Laurie Banta

🦄Thomas’s understanding of devotion, as it relates to the Declaration—through self-evident truth—is an exercise in how our individual identities are key to what the Declaration seals. The Declaration is hope sealed in Pandora’s jar—away from the evils ~ youtu.be/iXijcySC0ZU ~

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄He's my favorite. My mom, when she put us to bed would tell us stories about Achilles and Hector, so a lifelong love of Homer. And to understand Alexander the Great you have to understand Homer's Achilles, etc.

@LaurieABanta @dissidentwest Yeah Ms. Laurie... you get it... thank you kindly for sharing 💯 How many times have you read The Odyssey, The Iliad? Do you love Homer? I do, he's my all-time favorite author.

After watching the first ten minutes of The Odyssey I can say with one hundred percent conviction that even if you fixed the casting the movie would still be a steaming pile of shit. Anyone telling themselves otherwise is ideologically captured to the point of being lobotomized

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄I do love the NBC 1997 tv miniseries; but is doesn't have the Sirens' episode, so it could be very much improved upon. But it at least gives an Odysseus much ore aligned with Homer's.

@LaurieABanta @dissidentwest Have you seen the 90's miniseries? It suffers from 90's makeup snafu's and special effects limitations... but the casting and attempt to give us Homer's vision... low budget and there are struggles... but it's a fair attempt for the time and worth watching 🍿

@x_Aurelion 🦄Check this out: ~ x.com/TheCinesthetic… ~

@LaurieABanta I agree. Not a perfect movie by any means. But Brad Pitt is the best Achilles we've ever seen, and he definitely embodies that warrior archetype.

🦄This scene is really just crazy good. These are what heroes look like from the Heroic Age.

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄An intellectual historian, I track ideas.

@LaurieABanta @dissidentwest Yes, yes, and yes 💯 Laurie, are you a literary scholar, a super brain booklover, both?

@kyriosmykonoss 🦄Yes, I think that Odysseus' mind is key. How Odysseus processes his identity, and how he is perceived by others, but also by the gods, is essential to his heroic character in Homer. Whereas with Nolan Odysseus is already judged and found guilty before he achieves his homecoming

Homer's Odyssey: Hubris —> Nobody —> Memory —> Home Nolan's Odyssey: Sin —> Memory —> Guilt —> Exile In Homer, memory is restorative. Odysseus remembers who he is—recognizing his limitations—and reclaims his home. Memory generates civilization. In Nolan, memory is condemnatory. Guilt severs him from his home. Memory judges and destroys civilization. A depressingly modern reinterpretation.

@x_Aurelion 🦄I love how in Troy Brad Pitt becomes Achilles. It really just makes the film better because all the other actors are in the "presence" of Achilles. His interactions with Odysseus before they set sail are also very good.

@LaurieABanta This is my favorite scene from the entire movie.

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄One more I guess ... told you, long and dreary ... ~ x.com/LaurieABanta/s… ~

Oooh, someone named Lauire is.... S H A R P 💯 Thank you for your input. I wholeheartedly agree. Authenticity and honesty cures nearly everything. What I see most of today, as you put them, are sad zombies, lashing out at the world like children while regurgitating vulgar filled talking points that they have been programmed with. Are you a movie goer? Did you see this film? If so, what are your thoughts? Thanks again and cheers 🍻

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄... I think that is most of it. ~ x.com/LaurieABanta/s… ~

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄... ~ x.com/LaurieABanta/s… ~

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄More on the last one. But this pretty much gives you a general idea of my thoughts;) ~ x.com/LaurieABanta/s… ~

@ForgeLiberty777 @dissidentwest 🦄I'm afraid that "my thoughts" on Nolan's farce are long and dreary. I will try to share the main points with you here. ~ x.com/LaurieABanta/s… ~

@real_DefendWest 🦄This scene is really just crazy good. Since Homer's The Odyssey encapsulates the Iliad, and this is our generational understanding of that, at the very least one would expect an authentic hero from the Heroic Age with Odysseus. Or, Nolan should have done the Iliad first.

Remember when Hollywood knew how to make an epic fight actually epic? That's also gone now.

Watched Nolan's Odyssey. Some quick thoughts: - Unexpectedly for Nolan, the film has no memorable score. I left the cinema unable to remember a single melody. It's a shame, especially given that one of the earlier trailers featured a promising one. - Some of the harder-to-pull-off scenes were surprisingly good. I liked the disfigured Cyclops and found his screeches haunting. I particularly enjoyed how Circe transformed Odysseus' men into pigs. And not letting us hear the sirens was the right choice. - Odysseus killing the suitors was probably the most disappointing scene. The fighting felt clumsy, slow, cheap. Underwhelming after a 3h build up. - I couldn't care less about armors, columns, etc. being "unrealistic". The film has its own design language, as is to be expected. Agamemnon as a sort of giant stallion was an odd choice but it conveyed his power. The "grey-washing" also wasn't as bad as some say. - Casting was obviously biased and often ridiculous. I would have loved to see more grand, beautiful people, rejoicing in their strength. You never get the sense that anyone is a force of nature. Profoundly un-Homeric. - Nowhere is this clearer than in Odysseus, who is guilt-ridden and exhausted. There is no Homeric pride in him. No great hubris. He blames his trickery for unleashing 10 years of rage onto Troy and effectively suffers from PTSD. Yet another round of post-WWII Oppenheimer-y "what have I done"-ness. This is my biggest grievance. - You would think that given how they mention "Zeus' law" (xenia) every other minute, they would remind the viewer that the Trojans broke it at Sparta by taking Helen. Or that it doesn't really apply to a war setting. Or that the war itself was sanctioned by the gods. They never do. Overall, rather than trying to understand Homer on his own terms, the film asks Homer to conform to ours. In that sense, it is predictably disappointing. As a piece of entertainment, though, it is actually enjoyable.

@TheAliceSmith 🦄I would call it Authentic Heroism. They are really trying to change the meaning of Western Civilizational Heroism. They are trying to turn the antihero {developed from 1714} into Authentic Heroism.

At this point, the self-doubting, morally grey, guilt-ridden hero has to be the biggest cliche out there. But it is fascinating how traditional heroism has become such a target to the postmodern Left.

Bronze Age superpowers signed their biggest treaties in precious metal. Almost all of it is gone. One tablet survived. We know the famous Egypt-Hittite peace treaty after Kadesh was engraved on silver tablets. The silver is lost, melted or looted millennia ago, and the text survives only in clay copies. Then in 1986, at the ruins of the Hittite capital Hattusa, excavators found this. A complete bronze treaty, chains still attached, recording King Tudhaliya IV's guarantee of the kingdom of Tarhuntassa to his cousin Kurunta around 1235 BC. It is the only Hittite metal tablet ever discovered, and one of just three Hittite diplomatic documents believed to be true originals rather than copies. An entire class of documents, the metal originals of ancient diplomacy, survives in exactly one specimen. This is it.

@nonregemesse 🦄It is very good. But it is missing the Sirens' Song episode; it could be improved upon; but the general mythos of this NBC 1997 miniseries is much truer to Homer than Nolan's The Odyssey. If you look in what Aristotle says in Poetics about Homer's The Odyssey, you can see why.

Pretending to dislike a great scene from a great television adaptation to win online arguments is very lame