Dichroic Reflections

Reviews - one movie, one book

Troy
Same thing I've said about the last half-dozen movies I've seen (IMAX excluded): too damned long. I'm tired of having to choose between risking a ruptured bladder and missing some of the movie just so some director's inflated sense of Art can play out for two and a half hours (plus about eight previews). I haven't read the Iliad for years and deliberately avoided reviewing it before the movie, so I had no idea what Briseis and Achilles were or weren't supposed to be doing and any departures from Homer didn't bother me as much. Even so, what happened to Casssandra, Hecuba, and Aeneas (apart from a two second cameo of the last)? Also, I don't recall Hector and Priam being quite such sympathetic characters and the lack of manifestation of the gods was closer to histoy but would have dismayed Homer.

Going in ignorant of the finer details, the movie wasn't bad. Brad Pitt did an adequate job portraying Achilles as a throwback to (even) more savage days and I liked the historic touch that showed people asnot terribly clean or air-brushed. It was amazing how little blood there was, given the amount of fighting and dying that went on -- apparently when you kill a man with a sword or spear, he bleeds a bit from the mouth and that's it. (In the interests of historic accuracy though, there did appear to be flies on Hector a day or two after his death.) I wouldn't be too upset if the film influenced fashions and men (at least those with good legs) began walking around in flippy little skirts. (Rudder would look good in one, if he could muster the presence to carry it off.)

The cinematography reminded me less of sunbaked Greece and more of washed-out 1950s Hollywood scenes, which may be appropriate since that's when epics were last in vogue. Speaking of the vgue for epics, it was amusing to see who this movie learned the lessons of Lord of the Rings: keep the camera moving quickly during potentially gory scenes and provide both pretty boys for the teenyboppers to drool over and men you'd actually enjoy spending time as well as looking at for those of us who've learned that lesson. In fact, Troy went LOTR one better by having Brad Pitt in to bridge the gap between Paris and Hector -- though for women still another generation older, there were no older men in Troy who could compare with Gandalf. (Priam had the character but not the looks.) I think they may have used the same set, as well, with a few minor tweaks to turn it from Middle-Earthian to vaguely Egyptian. Which was also a bit odd -- Troy's in Turkey, right?

America's Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines
Given the amount of history Gail Collins has crammed into one book, it's not surprising that sometimes I was left wishing she'd included more details. Having said that, it's probably not fair to point out that she's included almost no information on Native Amercan women (except Pocahontas) or the Spanish community that settled in the Southwest some 400 years ago. Otherwise she did a very good job reasearching and communicating daily lives of Puritan and early Southern women, women of the early Republic, Victorians, abolitionists, suffragists, flappers, factory girls, immigrants in tenements, and so on. She's done a good enough job that I was able to connect the way my parents' rowhouse neighbors spend summer nights outside talking to neighbors with the way most of their grandparents would have lived in immigrant neighborhoods, a conection I'd never made before, and to see exactly why my great-grandmother, widoed by the Influenza Epidemic and her sister, widowed by WWI, moved in to raise their children together. There are also some shocking fatcs on how diapers were washed - in the seventeenth century and again on the wagon trains, mostly they weren't. Ick. As far as I can tell her facts are impeccable, though Collins does seem a bit frustrated by the total lack of evidence of how women in previous centuries dealth with menstruation, especially in the days of the earliest settlers when there were no rags because there was absolutely no spare cloth. I'm reading this from the library, but wouldn't be surprised if I end up buying it someday to keep as a reference.