Tag: Ann Hathaway

Film: The Odyssey, Directed by Christopher Nolan, 2026

Much anticipated and ultimately quite disappointing. This is a film made with its eyes firmly fixed on the prize. It will almost certainly earn Christopher Nolan the long-coveted Oscar, but it may also come to define the last great Hollywood director under the age of eighty as a filmmaker willing to compromise his artistic integrity. Too much of the film seems designed to please the Academy rather than to remain faithful to its own artistic vision.

As someone smartly noted – this is “an Odyssey” not “the Odyssey”. Its interpretation of the ancient epic poem is grossly modernized. Thus, it becomes symptomatic of our time – the Odyssey of 2026. It is made as an antiwar movie – Odysseus carries the guilt of creating the Trojan horse and destroying Troy. It seems that Nolan wants to continue here the Oppenheimer theme – Odysseus as Oppenheimer and the Trojan horse as the atomic bomb. He should have done a better job in exposing the LACK of guild in Oppenheimer in his biopic instead of now injecting alien to the Greek epic ideas. Having Helen of Troy send her apologies to Odysseus for causing the Trojan war – this is done in very poor taste and is one of the film’s most ludicrous lines. Basically, all the faults of the film are inherent in the script – the modern concepts, (e.g. Odysseus as a “veteran” of the Trojan war with a PTSD), the modern street language, the pseudo psychological insights…All tasteless.

The above is combined with some very long action scenes. The viewer might keep thinking how difficult it was to film all these given that Nolan uses very little CGI. Still, appreciating the “difficulty”, or the craftsmanship is not enough for truly liking the film.

One of the most annoying performances in the film is that of Anne Hathaway. Otherwise a fine actress (e.g. WeCrashed), she is definitely inappropriately cast. She sentimentalizes the character, her trembling chin is ridiculous, her hissing remarks about not being able to become the queen of Ithaca are out of place (here the blame goes to the script again), etc. etc. An infantile audience could be fooled that this is high art, but most vieweres understand that here we are dealing with the interpretation of one of the foundational works of the Western canon and things can’t be that literal and simplistic!

Books: Yesteryear, A Novel by Caro Claire Burke, 2026

This book was “workshopped” by film producers and Hollywood executives from its very first draft. As a result, it becomes a product of the very process it claims to criticize: marketing shapes creation itself, substance is overtaken by image, and the fake replaces the real. The Hollywood “influencers” behind the project manufacture a business product designed to appeal to a mass audience, and that audience is implied in every sentence. That is why the book’s politics feel so transparent.

The novel sets up a simplistic opposition between the “tradwife” and “the feminist” through Natalie and Reena, two characters constructed largely as clichés. Natalie is raised with conservative Christian values and wishes to become the perfect tradwife. Deeply unhappy, however, she builds an online influencer business around a fabricated image of idyllic family life on a traditional farm. Her supposedly Christian lifestyle is carefully produced for broadcast and, beneath the performance, proves abusive both to her children and to the people working around her.

Reena, meanwhile, is presented as the embodiment of modern feminism: promiscuous, detached from family life, and unable to succeed in her desired career because she is constantly undermined by the boys’ club around her. Both women are reduced to flattened cardboard characters.

Another contrast the novel exploits to advance its political message is the opposition between the fake tradwife lifestyle and the “real” life of a pioneer woman. Through its depiction of nineteenth-century rural America, the novel ultimately arrives at the predictable conclusion that modern women, unsurprisingly, have it better.

Because the book appears to have had “too many cooks,” the plot twists often feel confusing, with characters making arbitrary choices that do not emerge from any coherent inner logic. Natalie, for example, is the supposedly devout Christian girl, yet from the very beginning she is deeply cynical and frequently turns into the kind of “angry woman” the novel seems eager to critique elsewhere.

The book also tries to catalogue nearly every contemporary social issue imaginable: gender politics, child abuse, political campaigning, the MAGA movement, and even “mother’s little helper.” It wants to address everything and everyone, all while pushing an unmistakably clear agenda: the children who do not know what the “ocean” is and have never seen it are meant to symbolize people trapped within the Bible Belt — an extremely easy metaphor. Easy metaphors may serve propaganda, but they rarely serve literature.

As literature, the novel is quite boring. It could easily have been at least 150 pages shorter. Some sections — especially those depicting the hardships of the pioneer woman — read as though they were written by AI.

It would actually be interesting to see the novel’s original draft before the workshop process reshaped it. Perhaps, in that earlier version, the witty lines prevailed.