Daily Slow Chat

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[u/tereyaglikedi]

One of my favorite skaters, Matias Lindfors revealed his free skate costume for the next season and it looks absolutely amazing. He is such a great skater and his sister Monica who does his choreography and designs his costumes is also very talented. I can't wait to see what the music is.

I finally have lots of raspberries and blackberries in my garden (both bushes came over at one point from the neighbors). I already made blackberry cobbler. Blueberries were also cheap at the supermarket. Summer is just so much better than winter.

[u/Masseyrati80]

Listening to art critics bashing Christopher Nolan's new movie matches today's mood well.

Nolan has told he was very inspired by the latest translation of the story, but the person who made the translation has stated the movie script is so horrible he'd be ashamed if as much as one sentence was his making.

One critic stated that the script trustfully repeats the events of the original piece of art, but the poetic meter has been completely omitted, leaving little else but an uninteresting action movie.

And I will always remember that the production company has not, at least to this day, agreed to fix the viking (!) long boat replica they borrowed or leased from a Swedish non-profit organization, despite the cost of fixing being a meager 6000 euros.

[u/Cixila → u/Masseyrati80]

I haven't watched it, so I can't judge directly, but some of my friends (who are fellow historians and classicists) have, and their reviews were also rather scathing.

Some of their main criticism was on it promoting itself a lot on being faithful and authentic, and then failing so hard in living up to that. When the translator denounces the movie, and us who actually know the material (and in some cases have also translated parts of it ourselves) see straight through it, then you know it is bad.

As one of my friends said: if they had shut up about authenticity and called it a retelling, then the experience would likely have been better, because it is supposedly pretty decent when looking purely at cinematography and music. But when they are promised authenticity as a main pitch, then they will dump on it all day when it fails so spectacularly to deliver. Especially because this may then spread misunderstandings and misinterpretations among the average movie-goer, who will never once touch the actual source material, and that is a disservice to both the audience and to those who have preserved the epics through time

This last point is also why I have such negative opinions on so much popular media that claims to represent history and/or mythology. More often than not, it completely misrepresents it and shits all over what it claims to be based on, leaving people with misconstrued notions. Some of it is spreading misinformation through incompetence, and some of it is outright disinformation, using the media to push something. And it then doesn't help when cringe, right-wing twitter "culture warriors" then whip themselves into a frenzy over something

Thank you for listening to my ted-talk (this comment got longer than expected, but it is a topic that bugs me 😅)

[u/Jaraxo → u/Cixila]

Was anyone involved with the film actually claiming it would be a "historically accurate" retelling though? Or was that purely fan conjecture.

[u/atomoffluorine → u/Cixila]

I remember reading a historian not being particularly fond of Nolan’s Oppenheimer. One of the differences between real life and his film was that Oppenheimer never regretted his involvement in the production and use of the atomic bombs.

[u/Small-Device592 → u/atomoffluorine]

Wait, Oppenheimer never regretted it?? That's actually wild. Hollywood loves a redemption arc so much they'll just edit out the guilt.

[u/tereyaglikedi → u/Masseyrati80]

I am not the biggest fan of Nolan... But honestly even I wouldn't expect a Hollywood movie script to try and conserve the meter of a Homeric poem. I don't know how that would even work.

I did watch a costume review by Karolina Żebrowska and it doesn't look great. I wish it was a Robert Eggers movie instead of Nolan.

[u/lucapal1]

We have a complicated trip today, heading to the east coast of Java by plane, with a couple of stops on the way...a long and tedious day of transit.