movies Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Movie review: The Odyssey

“faithful” to the source material?

My wife and I saw the film The Odyssey at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany a couple of weekends ago, and I somehow neglected to write about it. Busyness has its costs.

I’ll admit to never having read the book/books; he also referenced Homer’s The Iliad and other period pieces. So I have no feeling about whether Christopher Nolan was “faithful” to the source material, though I find the debate endlessly fascinating. It’s a three-hour movie, not thirty.

The movie is vast and often impressive, especially visually. I thought the first palace-intrigue, extended scene dragged a bit, though the pacing improved after that.

The action scenes are memorable. Because of my lack of foreknowledge, the Cyclops, many of the storms, and the Circe’s magic narrative took me by surprise. What was particularly striking was the treatment of Circe’s magic; someone suggested correctly that it recalled “the unsettling body horror of David Cronenberg rather than traditional fantasy spectacle.”

Yet I thought the recapitulation of the Troy was what I found most unnerving. It was the point that Odysseus (Matt Damon) seemed to grasp the consequences of the “battle.”

A lot of the debate about the film centered on the religious content. A story from Religion Unplugged pondered, “No Divine Powers: Where Are All The Gods In Christopher Nolan’s ‘The Odyssey’?” Yet my wife and I spent the ride home very conscious of the film’s faith basis. “Many have noted that [Nolan] conflates aspects of Homer’s religion with Christianity and modernity.” This is a fair point.

Still, it rated a 93% (critics)/97% (fans) positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I didn’t love it, but I was glad to see it in the theater, at least until…

Technical difficulties

The real problem, though, was technical – not Nolan’s fault but the Spectrum’s. If you’ve ever played a DVD in a player and it momentarily sticks, you’ll get some idea. It happened a couple of times about 2/3s of the way through. But in the extended consequential fight scene, it happened frequently, not severe enough that we couldn’t make out the dialogue, but it was mightily distracting.

I mentioned this to the ticket seller after the film, and he said he’d let someone know. Meh.

I recently saw an interesting piece in the Boston Globe (behind a paywall): ‘The Odyssey’ and the death of the Hollywood epic. The year’s most celebrated film is destined to be forgotten. “From opening title card to closing credits, “The Odyssey” is a nearly three-hour barn burner, racing from event to event with whirlwind kinetic energy. Blink, and you’ll miss some roaring fire, raucous tempest, or piggy sorceress on the spinning carousel of adventure. Nolan’s film zooms along as though locked into a high-speed drag race with the ‘Fast and Furious’ franchise.

“That’s why it’s so forgettable.” This was not my experience, but time literally will tell.

Even before seeing the film, I enjoyed the story of thirteen-year-old Mason Cufari, from Rotterdam, Schenectady County, who played young Sinon.

Brunello: The Gracious Visionary

Brunello Cucinelli, The King of Cashmere

On its very last day at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany, my wife and I attended a matinee of the film Brunello: The Gracious Visionary, even though I had no idea what it was about.

Per Rotten Tomatoes, it’s “an inside look at the extraordinary life and career of the man behind a luxury fashion empire built on the principles of humanity and artistry,” Brunello Cucinelli.

It’s an odd yet interesting device to have actors show him growing up in a rural agricultural community, while the now-70+ Brunello makes asides about the situation. His family lived on land they didn’t own, so the landlord came by annually, imploring the children not to go to school but to stay home and help their parents. The parents ignored the advice.

Young Brunello excelled at school, especially in math. This would help him play cards, initially with family. But the young man and his siblings still had to come home to do chores. Nevertheless, he found rural life idyllic.

His father and other relatives decided to move to the city and work at the factory. Soon, it was clear that his father was disappointed in the sterile work environment.

Adrift

Brunello was a young man without a plan, hanging around a local establishment and winning money at cards. When he got a girlfriend, he bumbled into a brief gig as a fashion model. His affection for angora wool reminded him of the rabbit fur that he and his siblings would comb out.

When he decided to start a factory, his building design, with windows to the outside rather than sterile walls, arose directly from his father’s unsatisfactory experience. He became “The King of Cashmere.”

Brunello noted in The Cut that making the film he wanted was so that “50 years down the line, when my grandchildren and others look at the movie, for them to say, ‘This is what my grandfather, my great-grandfather thought as he was still alive.'”

There were oodles of celebrity tributes, from Oprah Winfrey, Patrick Dempsey (“McDreamy), Formula One chief executive Stefano Domenicali and others.

Is it hagiography? Well, sure. Does it work anyway? It didn’t for most of the RT critics, who were only 27% positive. IMDb was more generous at 7.2 out of 10, though with more one-star reviews than two- to six-star combined.

But my wife and I liked it for two reasons. It was beautifully filmed by Giuseppe Tornatore, who made Cinema Paradiso.

More importantly, we were taken by the “‘philosopher-designer’ revered for his distinctive integration of humanistic values, craftsmanship, and ethical entrepreneurship.” He called it “humanistic capitalism,” which essentially meant one can make money while encouraging the workers, creating an inviting place to work, etc. When COVID hit, he promised to keep his employees paid for up to two years.

So we bought into the messaging. It didn’t feel particularly self-serving for a guy who’s been in business for a half century. Check out the website, especially the section on the company and the value of human dignity.

Movie review: Reading Lolita in Tehran

Gatsby”/Lolita/Daisy Miller/Pride and Prejudice

My wife recommended that we go to the Spectrum 8 Theatre and watch the movie Reading Lolita in Tehran. I’m almost always interested in seeing movies unfamiliar to me, so we attended on a Thursday afternoon; alas, only one other person was present.

I will admit that I was unfamiliar with the non-fiction book by Iranian author and academic Azar Nafisi, published in 2003. It is based on her own experiences while teaching English literature at the University of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution.”

The film seems to hew closely to the book, but it does not necessarily follow its chronology. After the fall of the Shah of Iran, Azar (Golshifteh Farahani) and her husband Bijan (Arash Marandi) return to their homeland, expecting more freedom.

Unfortunately, the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini meant a different change. She gets pushback, initially from a young man in her class, who thinks there was nothing redeeming about The Great Gatsby because of the moral turpitude of the main couple – adultery! The country increasingly becomes more restrictive.

“Gatsby” for 1979 was the first piece, followed by “Lolita” (1995), Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” (1988), and Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” (1996).

The professor ultimately gets fired from her position. Society requires the hijab. Her ultimate response was to teach these classes – for women only for a variety of reasons. It’s in those discussions, shown in much brighter hues than much of the rest of the film, that allow great insights about liberation.

My favorite involved Pride and Prejudice, where the professor explains how conveying dialogue and even flirtation in the midst of regimented dance.

Pretty good

This was a good, not great movie. One is already in the movie’s corner going in. The episodic nature of the film didn’t always gel. It was still worthwhile, because, as Peter Travers noted in his 2.5 stars-out-of-4 review, “Today, the book banning strikes a raw nerve in America, the country the women once regarded as a haven for freedom seekers.”

(A recent example: South Florida State College fired an English professor after she assigned a story about a teacher who talks about sex with her students. Now the professor is suing. “The instructor, Vinita Prabhakar, said in an interview that she had taught the story in her classes for nearly a decade without incident.”)

Rotten Tomatoes gave the movie an 86% positive rating, but not enough audience patrons viewed the film to comment.

The film was made in Italy, and some narratives were fictionalized to protect some of the real people portrayed. It was released originally in 2024, but didn’t make it to the US until July 2026.

Movie review: Toy Story 5

Jessie faces Lilypad

My wife and I went to see the movie Toy Story 5 on a weekday afternoon at the Spectrum 8 in Albany because I had to. I’ve seen Toy Story (1995) and Toy Story 2 (1999) in the cinema well before we had a child. When we watched the third film (2010), we didn’t take the kid. For the fourth (2019), the three of us all saw it at the movies, but not together. I even saw a couple of TV specials, Toy Story of Terror! (2013) and Toy Story That Time Forgot (2014). But I never saw the Lightyear (2022) movie.

So I guess I’m as invested in the TS universe as others are in the ones for Star Wars, Marvel Cinematic, or LEGO.

Bonnie, the eight-year-old who inherited Andy’s toys in TS4, is rather content with playtime, which is represented wonderfully in a handmade-looking style. But her parents are concerned. They buy her a new smart tablet, Lilypad, so Bonnie can chat with her dance class members. Has Bonnie outgrown her toys?

On the outskirts of town, Blaze, a nine-and-a-half-year-old, loves animals: a horse, Daffodil, and the family pig, Jimmy Dean. (The name cracked me up.) She has a display of her model horse collection in her room and still enjoys playtime occasionally.

Sheriff Jessie and the other toys, including her deputy, Buzz Lightyear, worry that Lilypad will usurp Bonnie’s attention. The action goes from there, including the return of Woody. A unit of high-tech Buzz Lightyear toys crash-lands on a deserted island, and they too end up in the main plotline.

The cowgirl

This is very much a Jessie story. There’s a brief reprise of When She Loved Me from Toy Story 2 early on, which was a hint for me. How much has the cowgirl mattered over the years?

At the same time, the movie seemed to be set up to bash online technology, yet in the end found a place for it.

Rotten Tomatoes gave Toy Story 5 a 92% (critics)/94% (fans) positive rating. It “largely sidesteps franchise fatigue” through its redirected focus. We liked it a lot, and even got a little, er, emotional. Aside from the core characters, most of the TS tribe was underutilized, but it would have made the story too bloated.

It was strange, though. There was a father and child in the theater, but they left early on, leaving us to see the film by ourselves, which was too bad; I like getting audience reaction.

Sunday Stealing Is Artificial

Essential American songs of the last 250 years

Welcome to Sunday Stealing. Here we will steal all types of questions from every corner of the blogosphere. Our promise to you is that we will work hard to find the most interesting and intelligent questions. Cheers to all of us thieves!

Since it’s the 4th of July weekend, we’re going to keep this simple. On us all! The first question came courtesy of AI. Sunday Stealing Is Artificial.

4th of July Questions

1) If you could attend a 4th of July fireworks display anywhere in the United States, where would you choose?

I want to be somewhere with a great sightline, and not a lot of people setting off their own incendiary devices. In Albany, I used to have a great view in my former church’s parking lot on Lark Street. About 12 years ago, my daughter and I loved the view from the field behind Albany High School. But on the way home, only a half dozen blocks away, I felt as though we were going through a war zone. So, sadly, I settled for watching it on television.

2) What book are you currently reading?

Nothing. I’m doing a book review on Tuesday, July 7, at 2 pm at the Albany Public Library, 161 Washington Ave. The book is African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, 1778-1990, by Emerson I. Moss. I picked this book because I have an ancestor, and indeed, a whole family to whom I am related, mentioned substantially in this book. Preparing a book review involves rereading, taking notes, and the like.

CCL

3) What have you been listening to?

Last week, CBS Sunday Morning offered up Essential American songs of the last 250 years. The presentation featured Sara Bareilles singing “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” made famous by Aretha, and Jon Batiste performing “Georgia On My Mind”

Here’s the Spotify roster. Lists like this always generate a certain controversy. “Where’s X? What about Y?” The missed choice I read about most was “Take Me Home, Country Roads” by John Denver. A guy named Mike Smith had a list of 15 alternatives; I totally agree with Midnight Train To Georgia, probably 16 Tons, and El Paso.

4) What shows or movies have you been watching?

I finally watched Idiocracy, an absurd 2006 film which is becoming more believable by the year. “Corporal Joe Bauers, a decidedly average American, is selected for a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive.” Will stupidity win out? One fan on Rotten Tomatoes wrote: “The most prophetic movie ever created. It predicted Trump’s America in an amazingly accurate and satirical way!”

My wife and I are FINALLY watching The American Revolution. We’re 2/6 of the way through the Ken Burns documentary. It’s amazing how little we knew about the period between Lexington/Concord/Bunker Hill and July 1776.

Thank you for playing! Please come back next week.