Nobody is more certain of anything than conservatives are that the whole world thinks exactly as them. We’ve seen it on so many fronts of political issues and idiotic culture wars over this last decade -conservatives, or those of a like reactive mindset, declaring with confidence any outcome that suits their prejudices. The rise of Trumpism taught them that fringe positions and complaints were a lot more popular than the mainstream expected -which was true but clearly not to the extent that they believe. There are so many other factors and nuances that have little to do with broader conservative grievances and the picture painted isn’t actually as accurate as they like to claim either (remembering that Trump only won a popular vote once and by the slimmest of margins). It is exhausting, yet it is an exhaustion that has long spread to my space of interest, the movie space -an area where conservatives, for as much as they decry Hollywood’s ‘liberal elites’ at every opportunity, are despe...
“A new dawn will break over the darkened world, when our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” In promoting his new book Son of Nobody at my local literary festival, author Yann Martel noted how the works of the anonymous Greek poet(s) identified as Homer - The Iliad and especially The Odyssey - are foundational texts of western culture; works of curious fiction that carry immense weight on how the literature of western society developed. Martel observed that perhaps a part of that comes from an apparent timelessness in the themes of these stories in which the patterns of the world as we know it three thousand years later can still be found. The personalities, conflicts, and anxieties of such works are apparent in both life and fiction -they speak as much to the present as they ever did. Thus, like every custodian of the material before him, Christopher Nolan very intentionally speaks to the present, in his new adaptation of The Odyssey , in which the Homeric epic is cast as a person...