Screen Test

Olivia Wilde, Seth Rogen, Penelope Cruz and Edward Norton in “The Invite.” Photo via IMDb.com New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has me rethinking my review of “The Odyssey.” With the ink barely dry on her 2023 Columbia University master’s degree in literature, she joins the classicists taking issue with writer-director Christopher Nolan’s version. It’s not just the absence of the gods in his retelling of the Greek epic. It’s the absence of SEX. The whole horny subtext is missing, Maureen complains. All of the randy coupling among humans and deities. She’s happy to do the lit-major strut, name dropping her way through the deleted erotic scenes. She reminded me that my own experience  of “The Odyssey” and its companion “The Iliad” pretty much took place in junior high school, when I wouldn’t have gotten the sex parts anyway. Looks like I might have to check out Emily Wilson’s translation of “The Odyssey” that Nolan based his screenplay on. Actually reading a classic … what a...

      Matt Damon and his men in “The Odyssey. Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic - Universal Studios photo via IMDb.com After winning all those Oscars including Best Picture for “Oppenheimer,” writer-director Christopher Nolan goes back almost 3,000 years to essentially tell the same story all over again. It’s called “The Odyssey.” Created in ancient Greece by a blind bard named Homer, with its companion piece “The Iliad” it marked the transition from oral storytelling into what would become known as Western literature. For those who dozed, or more likely have zero recollection of high school English, “The Odyssey” recounts the decade brave warrior Odysseus (Matt Demon) spent fighting the Trojan War, followed by the decade he spent trying to return home to his wife Penelope (Anne Hathaway) and son Telemachus (Tom Holland) in the Greek kingdom of Ithaca. It was, as an opening line of onscreen text informs us, “A time of apparent magic.” On his journey Odysseus encounte...