reading:
John Bowe (ed): Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs
Gail Simone: Birds of Prey
Sarah Vowell: Take the Cannoli
Howard Zinn: People's History of the U.S.
Conversations With a Classics Major: The Cut Stuff I Liked
You never really realize how much you can talk about gay Trojan men in skirts until you transcribe an hour-long conversation about gay Trojan men in skirts. An abridged transcript (skipping over most of the tangents) ran about fourteen pages, and in order to get it to a manageable length I had to cut about half of that. Which meant that some of my favorite bits had to go, especially the most off-topic, but I retrieve them now for your entertainment. Because they're funny.
To me, at least.
Before we get into the hate, tell me a couple of things you liked about Troy.
I thought the casting was really very good -- though whether they were directed well or not is another topic. Y'know, despite how bad a job he did, Orlando Bloom is very pretty. He's the prettiest celebrity we have.
Everyone seems to like the horse -- the horse was very good, given that we don't know what the horse actually looked like.
The horse did look like somebody built it from a bunch of boats.
Yeah, the design was really good. And...
Alison's boyfriend: And Odysseus-
Yeah, I liked Odysseus more in the movie than I ever liked him in the book.
Yeah, Sean Bean was awesome. Everyone was joking about wanting the sequel to be Sean Bean's The Odyssey -- now I actually want to see Sean Bean's The Odyssey...
I don't know if he's really the best body type for Odysseus (at the end of The Odyssey, he's the only man who can pull his bow, and I don't see Sean Bean as the only man among big burly men who can pull his bow) but he did a very good job.
Do you think they could ever make a historical biopic where they were very honest about [homosexuality]?
They're doing that!
With Alexander?
Yeah -- Jared Leto's his boyfriend! And he has a wife too, you know.
But in Alexander, aren't Alexander and Hephaestion the same age?
I don't know who his boyfriend was in real life -- they don't have a book like The Iliad that says who was what or anything. And Alexander was from Northern Greece, and who knows what they did up there-
They might just have sex with whomever they like.
What's important about The Iliad and why it matters is that it actually discusses Greece coming together as a country -- the Trojan War is the first time they all came together as a united Greece. And Alexander cemented the united Greece.
And by cement we mean "conquer the shit out of."
Well, it was a united country after that.
Other impressions about the movie? What would you have done differently?
Well, it's always hard to decide what things to keep in and what things to lose -- plus, they wanted to get to the end of the war anyways. But the little Aeneas nod, even though they did it terribly, I liked.
What was the Aeneas nod?
One of the big Roman epics is The Aeneid -- Aeneas is actually a Trojan who escapes and founds Rome, and so at the end of the movie when they're all leaving through that corridor and Orlando Bloom is like, "Who are you?" and the kid's like "I am Aeneas" and Orlando says, "Here, take this sword of Troy, for if this sword is around then Troy will always be around." And so Aeneas then goes and founds Rome. It was a cute little nod to those of us who know it, but it was REALLY cheesy. Plus Aeneas there is 15 and he's not supposed to be, because there's this whole thing where he takes his dad with him instead of his wife -- because he has to go marry the Italians so... whatever, it's another story. But one of my favorite stories that they didn't do was the Ajax story -- 'cause, you know, Tyler Mane-
I know! I was totally like "I can't believe the Hulk could beat Sabertooth in a fight!" And not Hulked out or anything!
But his story is one of my favorites, because when Achilles dies they have to give his stuff to somebody, and it's between Odysseus and Ajax, and Odysseus wins, and this makes Ajax mad, and as a result one of the gods makes him crazy and he goes around slaughtering all of the animals because he thinks they're Greeks. But they can't include everything, even though that's one of my favorite parts.
Wait, so that's with Ajax? He isn't killed in the first half of the story by a non-Hulked-out Hulk?
