I can't believe there's people finding out about THE ODYSSEY because of the new Nolan film and complaining about spoilers. Sir please it was written almost 3000 years ago what spoilers are you talking about.
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Spoiler alert: It ends with Penelope saying "I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes".
My favorite story from that production was that the Coens actually knew very little about The Odyssey and took notes from Delmar (Tim Blake Nelson) who was a Phi Beta Kappa classics major at Brown.
I adore highly educated character actors who can believably play tough guys and simpletons. Sheldon Leonard, for instance, played wise guys like Nick the bartender in “It’s a Wonderful Life” before becoming a TV producer. He was a nice Jewish boy from Manhattan with a theatre degree from Syracuse.
Having read the Iliad and Odyssey didn't prep me for the ending of the film Troy. What happened to Agamemnon certainly raised my eyebrows. It reminded me of when Bart found the Alternate ending to Casablanca. "Back then we were just dummies in suits: not like today's studio executives."
Ha ha when my daughters and I went to see Gerwig's Little Women, I said something like -- ooh it's a shame what happens to Beth -- and yes, I was in trouble for spoiling a 150+-year-old story.
Couldn't tell her about Easter in case I spoiled the Bible for her.
This is level of ignorance common. Read about the movie, "O Brother Where Art Though. - A friend of mine once broke up with a woman because she thought we fought the Russians in WW2 and Pearl Harbor was in Virginia. His words were, "This is sh** people can learn by walking through a mall."
it was literally used as a plot point when Frodo was with Galadriel, just not something that already occured
i'm glad i'm not as nitpicky as you i wouldn't enjoy anything lolol the movies were near perfection in bringing that type of story to the average idiot and you know it's true
I haven't read the Odyssey since HS but I need to pick it up again. I loved the mini-series with Armand Assante and Isabella Rosselini although why they made the son look like one of the Geico cavemen I'll never know😆
There’s a recent translation out (by Emily Wilson) that’s excellent — it’s a modern English translation that uses poetic rhythm (vs prose). It’s very readable and way more enjoyable IMHO than the prose translation I originally read in HS!
A girl once got angry with my husband for saying “The ship sinks” when she was telling a friend about the movie Titanic. She said “Don’t ruin the ending!” 😳
LOL my mom and sisters were OBSESSED with this movie and were pissed at me because I wouldn't go see it (I hate overhyped movies). I just shrugged and said why, I know how it ends. Ooh, but they'd get heated🤣
My mom was half way through watching Das Boot, and literally said 'don't tell me the ending' to my dad, who had seen it. For some reason my dad opened his mouth and told her the exact ending. My dad is far from dumb - I have to think this was a petty Scottish marital tiff in action or something.
See, this is why I knew I could get away with loudly complaining about the Hobbit being such a cheap knock-off of the Lord of the Rings Trilogy when the theaters had the coming soon posters up. No one reads anymore.
A friend made me watch Romeo and Juliet movie 7 times, hoping it would end differently. Same with Camelot..actually enjoyed watching them over and over
And also there’s a former big screen adaptation starring Kirk Douglas almost a decade before “Spartacus” alongside Anthony Quinn titled “Ulisse” (Mario Camerini, 1954)
I'm so excited for this film. I read the story in high school. Plus there was a TV adaptation with Vanessa Williams that came out in the late 90s. I need to go and rewatch it. 🙌🏾🙌🏾
This is why I’ve always said the Tennyson’s Ulysses is about him dying… he sees his ship and his loyal crew in the harbor. But all those people died in the journey and he lost his ships. But what do I know, I’m just a car guy… 🤷🏻♂️
I went to see Romeo + juliet on Broadway a couple weeks ago and this lady spent the last 20 minutes or so gasping. I think she may genuinely not have known what happens at the end of Romeo + juliet.
When the touring production of La Cage Aux Folles came to Boston many years ago, my husband was stuck sitting next to someone who was utterly unfamiliar with La Cage or The Birdcage, and was thus gasping audibly at the various twists that everyone else in the theater were *well* aware were coming
That...that doesn't sound so bad. I'm cool with anyone who's seeing something for the first time, especially if they're so into it you get audible gasps like that. Good for them!
Sometimes it isn't not knowing the story, it's seeing people perform it so well it brings it to new levels for you.
I was so proud of my little sister, so many years ago when we watched "Westside Story" together. She turned to me and naively said, "That was just like 'Romeo and Juliet.'" As an actor, I couldn't have been more tickled.
I can't believe Ody finally came out. I mean, it was obvious. We all thought he was WAY too eager to set sail with a bunch of men for an indefinite amount of time 🤷🏻♀️
I have a friend who complained I spoiled Spartacus to her. What did you think? The slaves overthrow Rome and found an anarchist collective where all people from all origins live in harmony for two millennia? :-P
If you haven't heard of EPIC the (concept) musical by Jorge Rivera-Herrans they might appreciate that, it's what got my 11 year old son into Greek mythology. It's a bunch of different mini-albums starting with the Troy saga.
True, but there can still be a joy to experiencing the story for the first time (including the tropes and themes that you are familiar with from modern media) that kind of gets lost if everyone goes "oh a new movie is coming out? Let's talk openly and flippantly about specific plot details!"
Granted, I've read Odyssey myself (my reply was rhetorical) and I haven't seen the spoiler anger you're talking about, so maybe there's some context that I'm missing. But I think we should culturally err toward preserving Fresh Experiences for new humans
this was a conversation I had yesterday. a dinner guest was saying he learned about the odyssey at his princeton prep school and felt well prepared compared to other students when starting at college
I felt the same way about the ending of The Passion of the Christ. Total cop out, having the MC come back to life. Makes the rest of the story irrelevant.
What about all those Trojans? A cool spin off would be if one of them flees and ends up founding a town somewhere else in the Mediterranean that then develops in an empire
My brother took me to see the Zefferelli film and I literally did not know what the ending would be ( I was probably about 9)- devastating. I couldn’t believe it
Somebody once chewed me out online for spoiling The Hobbit because Desolation of Smaug just came out and I wondered if they would still kill off Fili and Kili even with the elf lady romance subplot. :|
The plot is not a secret nor has been for some 3000 years... We read the Odyssey in English in 7th grade... the 8th graders at my school were reading excerpts before winter break... it's a classic book.
I finally read the Odyssey in the first couple months of lockdown.
On my list forever.
Our culture is proud of our ignorance and its literally killing us.
I know about it because I'm a nerd who likes Ancient Greek history and mythology but I 100% never learned about it through school or anything like that.
The average person will generally just not know about old literature unless it was taught in school or in a movie adaptation.
That was something Ian McKellan said. Fans were clamoring for sneak peeks of, or any information on, the final LOTR movie. McKellan said something like, You can always read the books; they’ve been available for like 50 years.
I know it’s meant to be an adaptation of the Odyssey but I’m convinced it’s really meant to be the worthy film the director longed to make in Sullivan’s Travels. I really like O Brother Where Art Thou (and Sullivan’s Travels) I just can’t see how it’s like the Odyssey.
I took my teenaged son to watch the musical Hadestown. (Spoiler alert) When Orpheus turned around to look for Eurydice and she got sucked back in to the netherworld the audience gasped out loud. My (Waldorf-educated) son leaned over and said, “Did they NOT see that coming??!” 😂 A proud moment.
"No spoilers" culture has gone off the rails. So many good stories are about the journey, not the destination. Some things are better going in blind and some genres like mystery rely on it, but usually if something is really good, it doesn't rely on shock or surprise to be worth experiencing
It's not the same. The Odyssey has been a part of western culture for thousands of years. There were people ego didn't even know of its existence, and the "spoiler" was just that Odysseus returned home
I get that. Probably a poor comparison. I suppose it must have been written after WII. You got me banged to rights there. Is the new Nolan film any shorter than 5 days? Man is an amazing director but he likes a looooong film 🙂
When nbc did an Arabian Nights miniseries the bookstore where I worked but a copy on an end cap. Customer: “wow, they already got the novelization out?”
Yeah. Who would have thought the Titanic might actually sink at the end of the movie? Or Hitler dies in the Reichskanzlei? Japan attacks Pearl Harbor? Oppenheimer build the A-bomb? All these spoilers in (history-)books...
I love The Odyssey, in my top 20 for books, but Odysseus is the originator of FAAFO. Dude would have had a way easier life if he hadn’t kept making arrogant decisions.
Families of his crew shoulda sued. They were totally clear of the cyclops BUT BRO COULDN’T KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT
Yeah, your point about being clear of the cyclops was the big thing I took away from the story as well. Like if Odysseus wasn’t desperate for everyone to know how clever he was with that “my name is nobody” trick and so on, he never would’ve been stuck wandering so long
But I guess he played the long game, 10 years of wandering got him a buttload of treasure from the Phaeacians in the story and thousands of years of fame irl
Back in the days of Livejournsl there was a spoiler flap every other day, so I made a sarcastic animated icon (as was the custom at the time) of classic book and movie spoilers. "Odysseus makes it home" was one of them. Who knew how prescient that icing was...
I've never forgotten people complaining about the episode of Mad Men where 2 characters in 1968 went to see Planet of the Apes because it spoiled the famous ending of a 40-year-old movie.
Troy:
I hate every ape I see.
From chimpan-a to chimpan-z,
No, you'll never make a monkey out of me.
Oh, my God, I was wrong,
It was Earth all along.
You finally made a monkey...
Apes:
Yes we finally made a monkey...
Troy and Apes:
Yes, you finally made a monkey out of me!
Great, The Odyssey presented backwards, or middle out, or just a series of flashbacks and flashforwards mashed together but in sequence all while there is an obligatory reversal of the film; so instead of explosions going backwards, ancient weapons hacking people apart, in slo-mo reverse.
clearly your understanding of the phrase "based on a true story" or "a novel" means something entirely unrecognizable in Hollywood. Lincoln as a vampire slayer was a slice of history I must have missed.
These are the same people who were shocked that the Titanic sank in the movie and that the US dropped two big bombs on two cities in Japan in Oppenheimer.
Genuinely don't think either set of people actually exist. I've only ever seen people talking about them, and never actually any comments with those complaints
Enjoying the journey does not require the destination to be a surprise. Some of them work better if you know how it ends but are here to get "the whole story."
Ex: Romeo and Juliet whose opening narration is basically "So these two kids fell in love and got killed. Here's how it went down.."
Be that as it may, there is always opportunity for new future audiences to find past works and find satisfaction from them for the first time. Do not rob them of it.
I went into hadestown blind but knew what it was in a few minutes of the show starting. I was curious if they would keep to the ending or not but I wasn’t surprised when it happened
It gave some that flicker of hope that the end would be different. After all plenty of classics have been adulterated but Hadestown stayed true on that beat.
I know this is going to sound nitpicky 😅 but Les Mis is actually about the June Rebellion/Paris Uprising of 1832, the French Revolution is a different one that happened in the 1790s
At some point spoilerphobia moved past “don’t blab, it’s rude” and into “the entire rest of the world has to cater to me and preserve my ignorance about things I haven’t even cared enough about to keep up with, because all I’m capable of getting out of media is ‘BUT OMG WHAT HAPPEN?!?!’” Sigh.
It’s what destroyed film criticism. No one can discuss the themes, plot development, how the ending works or doesn’t, etc. because everyone freaks out. Movie reviewers used to discuss the whole movie the day it came out.
I once had a guy have an absolute screaming and ranting meltdown at me about "spoilers" for a book that came out 40 years before that time because "I might want to read that someday!" Lmao. I was actually reading it at the time and wanted to talk about it!
Sadly, most people are largely ignorant of Greek mythology and the lessons it teaches us about life, love, sorrow, jealousy, hatred, etc., in short what it means to be human.
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Or am I confused?
I thought it was no one, or nobody, or no man!
Couldn't tell her about Easter in case I spoiled the Bible for her.
Everything I know about Christianity was penned by Lloyd-Webber and Rice.
Jk jk
Can't read Jung if you don't know the Bible.
His legacy will always be LotR for me.
And after adding hours of gratuitous battle scenes, he dropped the Scouring of the Shire.
Sorry, Jackson is on my permanent Asshole Director list.
he did incredibly well to bring it to the masses
i'm glad i'm not as nitpicky as you i wouldn't enjoy anything lolol the movies were near perfection in bringing that type of story to the average idiot and you know it's true
They complain. A lot.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-odyssey-homer/1129773507
;)
Ya know. it's no biggie. Got shit to do and stuff.
Seriously… you went to high school in North America AND NEVER HEARD THE PLOT IN HAMLET?!?”
Sometimes it isn't not knowing the story, it's seeing people perform it so well it brings it to new levels for you.
I can't believe Ody finally came out. I mean, it was obvious. We all thought he was WAY too eager to set sail with a bunch of men for an indefinite amount of time 🤷🏻♀️
Not like the burning part of hell but hell none the less
Complainer friend, after extensive research: ah I get it.
Me: no, I’m asking where have you been.
ITS HOW OLD?!
On my list forever.
Our culture is proud of our ignorance and its literally killing us.
The average person will generally just not know about old literature unless it was taught in school or in a movie adaptation.
They literally say it's a tragedy in the opening number
They outright admit the show will end badly for Orpheus and Eurydice within the first five minutes
Like it's a heart wrenching moment but they don't hide it's going to happen??
Followed. 💙😊🦋
We read thru parts of it out loud in high school.
“Shockingly” they assigned me the role of Penelope. 🤦♀️
Families of his crew shoulda sued. They were totally clear of the cyclops BUT BRO COULDN’T KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT
Still, several chapters in the Odyssey are such cases.
But, no spoilers!
https://www.kten.com/news/entertainment/christopher-nolan-s-next-film-will-be-a-star-studded-adaptation-of-homer-s-the/article_f80f5cce-ab0e-507a-be85-8b621e30f03c.html
I hate every ape I see.
From chimpan-a to chimpan-z,
No, you'll never make a monkey out of me.
Oh, my God, I was wrong,
It was Earth all along.
You finally made a monkey...
Apes:
Yes we finally made a monkey...
Troy and Apes:
Yes, you finally made a monkey out of me!
What else is there?
Next thing I know you're gonna tell me that the founding fathers didn't really have rap battles in cabinet meetings.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000jtn0?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001brj5?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile
Ex: Romeo and Juliet whose opening narration is basically "So these two kids fell in love and got killed. Here's how it went down.."
Unless it's really funny to do so.
Dammit Homer!
Then I remembered, the French are revolting.
From 1789 to 1848 the people of Paris repeatedly revolted (1789, 1830, 1832, 1848). Building huge barricades in the streets became their forté.