Homer’s Odyssey is about Odysseus’s ten-year journey home to Ithaca. Odysseus and his crew were blown far off course to exotic unklnown lands. Odysseus resultantly had many adventures, including the famous encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, and an audience with the seer Teiresias in Hades. On the island of Thrinacia, Odysseus’s men ate the cattle sacred to the sun-god Helios. For this sacrilege Odysseus’s ships were destroyed, and all his men perished.

“Odysseus had not eaten the cattle, and was allowed to live; he washed ashore on the island of Ogygia, and lived there with the nymph Calypso. After seven years, the gods decided to send Odysseus home; on a small raft, he sailed to Scheria, the home of the Phaeacians, who gave him passage to Ithaca.

Frustrated, spiritually spent Odysseus (Matt Damon) to self: “First the decade-long siege of Troy, and then another ten years to get home! Good Lord!

“If only the young and impetuous Paris hadn’t fallen head-over-heels in love with Lupita Nyong’o‘s middle-aged Helen! On top of which she’s…what? Roughly 15 if not 20 years older than the 20something Paris? What could he have possibly seen in her? An obviously beautiful woman, yes, but hardly the most beautiful in the entire ancient Greek-Aegean world. At best Paris saw her as an exotic MILF, but was this mad passion worth the deaths of so many hundreds if not thousands of Greek and Trojan soldiers?”

Overview: Who needs ten years to return home? A year or two, maybe, but not a full decade.

Odysseus’s wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway in Chris Nolan’s film) had logical suppositions that would lead any reasonable woman to believe that her husband is dead. Who wouldn’t presume this after a couple of years?

What kind of wife shrugs her shoulders and says, “Ah, well…my husband has obviously been delayed on his way home, but I trust that he’ll eventually return so I will wait and keep myself chaste until the glorious day of arrival.” Commendable but not when you’ve been waiting ten fucking years. That’s ridiculous.

What if Odysseus couldn’t find his way back until 12 years have passed? Or 15 or 20? How many years of absence are tolerable or understandable? I say no more than two. Okay, three max.

If I were Penelope I would say after four or five years, “All right, screw it…Odysseus has obviously drowned or been killed or has settled down with another woman somewhere. I guess it’s time to start thinking about finding a replacement husband. What am I supposed to do? Wait until I’m 50 or 55 years old?

“And someone younger this time. My husband had begun to slow down or, you know, lose rigidity before he left. God knows what he’ll be like in the sack when he returns. If I’m going to remarry I want a man with a phallus like a piece of petrified wood.”

And so, naturally, the word gets out and several suitors start hanging around Penelope…all of them looking to “make it happen”. But then Odysseus finally returns, and in a big thundering climax he and his son Telemachus murder all the guys who were hoping for a little Penelope action.

Dying would-be suitor, arrow in his chest, bleeding on the floor: “What the fuck, dude? You’ve been gone for ten years and you expected your wife to…what, just wait and wait and wait? If you had been among us and some other king of Ithaca had been absent for ten years, you know you’d be looking to win Penelope’s favor and maybe discreetly do her on the side when no one’s looking…you’d be acting no differently. So why have you and Telemachus killed so many of us? What have we done that is so awful? Nothing.”

Sorry but The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century, 5.1) is going to underwhelm. Such is the fate of nearly all sequels, excepting The Godfather Part II, T2: Judgment Day and…which others?

It;s obviously some kind of old-giving-way-to-the-new, passing-of-the-fashion-industry-torch saga. Meryl Streep‘s aging Miranda Priestly coping with the oppresive dynamics of a changing media landscape (digital overtaking print) as Anne Hathaway‘s Andy Sachs, now features editor at Runway, and Emily Blunt‘s Emily Charlton scheme to further their own ambitions blah blah blah.

The trailer offers one of two unappetizing scenarios — (1) Priestly is suffering from memory loss or perhaps even Alzheimer’s (who wants to watch a great ice-villain swirling downwards?) or (2) she’s playing cheap, petty mind games by pretending (initially at least) not to remember Andy and Emily blah blah blah. Only a frightened and insecure oldster would resort to such a tactic. Tedious either way.

HE is mostly looking forward to the Milan footage, especially after having gotten to know Milan a little bit after last September’s Venice Film Festival. Pic filmed at Milan Fashion Week in late September. Further Milan filming took place between 10.5.25 and 10.18.25.

I’m sorry but between :37 and :50 Sam Neill‘s eyes look fake. Oh, and I hate, hate, HATE the jowly, neck-beard ginger guy with the purple Xfinity golf shirt. If only a T-Rex could come along and make Mr. Xfiniti howl and scream like a warthog as his bones are snapped and crunched between the T-Rex’s jaws.

Antoine Fuqua‘s Michael pops on 4.24.26 — a bit less than 12 weeks hence. 29 year-old Jaafar Jackson seems assured in the titular role, but I’m especially interested in Juliano Krue Valdi as young Michael.

14 months ago The Hollywood Reporter‘s Borys Kit reported that Lupita Nyong’o had joined the cast of Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.16).

We’ve all since read the rumor that Nyong’o will play Helen of Troy and perhaps even a double role as Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra, who was the wife of Agamemnon**, king of Mycenae.

We’ve also read that Elon Musk disapproves.

If Nyong’o has indeed been cast as Helen, we all know what this is — i.e., Nolan playing the diversity-for-appearance’s-sake game, or otherwise indulging in woke presentism.

Since the late teens Hollywood’s progressive comintern has been dictating that all historical films have to adopt the practice of presentism, meaning that all casts have to reflect social values as they should be in terms of inclusion and representation rather than how they actually may have been during the time of the story.

But let’s bend over backwards and consider the Nyong’o casting on its own historical merits.

First, the 42-year-old Nyong’o is too old to play Helen, who was a nubile 20something hottie when she ran off with Paris, the Trojan prince.

Secondly, historians seem to agree that ancient Greek culture wasn’t exactly racially enlightened, much less wokey-woke. Cruel or dismissive racial attitudes were apparently evident within ancient Greek culture, as they have been in many other cultures over the centuries. It’s been written that the Greeks had a term for POCs — Aethiopes (“Ethiopians”), which in Greek meant “burnt-faced ones.” Does that sound like a term of respect or elevation?

AI sez that “ancient Greek and Roman authors, including Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Ovid and Martial, perpetuated anti-black, xenophobic, and proto-racist attitudes that essentialized non-Greeks/Romans, particularly Africans, as inferior, exotic, or servile.”

According to most sources, including Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey, Helen was the daughter of Spartan king Tyndareus and his wife, Queen Leda.

Mythology says Helen’s actual father was Zeus, who apparently had sex with Leda while inhabiting the body of a swan. How was that physically possible?

If Nyong’o is, in Nolan’s mind, Helen and her half-sister Clytemnestra is also of African (or Kenyan) ancestry, it would naturally follow that Tyndareus and Leda were themselves African. Find me the respected historian or chronicler of ancient Greek mythology who will support that notion.

An overwhelming majority of classic-minded film buffs subscribe to the idea that Helen of Troy resembled Rossana Podesta, who starred in Robert Wise‘s Helen of Troy (Warner Bros., 1.26.56). Brigitte Bardot played Andraste, Helen’s servant or handmaiden.

** You want oddball casting? Nolan’s Agememnon is played by, of all the actors in the whole wide world, effing Benny Safdie.

… is intended to discourage internet bums like myself from hanging around for too long. That’s the basic idea. Drive customers slowly crazy with moderately awful MOR music…mediocre love ballads sung by Karen Carpenter, Robert Flack, Luther Vandross, the Fifth Dimension….not so awful that patrons can’t tolerate the songs for a half-hour or so, but impossible to listen to for much longer as they gradually poison and putrify.

No, seriously….Aaron Couch’s 1.30.26 THR story sounds all too familiar, unfortunately.

The ADD fast-forward trend has been increasing over the last 12 to 15 years, and certainly over the last ten.

That said, I could probably come up with a fairly long list of acclaimed films that I’ve also had trouble sitting through, or have even dozed through portions of. Unlike the vast majority of snooty, know-it-all film crickets and essayists, I’m just being honest. This is mostly a failure on my part, of course, but in the case of, say, Mascha Schilinski‘s Sound of Falling or Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee…

I’m sorry but this is mildly effective as far as it goes:

@bryanjacoby This is what it would be like if the MSM of the United States existed in the Star Wars universe. #news #meme #starwars #unitedstates ♬ original sound – Bryan Jacoby

We all understand what Ethan Hawke is talking about here, obviously, but my first reaction, frankly, was that he could be talking about the climate of woke terror that began to permeate the Hollywood-journo realm in ’18.

The Robespierres finally began to weaken and dissipate in mid ’24, thank God, but they’re still with us to a certain extent.

Hawke’s 2026 words could be my own seven or eight years ago: “I never felt scared about what I was gonna say until ’18 or thereabouts. In which you feel, like, ‘oh, I have to be careful.’ There’s a fear in the air that I’ve never felt before. And it’s not America.”

Brett Ratner‘s Melania (Amazon MGM, 2.2.24) is about as empty and unrevealing and bland as a well-polished, kiss-ass documentary could possibly be.

It’s a cover-up thing — pure gloss and lacquer, no vulnerability or emotional honesty except for two moments…no sharing, no letting down the proverbial hair…gleaming surfaces, cliche-ridden narration, stiletto heels and fake eyelashes that never come off.

And I’m sorry but it is a little bit like Jonathan Glazer‘s The Zone of Interest (A24, 2.2.24).

Glazer’s WWII film conveys the denial mindset of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss, his wife Hedwig and their kids…sitting pretty in a spacious home next to the camp, separated by a 12-foot wall…a sizable kitchen, a horse stable, a nice garden, a nearby lake…a privileged, well–ordered life while Hoss manages the industrial–scale murder of hundreds of thousands.

Melania is also about denial and insulation. (Hell, I felt detached myself.) It’s basically a shallow and surface-y infomercial about a brief chapter in the life of Melania Trump — her last 20 days of being a semi-private citizen before the inauguration of Donald Trump as U.S. President on 1.20.25.

Separated from the real world by a thick membrane of limitless wealth, security guys in black suits, an abundant wardrobe, fawning assistants, tank-sized SUVs…you get the idea.

Buy your ticket and watch the extremely well-tended, exquisitely dressed Melania living a life of flush banality…maximum privelege and insulation while hubby makes plans for the persecution of wokeys, the rousting of illegal immigrants, the restoration of male-female simplicity, the implementation of authoritarian rule, the punishing of his political enemies by hook or crook, the weakening of the U.S. economy through tariffs and the general undermining of democracy.

Melania touches bottom when she recalls the death of her mom (Amalija Knavs) during an evening visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It also briefly connects when she sings along to Michael Jackson‘s “Billie Jean”. But that’s all there is.

At the very end, an exhausted Melania finally takes her stiletto heels off. Vulnerability at last!