#all that brad pitt achilles cake

[menoitides]

Here was a man not sweet at heart, not kind, no,

he was raging, wild - Homer, Iliad 20.528-529

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I know you’re all waiting for the Achilles post, “when is the Achilles post going to drop” I am asked every moment of this benighted siege during which I speak only of 2004′s Troy

I’ll get to it

here’s the problem with King Priam. 

Priam is Hector & Paris’s father, and the king of Troy. In the Iliad, he serves as a vehicle for a straightforward aesop. Priam is a kind man and a good king who honors the gods as he should. He loves his son Hector, who represents Troy’s strength, and overindulges his son Paris, who doesn’t represent anything but he’s a handsome lil scamp, you know?

When Paris brings Helen into Priam’s home, and Priam permits it, he violates the sanctity of Greek hospitality (bc Paris stole Helen from her husband while Paris was his guest). He is then forced to watch Hector (Troy’s strength) be destroyed and desecrated, and his city is ultimately sacked and burned. Priam himself is killed on Zeus’s own altar: because not even the gods will protect a king who fails to uphold the social order.

Moral of the story: don’t let your shitty son violate hospitality. He also gets a really moving scene with Achilles when he goes to reclaim Hector’s body.

This is a functional story, but it doesn’t fuck. “oh, be a responsible steward, don’t let your son kidnap other men’s wives” like whatever. I’m down for changing it up.

Troy’s take on Priam is that he is a doddering fool who is totally down to fight a war because his fuckboy son thinks he’s in love and ~what could be more worthy than a war for love~, who relies on goofy bird-signs from fake-ass “gods” instead of listening to Hector when Hector tells the priest to sit the hell down, man, a soldier with experience should make the decisions.

and that...could work...

like, if you consciously commit to a version of this story in which the gods are fake, which Troy seems to be doing

but Troy is unable to commit to it. It repeatedly shies away from condemning Priam’s devotion to the gods. It simultaneously wants us to respect his convictions, while also showing at every turn that his convictions are wrong. it wants us to find it poignant that he, a faithful man, is murdered in the temple of Zeus, but it also wants us to side against him whenever he listens to his priests.

it wants to have its cake and eat it. It wants both “it is admirable that this man is pious” and “this man’s piety is foolish and misguided” to be true.

it’s the most visible sign of Troy’s dysfunctional relationship with the Greek gods. obviously in the Iliad, they are literally characters who are walking around and doing stuff and talking to the humans. maybe a spicy take, but I think cutting that is fine. it’d be really hard to execute in a way that didn’t come off as silly to modern audiences. there are a few directions you could take it from there: I think the most interesting is to imbue your story with an element of magic realism, or to have symbolic omens throughout the movie that portend the movements of fate. I think removing the gods’ influence from the story entirely kind of raises the question of, like, why are you adapting the Iliad then, there are plenty of other stories where you could just do a swords-and-sandals war movie. but like, okay, you can do that too.

but if you’re telling a version of the Iliad in which the gods just aren’t real - when Priam has no concrete reason to believe that his bird signs mean anything - you are inviting modern audiences to think he’s an idiot for ignoring the advice of his son and greatest general.

and that’s fine!

you can make Priam an idiot!

I don’t even think it undercuts the big scene with Achilles, which even in Troy is almost good! like if he was playing against anyone but Brad Pitt’s execrable and incoherent Achilles, it would have had real pathos! idiots still love their sons!

but if you’re making Priam an idiot, you gotta commit. you can’t have everything that happens in the movie lead me to believe that he’s an idiot, and then ask me to mourn him like he’s a wise and admirable man.

[pearcewhy]

🎬🍜🍰🎮⛅ v important research answer ASAP !

🎬 Movie

Troy. It has Brad Pitt in it and it’s a cool lecture on history and mythology. Who would ever want more? Plus Achilles was like super gay. And there’s a giant wooden horse. And magic.

🍜 Soup

Onion soup. I know it sounds super basic, but my mother used to make it for me when I was sick. It’s not a very complicated recipe, so I make it sometimes as comfort food, though I’m not nearly as good at cooking as my mother. It’s one of the few things I can make without burning down my kitchen though so that’s nice!

🍰 Cake

YES. ANY! I love all types of cake. But not in like, huge quantities.

🎮 Video game

Uncharted. Any of them. There’s action, shooting, puzzles, mysteries, platforming, stealth… these games have it all! Plus the story is super interesting and I adore the characters. Nadine can beat me up any day!

⛅ Weather

I like it when it snows. Snow means cozying up inside with blankets, hot chocolate, and movies. I like that a lot, just chilling inside with my friends and not really doing anything. Just having fun.

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: A Documentary About Syrian Refugees Undermines Its Subjects

Still from A Syrian Love Story (all images from the movie’s trailer)

On the afternoon of October 18, 2011, from my desk at Syria Today Magazine in Damascus, I tried to track down a missing filmmaker. “Hey,” I emailed a British photographer friend also based in the capital. “We noticed this morning that one Sean McAllister is reported to have gotten arrested in Syria — he’s been here for months — and all his videos (of people saying nice things about the government) seized … does anybody know if he’s contacted anybody — I mean, how disappeared is he?”

McAllister’s arrest was first reported in Arabic on the Facebook pages of local revolutionary coordination committees, warning anyone he’d filmed to flee the country immediately or face arrest and torture. The family he’d been filming — Raghda, Amer and their two boys — did escape, first to Lebanon and then to France. A Syrian Love Story is McAllister’s take on their journey: the boys’ coming of age and the unraveling of their parents’ marriage.

Confinement, literal and figurative, is a central theme of the film. The couple fall in love in prison, and the tension between their roles as comrades, parents, and spouses drives the film’s conflict. At its outset, Syrian prison has made a gaping hole in the family, with Amer and the boys suffering Raghda’s absence as she serves a nine-month sentence for her activism. In Lebanon, exile becomes another, larger jail, which Raghda tries to escape by leaving her family and returning to Syria. Her departure traps Amer in a limbo where, he says, “my heart is broken every day.” Raghda eventually returns, and on the strength of her status as a former political prisoner, the family is granted visas to France. There, the couple’s marriage disintegrates as their children assimilate.

Raghda’s problem, as Amer sees it, is that she cannot be both “Che Guevara and a mother.” Raghda’s problem, as she sees it, is that everyone wants her to take care of them, but no one takes care of her. The couple’s problem, as their sons see it, is that though they’re physically free in France, they are still emotionally locked in “a big cage” of trauma.

Still from A Syrian Love Story

Eventually, Amer leaves his wife for a Frenchwoman, finding peace in “being quiet.” Raghda attempts suicide, recovers, and continues to advocate for the revolution she cannot stand to abandon. Both parents see themselves as building a future for their children: Amer in quiet France, Raghda in unquiet Syria.

The film’s strength lies in its ability to situate the impact of vastly violent conflict in an intimate personal context. In the moment of McAllister’s arrest, which is narrated over footage of detained Syrians being beaten, the filmmaker has literally, if accidentally, put himself on the line for the sake of witnessing history. Within this framework, the film has an opportunity to do delicate, powerful work exploring the intersection of national trauma with the strains of domestic life.

But it does not do this work. Instead, like its subjects, it gets trapped within the limits of its own choices. Foremost, by confining dialogue between McAllister and his subjects to English — a language none of the Syrians are proficient in — it severely undermines not only their abilities to express themselves (in phrases so choppy they must be subtitled) but also the scope of the questions McAllister asks them: “Are you happy/sad?” “Are things good now in France?”

Still from A Syrian Love Story

This obstruction of adequate self-expression is especially heartbreaking as Raghda and Amer try and fail to rebuild their relationship on camera by communicating their respective positions. When Raghda chokes up as she tries to explain her flashbacks to prison, it is impossible to know whether her silences are due to trauma or lack of English vocabulary. Either way, by denying its protagonists the means to fully articulate themselves, the film unwittingly echoes, on an aesthetic level, the political repression they paid dearly for challenging, even while mining the pathos of their marital breakdown.

Equally frustrating is the film’s exclusion of the Syrian context from its vision of life in exile. This especially damages its treatment of Raghda, who suffers precisely from her desire to remain faithful to two core commitments simultaneously: her politics and her family. Once the flawed revolution disappears from the screen, so does the meaning — on her terms — of her struggle. With the failing revolution invisible, Raghda looks, particularly in the scene when she has just attempted suicide, like a slovenly, unfit mother, chain-smoking and avoiding eye-contact with the British man filming her and asking why she feels that “everything is bad.” Perhaps she feels bad because two of her loves — revolution and husband — have betrayed her! But we cannot know, and by eliding everything that is happening in Syria, the film winds up taking Amer’s side, reinforcing the idea that it is better to leave the baggage of the past behind.

Still from A Syrian Love Story

In his post-screening talk, McAllister made it clear that this framing, wherein the film “completely lost a lot of the context … worked for what we wanted to do, which is make a bigger audience as possible in a TV market and tell a human story.” But this is wanting to have one’s cake and eat it too. The lynchpin of this love story is its genesis in protest and its subjects’ tortured ties to that history, which is still ongoing. Without that fundamental dramatic structure, the protagonists would have no agon, no heroic struggle, and there would be no story to tell.

By largely reducing the scope of the story to a he-said, she-said formulation, the film misses the chance to raise vital questions for its audiences. How can love in a Syrian context be usefully translated into a Western one, where love and freedom are packaged and imagined largely in personal, apolitical, neoliberal consumer terms? How do the broader and equally difficult commitments involved in a Syrian love story — to dignity, to human rights, to the rule of law —challenge the generic Hollywood romance, which presumes that the fall of Troy is redeemed by Brad Pitt’s Achilles seducing a pretty POW? For better or worse, what we need now is art that is capable, if not of giving all the answers, at least of asking the crucial questions.

A Syrian Love Story will be screened on March 29 during TIFF’s Human Rights Watch Film Festival.

The post A Documentary About Syrian Refugees Undermines Its Subjects appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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