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Another good to very good entry in the Spiders-Men MCU catalog. If you liked the previous Tom Holland ones, you'll like this one. Some definite shoehorning trying to make the New Avengers* happen. Though I have some spoilery questions about the ending (not the post credit).

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Another good to very good entry in the Spiders-Men MCU catalog. If you liked the previous Tom Holland ones, you'll like this one. Some definite shoehorning trying to make the New Avengers* happen. Though I have some spoilery questions about the ending (not the post credit).

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As in his previous films, Nolan is interested in the discontinuities of space and time, in magic, tricks, craft, technology, rivalry, substitution, masks, miscommunication, what we remember and what we choose to forget. Yet again, survival is portrayed as a kind of triumph. Yet again, there are long, claustrophobic scenes of drowning and near-drowning, and technically impressive episodes in which buildings are engulfed in flames and vehicles explode. Yet again, we watch a male character’s desperate quest to recover and/or avenge a female love object. I had hoped that Nolan’s affinity with these Homeric themes might push him to new creative heights, and enable him to conjure more believable characters. But The Odyssey features his usual combination of grandiosity and superficiality. Without a tub of wax for my ears – which Himesh Patel’s ever anxious Eurylochus, Odysseus’s doomed right-hand man, uses to sail safely past the Sirens – I was exposed to the full din of thumping sticks, staffs, swords and clashing armour, thunderbolts, crashing waves, grunts, screams, toppling palaces and burning temples. But unlike Matt Damon, the wax-free Odysseus who is tied to the mast as he is conveyed past the Sirens (naked ladies reclining on some uncomfortable-looking rocks), I gazed at the shipwrecks and bloodbaths without any agony of emotion. My eyes stayed dry, even for Argos the dog – whose adorableness as a puppy is predictably amped up to suit our animal-loving times. If only the human characters had been treated with such serious attention.

...

There are more female characters than in most Nolan movies, thanks to the source material. But none of them has much to say, in contrast to the characterisations in the poem. Homer’s Calypso has a wonderfully outraged, operatic speech about divine double standards: male gods can kidnap and rape any mortal woman they desire, but when a goddess tries it, Zeus and his cronies scupper her chances. It’s a clever and comical distortion of the mythological ‘facts’: the poem’s listeners know that it is primarily Athena (a female deity) who is taking Calypso’s mortal victim away from her (Hermes, whom she’s complaining to, is merely the messenger) – and Eos, goddess of the dawn, as we’ve been reminded only a few lines earlier, has not been prohibited by the divine patriarchy from holding on to Tithonus. Charlize Theron’s Calypso looks gorgeous, but she is never angry, never funny, not skilled in rhetoric, and never consumed by lust for her scraggly mortal victim. She’s an unpaid therapist, soothing the soul of the bedraggled, PTSD-ridden Odysseus with drugs, and graciously listening to his disjointed tale of woe.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n14/emily-wilson/an-uncomplicated-man

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You’re the first woman to have her translation of the Odyssey published in English. What does that mean to you, and why does it matter?

Mostly, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s a silly little factoid, not something particularly relevant for my actual work. Gender wasn’t a topic in my scholarly or critical work before I began work on the Odyssey. I’d published various books and articles, mostly about male authors and male characters, with very little attention to gender. I’d published earlier translations - of Seneca’s tragedies - and none of the reviewers or readers of those translations seem to have thought my gender mattered for that work, and nor did I. But all of a sudden, “Woman Translates Odyssey“ became the universal headline, and then journalists began to ask me endlessly and unstoppably about my supposedly female or feminine or feminist perspective. Whatever I say or do, it continues even unto this day.

I’ve found it quite limiting to have my work constantly framed by journalists in terms of my gender. I see it as both simplistic and anti-feminist to insist that all women’s work has to be viewed as primarily “women’s”, as if all our toys must be pink and no other color - whereas men, lucky things, get to focus on what they actually care about, which might not be gender at all. Everything a woman does has to be described as a “feminist intervention”, even if she doesn’t see it in those terms at all (which I certainly don’t). As members of the unmarked gender category, men get to imagine that their gender has nothing to do with their interpretations or perspectives on the world or on literature or history. I keep urging journalists to ask men about their gender and how it informs their work,and please stop asking me about it, because I really don’t work on gender and it’s not my main interest... but those pleas don’t seem to be going anywhere.

I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, for reasons that had nothing to do with my gender identity, but had to do with my specific scholarly training and literary sensibiities, as someone with longstanding interests in poetic and narrative form, the long traditions of both ancient and early modern verse, and a very long-standing interest in drama and dramatic narrative. I felt that there was an opportunity to provide English readers with translations in traditional, regular meter - in contrast with the dozens of existing free verse and prose translations - and versions that would, like the originals, have a supple multiplicity of voice and perspective, as well as their emotional directness and vividness. Those proto-dramatic qualities are flattened in many existing translations. In approaching any dialogue or scene in the Homeric poems, I make a consious attempt to understand how the text portrays multiple perspectives, and I don’t assume ahead of time that women characters will be presented as inferior or ridiculous. But that’s surely not feminism; it’s about being a reasonably responsible, competent translator of these great poems. The bar for what “feminist translation” means ought to be a lot higher than that.

* * Her answer continues beyond that

https://emily613.substack.com/p/if-you-can-bear-to-hear-the-truth?r=1g4uc&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer&triedRedirect=true

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You’re the first woman to have her translation of the Odyssey published in English. What does that mean to you, and why does it matter?

Mostly, I don’t think it matters at all. It’s a silly little factoid, not something particularly relevant for my actual work. Gender wasn’t a topic in my scholarly or critical work before I began work on the Odyssey. I’d published various books and articles, mostly about male authors and male characters, with very little attention to gender. I’d published earlier translations - of Seneca’s tragedies - and none of the reviewers or readers of those translations seem to have thought my gender mattered for that work, and nor did I. But all of a sudden, “Woman Translates Odyssey“ became the universal headline, and then journalists began to ask me endlessly and unstoppably about my supposedly female or feminine or feminist perspective. Whatever I say or do, it continues even unto this day.

I’ve found it quite limiting to have my work constantly framed by journalists in terms of my gender. I see it as both simplistic and anti-feminist to insist that all women’s work has to be viewed as primarily “women’s”, as if all our toys must be pink and no other color - whereas men, lucky things, get to focus on what they actually care about, which might not be gender at all. Everything a woman does has to be described as a “feminist intervention”, even if she doesn’t see it in those terms at all (which I certainly don’t). As members of the unmarked gender category, men get to imagine that their gender has nothing to do with their interpretations or perspectives on the world or on literature or history. I keep urging journalists to ask men about their gender and how it informs their work,and please stop asking me about it, because I really don’t work on gender and it’s not my main interest... but those pleas don’t seem to be going anywhere.

I took on the project of re-translating the Odyssey, and then the Iliad, for reasons that had nothing to do with my gender identity, but had to do with my specific scholarly training and literary sensibiities, as someone with longstanding interests in poetic and narrative form, the long traditions of both ancient and early modern verse, and a very long-standing interest in drama and dramatic narrative. I felt that there was an opportunity to provide English readers with translations in traditional, regular meter - in contrast with the dozens of existing free verse and prose translations - and versions that would, like the originals, have a supple multiplicity of voice and perspective, as well as their emotional directness and vividness. Those proto-dramatic qualities are flattened in many existing translations. In approaching any dialogue or scene in the Homeric poems, I make a consious attempt to understand how the text portrays multiple perspectives, and I don’t assume ahead of time that women characters will be presented as inferior or ridiculous. But that’s surely not feminism; it’s about being a reasonably responsible, competent translator of these great poems. The bar for what “feminist translation” means ought to be a lot higher than that.

* * Her answer continues beyond that

https://emily613.substack.com/p/if-you-can-bear-to-hear-the-truth?r=1g4uc&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer&triedRedirect=true

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Ignore what is available in this specific screenshot, I’m not going to this exact showing.

Is this entire row meant to be off limits to allow for handicapped folks who might be attending with 3-4 friends or family members? Or are you just supposed to leave the seats open that are directly on both sides of the handicapped spots?

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“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” he wrote, together with an AI-generated 3-minute short of “The Odyssey” posted by an X user.

https://variety.com/2026/film/global/elon-musk-grok-ai-odyssey-film-historically-accurate-1236817856/

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“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” he wrote, together with an AI-generated 3-minute short of “The Odyssey” posted by an X user.

https://variety.com/2026/film/global/elon-musk-grok-ai-odyssey-film-historically-accurate-1236817856/

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“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” he wrote, together with an AI-generated 3-minute short of “The Odyssey” posted by an X user.

https://variety.com/2026/film/global/elon-musk-grok-ai-odyssey-film-historically-accurate-1236817856/

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“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” he wrote, together with an AI-generated 3-minute short of “The Odyssey” posted by an X user.

https://variety.com/2026/film/global/elon-musk-grok-ai-odyssey-film-historically-accurate-1236817856/

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https://x.com/TSHamiltonAstro/status/2079663046666883114?s=20

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until August.

I may need to take a sick day

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Damit, just the week I'm getting my toga dry-cleaned.

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My kid is really into mythology, but he's not sure about the R Rating. we just watched the LOTR trilogy, so he's not fazed by fantasy violence. Just not sure if any of this is too gory.

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Polyphemus's eye being vertical was way more grotesque than it being horizontal.

The Hades scene was excellent.

I've seen a couple interpretations of Athena (Zendaya) in Troy. For those that have seen it, which of these do you think is correct:
A. Per the law of Xenia, Gods can be dressed as mortals. Athena was there in Troy and the Greeks beheaded her.
B. The girl that was beheaded wasn't Athena, but Odysseus combined that image with a statue of Athena being desecrated and has been hallucinating Athena speaking to him.
C. The girl wasn't there. Odysseus saw the desecration of the Athena statue the same as beheading a real person.
D. Other.

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Polyphemus's eye being vertical was way more grotesque than it being horizontal.

The Hades scene was excellent.

I've seen a couple interpretations of Athena (Zendaya) in Troy. For those that have seen it, which of these do you think is correct:
A. Per the law of Xenia, Gods can be dressed as mortals. Athena was there in Troy and the Greeks beheaded her.
B. The girl that was beheaded wasn't Athena, but Odysseus combined that image with a statue of Athena being desecrated and has been hallucinating Athena speaking to him.
C. The girl wasn't there. Odysseus saw the desecration of the Athena statue the same as beheading a real person.
D. Other.

Previous Message

Polyphemus's eye being vertical was way more grotesque than it being horizontal.

The Hades scene was excellent.

I've seen a couple interpretations of Athena (Zendaya) in Troy. For those that have seen it, which of these do you think is correct:
A. Per the law of Xenia, Gods can be dressed as mortals. Athena was there in Troy and the Greeks beheaded her.
B. The girl that was beheaded wasn't Athena, but Odysseus combined that image with a statue of Athena being desecrated and has been hallucinating Athena speaking to him.
C. The girl wasn't there. Odysseus saw the desecration of the Athena statue the same as beheading a real person.
D. Other.

Previous Message

Polyphemus's eye being vertical was way more grotesque than it being horizontal.

The Hades scene was excellent.

I've seen a couple interpretations of Athena (Zendaya) in Troy. For those that have seen it, which of these do you think is correct:
A. Per the law of Xenia, Gods can be dressed as mortals. Athena was there in Troy and the Greeks beheaded her.
B. The girl that was beheaded wasn't Athena, but Odysseus combined that image with a statue of Athena being desecrated and has been hallucinating Athena speaking to him.
C. The girl wasn't there. Odysseus saw the desecration of the Athena statue the same as beheading a real person.
D. Other.

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