movies: May 2004 Archives

Okay, so Saturday night, a friend and I decide to go see Troy. I drive by her place to pick her up, and I'm a few minutes early. We're going to the late showing, so it's nice and dark, and starting to rain a little. I pull up in front of her house, slow down, and I see someone who looks a little like her waving at me. Hair's a little different, but what do I know? I shave my head rather than getting haircuts. I stop, pop the lock, and she gets in.

Yeah, it's not my friend. This woman says something and reaches over and grabs my crotch. Ummmm, yeah. Yeah, she did. To my credit, before I slipped into complete shock, I asked her to step out of my car. I had to ask her three times, and refuse her request for a dollar (bus fare?), but she did finally leave. It took a bit for the cloud of perfume wafting off of her to do likewise. I drove a couple of blocks, windows rolled down, and just sat there dumbfounded. Five minutes later, pulled back up, my friend came out, no further surreality.

As if that wasn't enough.

So anyhow, made it to Troy, watched the epic, dropped my friend off, made it home, again without any additional incident. What did I learn from Troy?

  1. Our country's fetish with Nordic blondes as the ideal of beauty apparently stretches back to ancient Greece (iow, I agree with Aly)
  2. This was the one thing that the movie had in common with Clash of the Titans (Ursula Andress as Aphrodite).
  3. Orlando Bloom now need only play Robin Hood to cement his status as the greatest cinematic archer of all time.
  4. My tendency in contemporary epics is to appreciate the second-tier roles far more than the central ones--that's where the real acting seems to occur.
  5. There's a new movie about King Arthur coming out that appears to buck that trend.
  6. Brad Pitt makes a more convincing Achilles when his mouth is closed.
  7. Hector > Hulk, for Eric Bana's career.
  8. Peter O'Toole is still alive and still talented.
  9. I wouldn't mind seeing Sean Bean reprise his role as Odysseus in an adaptation of the Odyssey.

All in all, not bad. They made some serious choices about the story, certainly, not the least of which was to seriously downplay the role of the gods, but it's hard to fault them for that, given their audience. Most of their choices, in fact, seemed to have to do with stereotypes about American audiences. Not a full price epic, but probably a matinee.

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This page is a archive of entries in the movies category from May 2004.

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