Please Suspend Your Disbelief
She plays a Greek soldier, you know.
After viewing this video, I very much doubt Page will be shown walking in The Odyssey. pic.twitter.com/UQBH4xdRjm
— Gay Not Queer (@Gaynotqueer1) July 7, 2026
A mighty warrior. And a skilled deceiver.
And as this is fundraising week, which keeps this place here, do feel free to make use of the tip jar.
Open thread, me hearties.
Is that David and Goliath before heading out to the arena?
Crap. Now I’ve given Hollywood an idea.
That’s a lot to ask.
I realise the post may seem a little catty, but… well, it does strike me as an interesting anthropological snapshot. There’s a lot going on.
I mean, it’s hard not to notice.
She looks like a boy of 13 in the face, barely pubescent, but her tiny frame will never grow into manhood.
She transitioned to protect herself from predation. She still couldn’t punch her way out of a wet paper bag. I mean, I hope she actually is safer, but I kinda doubt it. Predators still know who and what she is. They still know she can’t defend herself.
The worst ones will be even more motivated to get them some of that.
Maybe they had a cinematographer who has filmed Tom Cruise?
Well, Mr Nolan is not an untalented filmmaker, though I don’t particularly enjoy his films, so he may have found some way to make it work, or sort-of work. But again, it’s hard not to notice the thing we’re not supposed to notice.
I saw the trailer for Oppenheimer at the cinema, back when I used to go to the cinema. It looked visually impressive in IMAX format. But then I remembered that I haven’t actually enjoyed any Christopher Nolan film I’ve ever seen. They often have set pieces that are eye-catching and clever and technically impressive, but I can’t think of a Nolan film that I’ve wanted to watch a second time.
The word enjoyed doesn’t seem quite right, for me. It’s hard to specify exactly what it is about them, the ones I’ve seen, and I don’t actively dislike them; but they don’t quite do it for me.
I’m thinking chiefly of Tenet, Interstellar, Inception, and the Dark Knight films. I mean, they’re often ambitious and striking and technically accomplished, but they strike me as oddly unengaging and emotionally flat. The soundtrack swells and rumbles as if some great emotional outpouring is expected, but… it’s just loud music and a lot of sub-bass.
And for some reason, Nolan’s films often have needlessly inaudible dialogue. He seems to do it on purpose.
Would a bigger bodyguard help?
A bigger suit.
It’s like looking at Rory Stewart* through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars.
*For the benefit of our American colleagues I am referring to the former Tory-in-name-only MP and centrist dad podcaster.
As God is my witness, I saw this in passing on X and thought it was AI.
I think it’s the submissive scuttling. That sort of tips it over the edge.
Band name.
Actually, Podcaster would be a pretty good surname.
Oppenheimer was quite good until it started dragging after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My husband and I streamed it and I recall at a point I asked him, “How much more of this movie is there?” He paused it and when we both saw there was another 40 minutes to sit through, we jumped over to YouTube to catch the weather on Ryan Hall, Y’all.
Dressing her in a boxy suit did not add bulk but merely emphasized how petite she is. She looks like a cross between a ventriloquist’s dummy and a 1st Holy Communion/Bar Mitzvah boy where they bought a suit he could grow into.
Except, she won’t.
Nolan has turned his movie into a freak show by allowing this. In a way, one might have a soupcon of sympathy for the other actors in the film as they may be upstaged by everyone talking about the Gidget.
I had to look it up. Ellen Page is 5’1″. She has less than a foot over Peter Dinklage, who is 4’5″ – a little more than the length of a dollar bill.
My god that’s brutal. She looks like a 12 year old in her dad’s suit.
…
And tip jar pinged. Long may this wreck continue !
As Bill Mauldin put it, “Our mountain stretcher bearers”
Oh and, “PING!”
Paging David Byrne…
Okay, this is AI but it’s still believable. Sadly.
Strongly agree.
They have no soul, to use a popular expression from my youth.
[ Returns from hair salon, a radiant being. ]
Bless you, sirs. Should you have a beard, may it be symmetrical.
They’re often visually splendid, but, for me, they feel… distant. Not emotionally engaging at all. Which makes a booming, bombastic score – an instruction to emote – all the more weird.
And then, as mentioned upthread, there’s his deliberate muffling of dialogue.
If you’re going to have a decidedly convoluted and unobvious plot – one that requires a lot of expositional dialogue – say, as in Tenet – and you then deliberately make much of that dialogue inaudible, as if that were clever, then… well, bugger that. I don’t watch films in order to be frustrated by the sound mix.
Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation being very much an exception.
Fix bayonets!
Much like the fiction produced by academics: Elegant prose. Layers and layers of metaphor and allusion. But nothing and nobody to care about. So, well, bugger that.
Speaking of suspending disbelief …
Greek soldier’s cup-bearer perhaps.
A mid-week palate cleanser for you.
After photographing the Akita who would not sit (really), I wanted to use his likeness for something fun. I told the owner I wanted to place him in a Tokyo bar with some humor (or humour for you, David). When I do these, I retain the dog’s likeness so it is a sort of illustrative portrait.
I bring you Titan in Tokyo.
Point of order: she transitioned because of the predation. Like Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Amanda Bynes, Lindsay Lohan, et al she was chewed up and spit out by the Hollywood pedo machine. The current self-destructive coping mechanism du jour is transitioning rather than drugs or alcohol.
I have nothing but sympathy for [Ellen] Page. She’s been abused twice over – once by the casting couch as a vulnerable minor, and again by a psychotic psychiatry profession as a vulnerable complex PTSD patient.
Also, she’s walking like that because women and men have very different hip structures, and she’s had training on how to “walk like a man”.
That, as they say. It’s the inexcusable insult to the victim, the party deserving of our compassion. Not the cross-dressing rapist. Whose feelings, to say the very least, do not matter.
It’s not unusual for surnames to be based on occupation – Farmer, Smith, Wright, &c.
Not sure what current occupations would best be suited to memorialisation in that fashion.
I’m going to start calling myself Dominic Podcaster.
Respect my identity, you racists.
Exactly, and why is it that no one, with all their money, in Hollywood has a tailor? [N.B., a three button jacket, it is the middle button always used…]
Meanwhile…
Obviously some Alphabet Mafia museum in San Francisco or the like? Of course not, The Smithsonian, silly.
But wait! That’s not all!
The things we can learn from a director who is …”propped up “by the cushions of whiteness and the pillows of the bourgeoisie.'”
Once again, you can make a swords movie with random races thrown in by making it from a fantasy time/place, like GOT or Conan movies. But if it is based on an actual time/place event, with a known book, it messes up the story.
Casting a tiny trans actress as a soldier is just too much too far. Too looney. People notice. I love movies like this but will not go see it due to this stupid casting.
I remember following a girl in an airport and by all outward appearances, she appeared to be trans, from clothing to a scraggly beard on her round, girlish face. As I watched her walk, I saw what I will call a “trans waddle,” that attempt to make a woman’s hips move like a man’s. It was pronounced and just sad.
Please Suspend Your Disbelief
Nolan’s looked into the abyss too long, and he’s now in his villain arc. The Odyssey is one of the greatest classics of western literature. It’s practically the definitive hero’s journey story or courage, manhood, and loyalty.
Nolan has turned it into a gender studies project. The black actress playing
FelonHelen of Troy complains Homer didn’t spend any time talking about women’s issues, and casting a 5’1 woman as a Greek warrior is simply laughable.And for all the talk of “cultural appropriation” that Hollywood loves to indulge in, this famous Greek effort is conspicuously free of any Greek actors. It does have a Latino actor who famously condemned non-Hispanic actors playing Hispanics playing a Greek, though.
Twenty years ago, “Nolan to direct transgender Odyssey with black Helen of Troy” would have been an Onion article, not a news story.
Brown suit and black shoes?
I think we can say a number of bold choices were made.
Soulless…
The precise word I used to describe Denis Villeneuve’s Dune movies (1 & 2 at least. I won’t be watching 3). Im grateful to my brother in law for providing the discs and the huge TV so I didn’t have to pay anything.
Walking next to the huge Ajax, the Greeks’ mightiest warrior.
Walks a little funny, as a cup-bearer might.
Stronger than Greece, you might say.
The shirt and tie don’t help.
The internet rumors were that she plays Achilles, but Wikipedia and IMDB say she plays Sinon.
I have several competing hypotheses. But unfortunately they require mind-reading, which the implant in the base of my skull prevents.
First: Maybe Page is the current-year embodiment of Orwell’s 1984 quote, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” It’s so obvious she’s a woman, to ignore it is a supreme act of self-abnegation and Bezmenov-style demoralization, meant to erode the ability to say, “No,” when the Party asks something even worse.
Second: Perhaps failing to look like a man, I’m being humiliated over this failure, is part of the kink. Lots of very damaged people enjoy that kind of thing. Maybe this is a very advanced form of BDSM submission roleplay.
Third: Maybe she and her low-wattage supporters actually believe she’s undergone the modern Alchemical transmutation from lead to gold, that the critical-theory Philosopher’s Stone has at last overcome our false consciousness, and she has achieved the long-sought-for Chemical Wedding of male and female, achieving mystical union.
Fourth: I might be reading too much into this, and should just jeer from the sidelines and throw a can of beer at her.
We will never reach Peak Woke. There are always new heights of lunacy to be scaled.
“Behind the Mountains of Madness, more Mountains of Madness”, you might say.
I think she’s going for a Davy Jones thing.
https://youtu.be/xvqeSJlgaNk?si=jBmQRm07AGtbrnDo
The thing is, Howard sketched out a fairly detailed map and history of his Hyborian Age that includes distinct regional ethnicities. Conan travels to those regions, but you don’t get a mixed band of ne’er-do-wells consisting of a Khitan warrior, a Kushite archer, and a Stygian sorceror without Howard damn well explaining why they’re all hanging out together.
“Because elves” is a common fallacy when it comes to handwaving away bad writing and worse agenda-mongering in fantastic literature.
That’s Achilles (“History’s Greatest Weapon of Mass Destruction“). Telamonian Ajax is the second-greatest.
If you’ve had about enough of the current handwringing over Nolan’s latest, I highly recommend that link. Jeff Wright does a bang-up job of narrating the Trojan War and the Odyssey in an entertaining and agenda-free way.