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.
Do not forget.
Allow me a small distortion for the sake of an old joke.
(Although I seem to recall reading that Ajax was the greatest in raw size and strength, even if Achilles was the greater warrior.)
Don’t you like my puns, David? It’s even right on the bottle.
Philistine.
“Christopher Nolan has cancelled all screenings of The Odyssey with movie influencers,” one X user wrote. “He is only allowing approved critics to see it in advance. He is waving the surrender flag. They know they have a financial disaster on their hands.”
Why?? I just want to know why….
To repeat myself:
She’s trying too hard to walk like a guy (and her pelvis is just not going to do it naturally) so it comes off as if she’s sunburned her inner thighs and desperate not to allow them to touch.
Most images of Page alone take an upward angle so you can’t gauge her height, but I had to look it up after that munchkin shot. She’s 5’1″ … which goes even further into that’s a she territory. Even Michael J. Fox has a couple inches on her.
Whether the film’s box office will be seriously impacted by Nolan’s peculiar decisions, I couldn’t say. But the air of needless alienation does undermine any remaining interest I have in going to the cinema to have fun. The shoehorning-in of Current Year Politics, combined with feeble writing in general, does make the hope of good times harder to sustain.
I haven’t been inside a cinema in a couple of years. The last films I saw were Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, which was underwhelming – especially after Fallout, which I enjoyed – and Dune: Part Two, which was okay, other than it features the ubiquitous scowling woman, the one unencumbered by charisma or discernible acting talent. Zendaya.
. . .
[ Decides discretion is the better part of valour ]
*shakes fist*
I asked grok for an estimated height of her body guard and it said 6’5″ to 6’7″ so…my props to the HR department for once.
Well, she needs to bitch-slap that trainer and demand her money back like a man.
And this. But try telling anyone that the psychiatric profession was psychotic back when something could have been done to stop this and pretty much all of the other f’n insanity that we are seeing today and people would treat you like the crazy one.
Seen over to Ace’s…
Can’t say I have heard drag was an “industry”, but it does explain a lot.I wonder if DragCorp is going to have an IPO.
What percentage of this Vibrant Community just needs to be shot?
Oh, yes. One of his epithets translates roughly as “the living wall”. (Again, sign up for Jeff Wright’s podcast. He’s not reading a translation; he’s telling the story of the Trojan War in a modern version of Homeric style, complete with repeated epithets and lots of side analysis)
To be fair Achilles is kind of cheating. It’s not hard to be utterly indomitable on the battlefield when you’re literally invulnerable.
I presume there’s some kind of BS legal reason why the police in major US cities no longer use water cannon, beanbag rounds and rock salt to disperse riots like this, but I feel that an occasional whiff of grapeshot would tamp this tendency down a bit.
Or maybe not. As body cam footage shows, Diverse Vibrants will charge fully armed police while wielding nothing more than a plastic spork. I’m increasingly coming to the conclusion that Scott Adams and John Derbyshire were 100% unironically correct.
They killed it with their politics.
It was, I’d say, a very significant nail in the coffin. The ‘Modern Audiences’ messaging seemed to be pretty much everywhere, even in the most frivolous confections. The faeces in the cheesecake.
And it didn’t even need to be done directly. Just the background assumptions in play, the unspoken rules of being progressive, could cripple otherwise sure-fire projects.
To pick one example, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. What could have been an entertaining romp – magic, monsters, heroism – was robbed of life by the politics of its writer and of the Marvel studio. Such that the film’s supposed protagonist – the character you’ve actually turned up to watch and be entertained by – wasn’t deemed worthy of anything approaching an arc, and was all but sidelined in his own film. On account of being male and pale-skinned.
When the studio chief is banging on about not wanting a “white guy” in a position of power in a story, this signals umpteen other assumptions and is a sign of creative rot.
Instead, we got the insertion of unloved characters who were deemed suitably brown-skinned, as if that would compensate for their being uninteresting, and a supposedly sympathetic villain whose motives are wildly unconvincing and who wants to abduct children and kill people in large numbers in order to – wait for it – be a single mom.
The single-motherhood being foregrounded as some obvious aspiration. As the husband whose death she was supposedly grieving, traumatically, when last we saw her, the love of her life, and who could presumably be restored via the same magical shenanigans used in this film, was simply forgotten about. The whole thing was morally dissonant.
It was one of those films where you found yourself thinking, “Why didn’t this character do that other, really obvious thing instead?” Over and over again.
And then there were the inevitable fight scenes, in which you could practically see the identitarian calculation of race and sex – and who must therefore lose first – such that the ensuing battle is entirely predictable and robbed of any drama.
It’s like they just can’t help themselves.
[ Compiles tomorrow’s Ephemera, clicks schedule. ]
!
Yes indeed. The left has made it legally perilous to use reasonable force. Hence all the videos of people wrestling with shoplifters, rioters, etc.
Even if more frequent use of firearms did not discourage the ferals, it could reduce their population. (A cessation of welfare benefits–food subsidies, housing subsidies, free medical care–would also help.)
Daniel Ream:
The USA benefits international discourse because the different states showcase the results of various policy options.
Entire regions of the US are not held hostage to this behavior… these are the regions Lefties denounce as “racist” or “gun-toting” or “backwards” or “unfriendly to diversity”. These are probably the areas from which Europeans sent amazed and glowing reports.
I recall a clip that circulated when Lefties tried to expand the George Floyd Revolution from burning urban neighborhoods to rural areas… their “Day of Outrage” march was met by gun-toting landowners who kept them on the public roads.
“We’re peaceful, you don’t need a rifle” whimpered one of the Lefties.
“It’s because I have a rifle that you are peaceful” countered one of the locals.
The chaos is totally self-inflicted.
An extremely desirable outcome.
Heh. Indeed.
By stealth or by violence, leftists seek our destruction. Sooner or later, good people need rifles.
Directly related:
Most criminologists are leftists and thus are pro-criminal.
And protecting criminals is part of their war on civilization.
Meanwhile, I think Knox County has a Manchurian candidate.
I have been asking around with a very basic question – who is he? What part of Knoxville is he from? Has anyone gone to school with him? His campaign bio says he was rasied by a single mother who cleaned houses – okay, can I hear more about that? He is a member of the ironworkers union. Is he a decent ironworkeer? Has anyone worked with him? Does he have any hobbies? Does he own a dog?
In political campaigns, candidates usually go out of their way to present their “human side” as a way of connecting to voters. I cannot even find one person who is saying, “Oh, yeah, Beau and I, we’d bowl on Tuesdays” or “Yeah, I remember him from Bearden High School.”
He has rasied controversy because he traveled to Venezuela with other US socialists to march in support of Maduro. He has answered that criticism by saying he was “young and dumb.” That was six years ago. When he was 29 years old.
In one news article, he said that “as a renter who works a 9 to 5 job . . .” Where does he work? He may well have stopped being an ironworker years ago and is just a union flack, but when you say “as a renter who works a 9 to 5 job,” you’re implying you’re just an average guy who punches a time clock, comes back to his apartment – not a house he owns because that’s terribly bourgeosie – and cracks open a beer.
Really odd. A candidate where extremely little is known about his personal side but everything about how he values hard work, and he is proud to be a union man, and wants to work hard for the people and [add your own campaign platitudes here]. It seems to me that if Socialism had a John Galt, here he is.
Our “liberal” journalists remain curiously uninterested in investigating.
No, Inspector, the expression “scum of the earth” is not overused.
As noted before, even to air such questions is, among Our Betters, practically taboo:
And so we get BBC broadcaster Dan Snow denouncing as “stunningly racist” even the suggestion that incompatible tribes could possibly exist. And that some of those allowed into our society are undeserving. That they are unfit for civilisation.
Despite the evidence piling up on an all but daily basis.
Platnerization – the Democrats or DSA (a distinction without much difference) attempt to push another of their notion of a Manly Man Of The People™ who will connect with the MAGAts Who Vote Against Their Own Interests™ because they reject the effete they usually tout.
Normally a union organizer (the VW UAW in Chattanooga notwithstanding) in a right-to-work state would be shown the gate, but with the invasion of blue state refugees into the civilized states (Nashville, I hardly knew ye) all bets are off.
My gosh. Pint sized!
I’m not much bothered by the fuss over who Page plays – the troll that she played Achilles always seemed too silly (Achilles isn’t actually in The Odyssey). There’s at least one role in The Odyssey proper that would be half-decent for her – Tiresias, the Greek man who turned into a woman and then years later turned back into a man. Or maybe she is Sinon, as a worthy commenter has noted below. Which, you know, whatever – again, I don’t think he’s in The Odyssey.
Last film I saw in the cinemas was quite recent: Disclosure Day. Hey! Stop laughing!
I heard it was a bit shit. Sorry, underwhelming.
Yes, she is. Hence the skilled deceiver bit.
A bit! I enjoyed it anyway. Some parts were quite original.
I had in mind all along that occasionally Spielberg makes a dog of a film. I think there’s probably a law for that. Every 10th Spielberg production will be terrible.
I did enjoy two other films of his that he made in recent years – Ready Player One and The Fabelmans.
I sort of tuned out of his output. I did go to see War of the Worlds, which had great set pieces but didn’t really satisfy as a story; and Bridge of Spies, which I saw on TV, the details of which now escape me, though I remember thinking it was watchable at the time.
Oh, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. And the less said about that, the better.
We’ll suspend your disbelief for you:
Hope someone budgeted for the new bolgias.
Groan
Formerly funded by USAid, I presume?
It’s simply more prevalent as so much has been imported.
Interesting…beanbag rounds, you say…beanbags. Yes. Well perhaps the police sense a lack of support even from the kinds of people who call for whiffs of grapeshot, employing wood chippers, and tossing commies from helicopters. Because in the end, when the chips are down and 20/20 hindsight is deployed in a court of law, the public…even “conservative” and especially “libertarian” types will fall inline with academic issues about semantics.
This is why Dereck Chauvin sits in prison today and numerous cops in Austin and elsewhere are persecuted such that at this point, even without a conviction, the lawfare is destroying them financially and has already robbed them of a big chunk of their and their family’s lives.
It would be fun if someone with a backbone would ask him in a public forum how his working-man roots align with the D policies of open borders and the downward effect that has on working class wages, or the upward effect it has on low-end rents. Or about perhaps the use of tariffs on countries that have miserably low wages, even slave labor, whose products undercut American-made companies. Or about D support for tranny story hours and groomers in schools. Or the welfare state in general. Funny how those sort of questions either never get asked or let the milquetoast answers go unchallenged.
OK…yet another thing…silly but still…I read The Odyssey (still can’t spell the damned thing) after going to my local library about a dozen years ago looking for The Iliad (again the spelling…like wtf don’t it have a ‘y’ in it?) but they only had the O thing. And so my memory not being all that great anymore I keep seeing, as you said at first references to Page playing Achilles. And I’m thinking wtf? I’m certainly no expert on this and I have to admit, as compelling as The O was, I got a bit lost between putting it down, doing life stuff, then picking it up again. But Achilles? Seems I should have remembered him being in that story, especially because I wanted to read the goddam I book in the first place…so…anyway…
New paragraph…just for you, David…So now I am seeing that Elliott is playing this Sinon character (gee, why not Synon?). And I’m thinking…Sinon…I vaguely remember some Telegraph guy but aside from Penelope (not the Pitstop one) a few other chicks and a god or two, I don’t recall any other guy, certainly not one named Sinon or Synon or Signon or wtf. So now I look that up and he’s not in the O thing at all either. He’s an I guy.
So the question I am left with is would any of this be bugging me if my useless county library had at least one copy of the I book?
Something to look forward to.
Some diversity occurred.
Perhaps we should start referring to these as “diversity incidents”.
Odysseus does meet and speak with the spirits of dead Achilles and Agamemnon.
(That is what I had assumed those rumors were about.)
As Tim notes, the juvenile typeface is the icing on the cake.
::::snort:::chortle:::guffaw:::
Best archaeological evidence is that Bronze Age Greek men ranged between 5’2″ and 5’6″ in height.