Happy Hump Day! Hope you’re humpin’. 

The focus of today’s letter is The Odyssey, a Greek independent film that I happened to catch this week because I’m really in the know about international cinema. I will try to be spoiler-light—about aspects of the movie, not the millennia-old story—but there are certain things that can’t be avoided in a writeup. So, proceed with caution. And if you decide to see the Odyssey movie for yourself this weekend, for the love of god make sure it’s not this one.

But before we get to Odysseus and his wild and woolly (but not fleece-y, that’s Jason!) EuroTrip, let’s take a look at a few new trailers. 

At long last the television producer (and writer) Ryan Murphy has turned away from his usual high-minded interests—his philosophy and astronomy and Arcadia-esque mathematical pursuits—to tell a tale of hot people doing depraved things. The Shards is an adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, which I’m told is quite good actually but that I have not read because Ellis was so awful online for so many years that I think I’ve turned off of him forever. Which is perhaps a little, I dunno, cheugy (?) or Millennial of me, but whatever. He’s annoying! And I think maybe not a terribly good person. 

But yes, some people love this book, about a serial killer stalking the rich and beautiful teens of 1981 Los Angeles. There’s a character named Bret Easton Ellis in it, who is played by an actor named Igby Rigney. Igby Rigney! Will Igby go down? I’m sure he will in some capacity on this show, because he is a young man with brown hair in a Ryan Murphy production. I don’t know, folks. This looks tiresome. In that I will be tired after I watch every stupid episode. 

What if Tár was a boy and he played the cello for film scores instead of conducting orchestras? That is not exactly the premise of this movie, from Tony Gilroy, but it is a drama (with some comedy) set in the music world, and there is a bit of a flourish in the title—it’s Behemoth!, not simply Behemoth—so I’m choosing to compare the two. In the trailer, it says that Gilroy is the mind behind Michael Clayton, and that is true. But more recently he was the mind behind Andor, and that’s one of the greatest TV shows maybe ever made (seriously), so I am very much in the tank for Gilroy at the moment. (He also made the criminally under-seen Duplicity, which you should watch if you haven’t.) Pedro Pascal? Not so sure about him anymore. But Gilroy, yes. I am cautiously optimistic about this. 

Did I miss Kenneth Branagh coming out as Russian at some point? Because he keeps playing Russian characters. He did it in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (which he also directed, bizarrely; also, isn’t it weird that Kenneth Branagh directed the first Thor movie?), he did it in Tenet, and now he’s doing it in this movie. Which, on the positive side, is from the guys (including the all-grown-up kid from Freaks and Geeks) who made the very fun Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. On the bad side, though, it stars Ryan Reynolds and is a straight-to-streaming action comedy. The straight-to-streaming action comedy is one of the worst genres of film at the moment, perhaps even worse than musician biopics, which is really saying something. So, I don’t know about this one. But congrats on finally living in your truth, comrade Branagh. 

As mentioned up top, I saw The Odyssey on Monday night. I’m still trying to gather my thoughts about it, and indeed am seeing it a second time before I record our Critical Darlings podcast episode about it next week. (Listen and subscribe, please!) But, here are some of those still-gathering thoughts for you, dear readers. 

It’s good? At the very least, it is impressive, a massive array of moving parts that does eventually coalesce into something powerful. In his last two films (or maybe Tenet counts too; I can’t be bothered to revisit that one), director Christopher Nolan has found a strange kinship with a very different kind of filmmaker: Baz Luhrmann. What I mean is, in Oppenheimer and now The Odyssey, Nolan begins his stories in a frenzied hurry, jumping around to plot points and whisking back and forth between times and locations in a way that is as disorienting as the beginning of, say, Moulin Rouge or The Great Gatsby. It’s a curious new Nolan tic that I don’t exactly love, but I suppose I can appreciate that it forces you to lean forward and immediately attempt to grapple with the full weight of the movie. Eventually, one settles into its rhythms, just as Nolan does, and then off we go on a grueling adventure of guilt and survival.