Helen of Troy should have a sorta "classical beauty". Sidney S. is an attractive lady, but she doesn't have that. She's someone I'd cast for Baywatch or some modern Americana movie.
If they couldn't find a Greek actress (which I find impossible to believe) an Italian or a Med was good enough. Victoria Justice has Spaniard ancestry and that's good enough by me.
Someone looked at this girl who tried a role for a woman whose beauty started a legendary war and said "sorry, you're too pretty" and cast instead a black woman who's not even attractive by black standards but rather forgettable in looks.
If Helen of Troy was some big tittie, thin Koran chick, would there be similar backlash? I think people could see the merits of some rare beauty in the setting.
This general idea is what the thinking will be for Lupito, but it just doesn't translate to universal beauty standards. She may be a prime example of Kenyan, but is that to Hollywood ideals? Compared to a typical Kenyan lady she looks very good, but does she even fit Kenyan beauty standards?
Anyway, so where are the Asians in The Odyssey? If they're just casting people from everywhere, why no Asians?
As I said in the other thread, her beauty alone wasn't enough. All the Greek kings had taken an oath to defend her marriage (oaths were very serious back then) and she was the legitimate heir to the throne of Sparta which made her husband king of the city. Her beauty wasn't the only reason for this war. There were other reasons too.
When Louis CK had directed pootie tang, at some point the film was taken from him and edited by the studio for a year.
He was invited to to see it. Someone brought him a review from the new york times that loved the film. So for 5 minutes he had the experience for being part of making a great film. He got to experience that. Before he saw what it had become, hated it, and more importantly for the audience to deeply hate it and being panned by most of the audience and reviews.
I think this project must have been for Ellen Page that way. She must have had that brief moment where playing an epitome of masculinity in an epic movie would be the full fulfillment of her delusions, right before it al came crashing down and she became another symbol of ill mental health.
Inception is a film on how awesome the people who make films are. Once you realize that, you can't unsee how much of a self masturbatory piece it is. It shitting on the entire cast for basic teenager philosophy question sours it even more.
I think inception, the prestige and interstellar are good films.
Christopher Nolan's writing is very literal and obvious in some ways and I think people miss the poetry and subtlety that he also creates with his filmmaking style. For example, inception creates a clear distinction between when you're inside a dream and when you aren't, but throws it overboard with the ambiguous ending. Then there is the well noted clue of Cobb's wedding ring that everyone will have noticed or heard.
But then there is the fact that there are moments that are supposed to be compeltely real events, and you take them as real events, that make no sense outside of a dream. Like the chase sequence in Mombasa, where Cobb has to squeeze his face through an alley. And when he does there immediately is a car waiting from a strange benefactor. Somehow Nolan's cinematography lets people swear its a non dream scenario, despite the literal action being a complete dream sequence if you read it off a page.
Interstellar is stellar for putting to film some scientific concepts that normally get handwaved away in space movies even if it is hampered by hathaways poor performance and the sappy love theme.
The prestige is a pretty good book, but creating the prestige movie from it is very interesting. Nothing tells you more about a film maker then when they turn a book into a movie. Because it lets you see every choice made.
In the book, the magicians are corny and silly in some ways. They shout from the audience how a trick is done. They deface each other's announcement boards. One gets control over the others diary and rewrites bits and puts in bad french to make him look more illiterate. While at the same time it's essentially a ghost story. Where the movie circles around the duplicating machine and the intentional use to frame a magician, the book has a machine that copies a person, but then leaves behind an empty husk of a body (no soul).
It's seen throughout his movies, his belief that there is nothing more than the physical. Whether it's interstellar and all the mystical moments from ghost in the bedroom, or weird touch upon arriving near gargantua, it's all just the self, the physical. There is a satanic element to the glorification of the self in it, or a redditor quality if you like.
That's why he is the worst director possible to take on the odyssey. If you want some blackified take on it, give it to spike lee or something.
I dislike Inception because of how it attempts to tackle the question of "is life a simulation" and it's ultimate answer is "it doesn't matter" (in case the "you're waiting for a train" line they repeat ad nauseam in the film along with the ending didn't make it blindly obvious). It's such a fucking cheap cop-out.
I dislike Inception because you can escape the doom dream realm at the bottom by just killing yourself. The same way you escape every fucking dream layer.
