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Cultural war and cultural revolution continues, as it should.
Revolution has a beginning, but it has no end.
And the newest battle is the most ancient, Homer's - and Christopher Nolan’s - Odyssey.
Many are happy, many are unhappy, and among the latter is world's richest man, as expected.
Elon was unhappy so much that he promised to rifle through his pockets for some spare change and give Mel Gibson $100 million to remake Odyssey in fully authentic and historically accurate way, with Greek actors and spoken in proper Homeric Greek.
Then, the next day, he changed his mind. Directors - and actors - are as obsolete as draft horses, Grok can do it all alone and cheaper.
If it happens, would it make a difference? Elite Mottizen human capital had been talking and daydreaming for a long time about potential of money to change the world. If only we were rich men!
The real life billionaire and centi millionaire activism is not encouraging but we can always dream how we will do it right!
edit: links
I'm all for AI art but right now the state of video is absolutely godawful. Elon is completely delusional if he thinks he can make something good in a year. Than again nano-banana came out and nobody expected it (though most people are still using gpt-image-2 ... YUCK!!!)
About the movie, who really cares about "authenticity"? It's not like the story is strictly historically accurate to real events in the first place. Watch the movie and enjoy it. or don't. Whatever it's a movie. I'm not going to watch it though.
On a related but unrelated note, casting a black girl as the green girl in Wicked completely ruined the movie. Because despite being green she was just so black.
The real problem with the Helen casting is less that she's black, and more that she's incredibly unattractive. Now, these are correlated. I normally don't go all HBD when it's not necessary (preferring to blame culture for most issues among black people), but as far as I can tell this is not merely my subjective preference but an actual objective trait that the majority of men (including black men) agree with: black women are less attractive than white women (or women from most other races). As usual, everything is a bell curve, you can find a couple of exceptions here and there. But it's been shown in studies to be statistically significant, and more importantly you can tell just by Noticing with your own eyes. Everyone knows this except the minority of people with the opposite preference, they just assume that their own subjective opinion is contained to themselves and not universal. And even more importantly, this particular actress, Lupita Nyong'o, is not an exception. She's ugly. Everyone knows she's ugly because they can see her.
Helen of Troy is supposed to be so beautiful she started a war. If there's one time Hollywood actually needed to cast a beautiful person, this was it. The race swap is not merely historically inaccurate, it is disruptive to the plausibility of the plot. Who would ever go to war for that creature?
Going solely by the trailers, Nolan also managed to make Charlize Theron (who is fifty and so getting older like us all) look like a dog and not the beautiful nymph who is a goddess herself. I know she's living on her own island, but I didn't imagine she'd be reduced to dressing in fishing nets.
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Herodotus notably states that Ethiopia produces the most beautiful women in the world, and Herodotus is Right About Everything.
That said, I agree with you that this particular actress undermines the trope being played.
Yes, especially when he is retelling second/third/Xth hand tales he heard on his travels.
When H talks about things he saw personally, he is not always reliable. For example when he traveled from Egypt to Babylonia, H was passing through Land Between River and Sea, that was at the time inhabited, as everyone knows, by wise and noble
ElvesHebrews worshippingEru IluvatarJHWH atLaurelin and Telperion treesbeautiful golden Temple with two pillars Jachin and Boaz.Meeting people who worship only one god would be at this time like seeing real dog headed people. And H is silent, H says absolutely nothing about these wonders. Damn this Greek hater, damn him to Tartarus.
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That kind of rhetoric just makes you sound like you are actually unusually racist and your beauty standards are uncalibrated (refer to the 3/10 elbows too pointy meme for further information). The actress is objectively not ugly, she easily clears most peers of her age you'd see outside, as well as many women a decade younger.
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There's no need to exaggerate. Lupita Nyong'o is not Leslie Jones.
Given that people tend to be somewhat looks-blind across race, my personal standard for black actresses is "if I were swiping on Tinder in Cape Town or Dar or Dakar, would she stand out", and Lupita Nyong'o fails that bar. But she fails it in a very particular way - she's a white liberal's idea of an Attractive But Strong (But Not Too Attractive) black woman. A couple decades ago and Hollywood would have dolled her up in a perfectly spherical afro.
Personally, I suspect she was cast because some extremely canny publicist identified her as ideal to cause controversy to drive marketing metrics, but most people aren't ready for the level of conspiracy theorizing you need to actually understand Hollywood (Mulholland Drive was a documentary).
Agreed she should not have been cast as Helen and it probably was deliberate choice to rouse up publicity via outrage, but she's not the ugliest woman I've ever seen. She's averagely attractive, and given proper hair, makeup and costuming, I wouldn't object at all to seeing her cast as Calypso, for instance.
Would you have preferred that black actress with Bette Davis eyes I keep seeing used in video games?
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This is what really annoys me about the Odyssey casting. It's so clearly deliberate outrage bait. It's a classic bully tactic: make a big deal about some minor controversial issue, then belittle anyone who responds by asking why they're so weirdly invested in this little thing no one cares about, trusting that their superior social status will make everyone forget they're the ones who started it. I'd almost respect Nolan more if he had given Lupita or Elliot Page bigger roles, because that would indicate that he's just really passionate about a very particular vision for his film. The fact they're basically throwaway characters with like 11 minutes of screentime between them makes me think the controversy was the whole point.
Maybe you're right, or maybe the point was making the film eligible for Best Picture.
A real baller move would have been to make the biggest film of the year and then watch everyone's confusion when they realise it isn't eligible.
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If the theory is that in a year video generation will be on a level where you say "Grok make a movie" and it does it, then I agree. But take our current tools and a gifted artistic team and spend a year carefully prompting and editing, and I think you could make something pretty extraordinary. Even when I'm just making a joke image like "grok make me a poster decrying anti-italian discrimination" I have to re-prompt it at least four times. Once to get it to what I actually wanted, once to edit some problems, and twice to remove weird artifacts from the first two edits. For a feature length movie, you'd be prompting every scene dozens of times. Which is basically what a director does now with actors, they reshoot scenes over and over until the actors understand the prompts and the director sees what they want, and sometimes at the end they have to go back and reshoot scenes that didn't come out right or that they have to change later.
I didn't like it because they made her skin color a metaphor for...her skin color. Why not just have her be black at that point and skip the green altogether? Though my bigger problem is Ariana Grande, whose face I find disturbing. She looks, after all the plastic surgery, like a black girl wearing whiteface.
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