the ocean

We finally saw The Odyssey last week. Not in IMAX, mind you, because the only tickets available there were either at 1:30 in the morning or six weeks from now. So we watched with the unwashed masses at our local AMC, which was just fine, thank you very much. We did have a bit of an incident where we couldn't find our seats and had to have an employee very sarcastically point them out to us after being shunted out of what were definitively not our seats by some sad-vibed ladies of a certain age, but that's to be expected. The movie itself I thought was quite enjoyable, particularly the last hour or so. The earlier parts were a bit episodic for my tastes (though I recognize that is the nature of the source material) and I have trouble buying Tom Holland as, well, anything, but I found Anne Hathaway surprisingly effective and Robert Pattinson really leaned into the terrible haircut. Not sure if I'll find another three plus hours to allocate should IMAX during waking hours every become available, but still.

In what I swear is a coincidence and not some sort of marketing tie-in, I have also been reading The Iliad. This is part of a program I have where I go back and read things I feel like someone should have made me read in high school or college, but they somehow either weren't assigned or we were only given excerpts. I did The Canterbury Tales and The Divine Comedy earlier pursuant to this program, which is sort of affirmative action for incredibly dead white men. Anyway, I'm enjoying The Iliad much more than I expected. The translation (Emily Wilson) is very lively and it's basically all action. There is a lot of explaining of genealogy and people's lands of origin that I could definitely do without, but I am a world class skimmer. And the insane violence is somehow much easier for me to handle when it is on the page as opposed to in glorious Technicolor (or IMAX). So two thumbs up for the ancient Greeks. Huge fan of their homoeroticism.