysseus.  And his son Telemachus will be played by Spiderman (Tom Holland) and Charlize Theron will be Circe.  Anne Hathaway is listed high in the credits so I fear she will be Penelope.  And most frightening of all, John Leguizamo is in the cast.  I guess I should be grateful that Pee Wee Herman is dead or maybe he would be cast as Achilles or Zeus.

Christopher Nolan is a talented director.  Could the movie turn out to be an entertaining and well-made film?  Sure.  But based on the cast I’m pretty sure it will have only the most tangential connection to Homer’s poem.  I’m guessing Damon will channel his character in the Bourne Identity and kill the suitors in a blur of shaky cam footage.  Maybe he can use his character development from “The Martian” to recreate Odysseus’s sense of abandonment on Ogygia with Calypso.  And come to think of it, Calypso can be played by RuPaul in drag.

No kidding, we’ve finally reached a point where special effects are good enough to show the scene in Polyphemus’s cave believably and what will render the story unfilmable will be the ethnicity of the characters.  In order to be eligible for Academy Awards, there will need to be a certain number of non-white and non-straight actors distributed among the most important roles.  I’m guessing that blonde Helen and specifically red-haired Menelaus will have to be portrayed by Australian aborigines and the Sirens will be transgender creatures.  Who knows, just to win Best Picture he’ll have to make several of Sylla’s heads look like prominent Republicans.

I’m probably painting this thing impossibly more negative than it needs to be.  But I think that Christopher Nolan is the closest thing to a good director left in Hollywood and the fact that he’s casting the movie with woke actors and following the DEI guidelines reinforces my worst premonitions for what this will end up being.  Well, why not?  Instead of Odysseus, the Sacker of Cities, we’ll get Matt Damon, Keeper of Safe Spaces.  I’m sure that instead of putting the hundred plus Suitors of Penelope to the sword, he’ll sue them in the court of public opinion and then realize that fighting for his wife’s honor is a toxic patriarchal practice that assumes that Penelope needs him to return when instead she could have shacked-up with Clytemnestra and ruled Ithaca as the first lesbian power couple of the Bronze Age.

And obviously, his son Telemachus would have discovered that he was born in the wrong body and want to be called Telemacha from then on.  And all of Odysseus’s slaves will have read Ibram X. Kendi and will rise up and decolonize Ithaca.

Well, I guess everything in the world is backwards at the moment and we’ll have to wait for a different motion picture environment before something like an authentic Odyssey is possible.  I guess the good news is that the book is still there to read.

The Odyssey

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands

and learned the minds of many distant men,

and weathered many bitter nights and days

in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only

to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.

But not by will nor valor could he save them,

for their own recklessness destroyed them all —

children and fools, they killed and feasted on

the cattle of Lord Hêlios, the Sun,

and he who moves all day through the heaven

took from their eyes the dawn of their return

(Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1961))

 

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

πλάγχθη, ἐπεὶ Τροίης ἱερὸν πτολίεθρον ἔπερσεν:

πολλῶν δ᾽ ἀνθρώπων ἴδεν ἄστεα καὶ νόον ἔγνω,

πολλὰ δ᾽ ὅ γ᾽ ἐν πόντῳ πάθεν ἄλγεα ὃν κατὰ θυμόν,

ἀρνύμενος ἥν τε ψυχὴν καὶ νόστον ἑταίρων.

ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ὣς ἑτάρους ἐρρύσατο, ἱέμενός περ:

αὐτῶν γὰρ σφετέρῃσιν ἀτασθαλίῃσιν ὄλοντο,

νήπιοι, οἳ κατὰ βοῦς Ὑπερίονος Ἠελίοιο

ἤσθιον: αὐτὰρ ὁ τοῖσιν ἀφείλετο νόστιμον ἦμαρ.

τῶν ἁμόθεν γε, θεά, θύγατερ Διός, εἰπὲ καὶ ἡμῖν.

(Homer circa 1,000 BC)

Oppenheimer (2023) – A Movie Review

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I finally got around to watching this movie.  This won’t be a full review because I don’t think I can be completely fair to the movie.  Christopher Nolan has been a big-time director for a good long while.  His Batman trilogy earned gazillions of dollars and was actually very good.  Now this movie is a very different animal.  I don’t think it is supposed to be entertainment in the same way.  It’s a biopic and a historical recreation of a very important event, the Manhattan Project; the invention of the atomic bomb.

As the story of the Manhattan Project, it is fascinating and compelling.  The biopic is a combination of experiences.  Oppenheimer himself is very odd duck.  From his own admission he was not a great physicist like Fermi, Einstein or Bohr.  He was a dilettante who found himself surrounded by the generation that invented quantum mechanics and became their interpreter and project manager in shepherding all the pieces needed to allow the US military to get the a-bomb in 1945.

And we hear his history as a retrospective because the movie is really the story of how Oppenheimer; this critical individual in the ushering in of the nuclear era, loses his US government security clearance due to his former association with communists and other less reputable individuals in his circle of friends.  We are also led through the less than honorable path of his love life.  And we see how his concerns about the dangers of nuclear weapons seem somewhat inconsistent depending upon where his role in producing the bomb stands.  While ensconced in the project he seems not at all conflicted.  But once he and his colleagues have handed over the bombs to the Army and the spotlight is no longer on him, his qualms grow exponentially.  As a viewer of the story, this seems clear.

The movie is populated with famous names and faces, some of them very hard to recognize.  Robert Downey Jr. is Lewis Strauss, Oppenheimer’s implacable foe who hounds him out of the government circle of influence.  Emily Blunt is Kitty Oppenheimer, his wife.  Matt Damon is Gen. Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project.  Josh Hartnett is Ernest Lawrence, a Nobel-winning nuclear physicist.  Kenneth Branagh is the brilliant physicist Niels Bohr.  Tom Conti is Albert Einstein and weirdest of all Gary Oldman is Harry S. Truman.

And there’s all kinds of good acting.  I especially enjoyed the “physicists seemingly engrossed in the endless details of making a weapon out of their incomprehensible mathematical equations.  There is a critical scene where Edward Teller, the father of the H-Bomb stops the project when his calculations seem to indicate that there is a very high probability that setting off a fission bomb could ignite the whole atmosphere of Earth and end all life on the planet.  That is a pivotal scene where eventually even Einstein is consulted.

And the climactic Trinity test scene in the desert is very effective.

But it’s a three-hour movie and that means we see quite a bit of J. Robert Oppenheimer and I have to admit I didn’t find him the most sympathetic character to follow for that three-hours.  It’s a good movie.  But I ended it wishing it had been more about Matt Damon’s character and that’s an odd feeling for me.

Ford v Ferrari (2019) – A Movie Review

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Since this is a true story, I’ll skip the spoiler alert but I also won’t give away any surprises.

Matt Damon and Christian Bale star in this dramatization of Ford’s grudge match with Ferrari to win the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race.  Damon plays Carroll Shelby, the legendary race car designer and Bale is Ken Miles a race driver who partners with Shelby to design a car that can give Ford the victory over the Ferrari in the race that they perennially win.

The movie highlights the contrast between the passionate individualism of Shelby and Miles and the hierarchical and bloodless conformity of the Ford upper management that looks to interfere with Shelby’s team at every turn.

I’m not a racing fan or a car connoisseur.  But the movie provides an infectious excitement that reminds me of that same feeling in movies about the American space program of the 1960s.  There’s a conquering spirit that strives for greatness and pushing the boundaries.  It captures the optimism that America still had in those times and it is exhilarating.

Both Bale and Damon provide excellent performances.  Bale especially disappears into the role.  I won’t elaborate much more except to say this is a surprisingly compelling movie and I recommend it highly.

Guest Contributor – The Fat Man – Movie Review – Ford v Ferrari

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Ford v Ferrari is the true story of the effort by Ford Motor Company, led by Carol Shelby, to build and race the first American car to win the Le Mans Gran Prix, the most prestigious road race in the world. The film was directed by James Mangold, starring Matt Damon as Carol Shelby and Christian Bale as Ken Miles, the lead driver for the Ford team. The movie is something of a small miracle; a mostly live action Hollywood film shot on real locations. Also, there is no political agenda. All the actors are who they actually were, white men, and they fight, lie and cheat, which is to say they compete, for the purity of winning. How did this happen in 2019 America?

It is a wonderful spectacle to behold. Matt Damon as the Texan Shelby battling the soulless suits, led by Josh Lucas, who has made something of a specialty out of playing dastardly weasels. The movie is unconcerned with cultural appropriation, casting the Jewish Jon Bernthal as the Italian-American auto industry icon, Lee Iacocca. He does a fine job. Even Henry Ford II has a substantial role played by Tracy Letts. And to top it off, the film is centered on Miles’ intact heterosexual family of three, a supportive, if somewhat feisty wife and his heartbreaking 10-year-old son, who will witness his fiery death.

Now the movie aims for iconic myth-making but I’m happy to report it is at least soundly competent. I have been wondering the last few years if the industry was still capable of making a real movie. Apparently in some corners, it is. The racing scenes are fun, much of it CGI, but still enjoyable. Grown men past sixty, as were many in the audience, will have a different experience from everyone else. If you were around in the 1960’s but still too young or too working class to be in college, cars was the most important thing in life. They are the material and cultural medium that ties the suits to the cowboys and the Brits to the Italians. They hate each other in all the deplorable ways we make believe is unnatural. It is the very nature of men and it is their crafts and creations, mechanics, racing, auto making that channels their animal spirits to a higher plane. They compete, they innovate and even when they lose they tip their hats to the winner, as Enzo Ferrari does to Miles.

Bale and Damon go a little over the top now and then as does the film itself when the Ford scion is reduced to a sort of weeping orgasm at his first experience of real racing at the hands of Shelby. But these flaws are welcome and authentically quixotic in their ambition. If the film ultimately misses the mark myth-making, it doesn’t matter. It succeeds at something more important, reminding us what real movies and real men once looked like.

 

 

 

 

Breitbart’s Tinseltown Travelogue

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As I mentioned in an earlier post, Breitbart put together a three-part article that combined an historical narrative on Hollywood’s communist roots along with a first-person story of left-wing bias against anyone who is to the right of Karl Marx.  Reading it I learned something that I hadn’t known.  The Hollywood Blacklist was actually a reaction to the Leftist Hollywood Graylist that had existed since the beginning of Hollywood and which controlled the ideology of movies by only permitting communist approved scripts from communist script writers.  I had always known that the golden age movies were mostly the product of leftist and even communist writers and directors but I never realized that the control of the union that controlled the screen writers was a man who eventually became the president of the American Communist Party.  Basically, the blacklisting was the result of the US government doing something about the Soviet Union controlling the largest propaganda machine in the world, Hollywood.

And more than sixty years later the Soviet Union no longer exists but Hollywood is even deeper under the control of people who believe in an ideology that combines the worst tenets of communism with an anti-western, anti-family anti-normal cult that threatens the very existence of this country.  And they expect us to pay them for their poison.

So, what do I think of all this Hollywood uproar?  All these actresses coming out of the woodwork and complaining about Weinstein, Damon, Crowe, Affleck et alia?

Not my problem.  I wouldn’t let a woman I cared about within a mile of those creeps.  We were told by Meryl Streep that Harvey Weinstein is a “god.”  Of course, Baal was a “god” so maybe we didn’t get enough details.  Harvey himself told us Hollywood had the best moral compass because it had compassion.  Well I guess if you’re a four-hundred-pound satyr it probably makes sense to hope that those you attack have a whole boatload of compassion but maybe he’s right.  After all they haven’t changed their minds about Roman Polansky and you’ve got to admit it takes a lot of compassion to overlook what he did to that 14 year-old-girl.  Funny thing about that.  Wonder if Meryl is rethinking her position on that one?

Recently the news is full of the disastrous ratings and ticket sales for TV and movie properties.  Now why would that be?  Well, in my estimation, white men have abandoned Hollywood and broadcast TV.  And why have they done this?  Because Hollywood has very clearly assigned white men (and especially normal white men) as the oppressor of everyone else.  In their movies we are the enemy.  At best we’re insensitive rubes who don’t respect the legitimate hatred of all these oppressed groups toward us.  And at worst we’re cartoon villains twirling our moustaches as we tie the transgendered woman to the railroad track.

Then if you’re a normal white man what has Hollywood got that you want to pay for?  Well, pretty much nothing.  Even the action movies that used to lure us into theaters have been poisoned with venom against us and filled up with 95-pound girl-power heroines karate chopping their way through stadiums full of full sized men.  Even the super hero and sci-fi summer blockbusters have become sermons against the dangers of being white men.  They’ve kinda taken the fun out of it.  Yep.

So, is it any wonder that demand is starting to tank?  The article is written in the end as a cautionary tale meant to wake up the Hollywood establishment to their danger of running out of audience.

Yeah, well, no.  Please don’t wake up.  Run the damn thing into the ground and hurry up about it.  Pump out another five hundred George Clooney/Matt Damon movies like Suburbicon.  Please, by all means.  Plough through every last cent of your capital on those kinds of projects.  With any luck, you’ll be completely out of business by 2020.  I guess that means the 3% of Hollywood types who are actually conservative will be out of work too.  People I really like too.

Well, that’s too bad because it needs to go out of business.  Because it’s a terrible place and it produces too much evil to make up for the little bit of good it does produce.  Shut it down and sell it off for scrap to the Chinese.

Then maybe we can start from scratch and creative people will make movies that people want to see.  Movies about people like us.  People they can root for and care about.  And movies that don’t tell them that they are bad people and that they should be replaced and that they should just disappear.

So that’s what it is.  We want them to disappear, not us.  Doesn’t seem too much to ask for.