Wednesday, April 06, 2005

Troy, finally visited.

I finally watched Troy (2004) this week. I recently listened to a lecture by JMNMNR introducing Homer, and it got me all interested in reading The Iliad again and watching Troy.

Ok, the movie's not great. But I was impressed with what it did well. I was surprised that it stayed so faithful to most of the events in the poem, and that it didn't stretch the characters very far from their ancient source.

I also sought out Jon-Mark Olson's old blog posts on the movie, which can be found here, here, and here.

Especially useful was his Top Ten post which reminded me of events I'd completely forgotten.

I've only just started reading The Iliad again, but I'm still amazed at what a remarkable piece of literature it is. (That's a huge understatement, I know.) It's not something that was amazing for it's time but has since been surpassed; it's just under the Bible as the most important literature ever preserved.

I'm reading The Republic at the same time for a nice complement. I don't know how long that will last, but here goes!

4 comments:

Jonathan said...

"Jon-Mark"? I don't get it.

Anyway, I hope everyone understood one of the points of my Top Ten list: how stupid the movie would have been if it included everything from the Iliad.

Ryan said...

Yes, I got it.

Jon-Mark is a vague inside joke from early Biola that relates to you only in that your name is Jon.

Jonathan said...

By the way, I hope you watched Troy projected onto your wall. I saw it twice in the theater, and loved it both times, but when I saw it on DVD a few months ago it became vaguely ridiculous to me. So I don't think it works as well under the microscope of a small screen (as it were); it's larger than life and it has to overwhelm you on a large scale.

Ryan said...

'Twas projected, which did indeed allow Brad's sweaty thighs to overwhelm me with their scale and scope.