Hacker Cinema
Troy
2004 · Film · 163 min
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
In year 1250 B.C. during the late Bronze age, two emerging nations begin to clash. Paris, the Trojan prince, convinces Helen, Queen of Sparta, to leave her husband Menelaus, and sail with him back to Troy. After Menelaus finds out that his wife was taken by the Trojans, he asks his brother Agamemnon to help him get her back. Agamemnon sees this as an opportunity for power. They set off with 1,000 ships holding 50,000 Greeks to Troy.
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10 comments on Hacker News
If you go to the streets of Athens and show them two pictures one of Diane Kruger and one Lupita Nyong'o, and ask them who they think represents Helena of Troy more I'm certain you are going to get Diane as the definitive answer.
I'm also certain that many will feel the casting of Lupita Nyong'o as cultural appropriation while the same will be less true for Diane Kruger.
I'm not saying the Greeks should decide who to cast in a US film, but the argument that if the actress isn't Greek then any other choice has the same level of accuracy is wrong.
I don't know about what Americans think, but, as a Greek, the whole "whiteness" thing is an American social construct. There aren't whites and blacks in Greece, mostly because we don't have enough black people here to have a divide.
As far as I'm concerned, all your casting is wrong, it's not like Brad Pitt in Troy looks anything like a Greek person. Casting black people goes even farther, but it's just a matter of degree.
It does make sense, these are American movies, they're going to cast Americans, and the whole race issue is about who gets to star in them. There aren't enough Greek people in Hollywood to make a fuss about representation, so they don't get representation. It is what it is, but let's not pretend it's about accuracy or faithfulness to the original material, it's just about less racially biased casting.
We've already accepted a lot of non-Greek casting, and always have. Movies like Troy are filled with people of German, English, Scandinavian whatever heritage, same here with The Odyssey.
I think they get a pass because we see Greek history as a shared western history, even though it's about as accurate as a black person in those roles.
So I think for a lot of people, when they see complaints about black actors playing historically "white" roles, what they're really seeing is a claim that black people don't have any right to our shared western heritage despite the fact that it's almost always a black person that has grown up in and only ever really been a part of western culture.
Damn, as bad as the Troy movie was I thought Sean Bean was a great pick for Odysseus. Not so sure about Matt Damon
Someone behind me before 'Troy' said: "Achillies dies." and someone in front of them turned around and said "Dont ruin the movie." to which the only response I could think of was ... "Were you born in a barn."
Wear dark glasses, and a pair of ear plugs.
"Play that sh* AFTER the movie." Please.
The very best part of Close Encounters is François Truffaut.
D&D had written a lot of movies (25th hour, troy, kite runner, wolverine, brothers) and there were some “known actors” (Lena heady, Peter Dinklage, aiden gillan, Charles dance, Sean bean).
And I think the biggest problem with game of thrones is that the show runners crapped out after GRRM ran out of material. So I would want a better runner for Tolkien.
Exactly. A lot of new content made seems to be really poor to me. And oh, did I mention content that keeps making frequent trips in and out of Netflix? (Movies like The Terminator franchise, Troy etc.) So cringe I just want to cancel it after this month.
>Also, this seems to me to be utterly unfounded: “Which poem is better, the Iliad or the Odyssey? I don’t have hard numbers to back this up, but today it seems pretty clear that the Odyssey wins hands down in the mass popularity stakes.“
The "which is better" is unanswerable but in terms of popularity, the evidence seems to show that The Odyssey is more well-known to today's readers.
One reason is that many USA high schools use The Odyssey instead of the The Iliad in reading assignments.
As for another datapoint to popularity, compare the number of ratings & reviews of The Odyssey (~760k) vs The Iliad (~305k) on Goodreads[1][2]. Similar popularity differences can be found on Amazon for other translations.
The 2004 film Troy may have increased awareness of The Iliad but it still seems like The Odyssey is more popular.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1381.The_Odyssey
[2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1371.The_Iliad
The Iliad consists of many scenes. Each scene could probably be a five-ten minute piece. If you read the Iliad it will probably take eight or more hours. Movie's rarely exceed three hours and any movie based on the Iliad would be abridged (director's cut of Troy is just over three hours). It's not clear to me that content dictates length. It seems medium does to a large extent.
"Their goal was to 'measure as precisely as possible the exact effects of the two bombs' in other words, to put calipers on the problem so that people back home would have a factual frame of reference within which to draw conclusions about the bomb’s capacities as well as its limitations
What was that for? To make a better bomb? Why don't we stop fighting and do something better? Heck, I'm gonna stop fighting with my neighbor about the cigar bits he throws out of his window. I could write 2 more lines of code by that time.
I remember a quote from the movie 'Troy' - Imagine a king who fights his own battles. Wouldn't that be a sight?
What if we send our leaders on a 1-on-1 battle instead of a million men. We could save a lotta blood.