Hollywood: Shit or Garbage?

Greeks are unhappy being written out of their own foundational national myth in the upcoming The ODEIssy.

To the cast and creative team of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, We write to you as Greeks, not as fragments of antiquity, not as echoes from museum displays, and not as characters sealed in marble, but as a living people whose story has never stopped being written.

First, we wish you well.

Cinema has always carried the power to reimagine ancient texts, to cross borders of language and time, and to reintroduce old stories to new generations. Homer's Odyssey belongs, in many ways, to the shared cultural imagination of humanity. We understand the ambition behind bringing it to the screen on a global scale, and we recognise the artistic tradition of reinterpretation that has surrounded these epics for centuries.

But we also ask you to consider something that is often overlooked in modern retellings of Greek stories.

We did not vanish.

Greek people did not disappear after the age of myth. Greek culture was not frozen in classical marble. Greek language was not extinguished in antiquity.

We are still here.

...

At every stage, something essential remained unbroken: language, memory, and cultural continuity.

Greek is still spoken today, the oldest continuously surviving language in Europe. Not reconstructed. Not revived. But lived.

That continuity matters when stories like The Odyssey are retold.

Odysseus is not only a universal symbol of endurance, struggle, and homecoming. He is also part of a cultural inheritance that has been carried through every one of those historical layers -- retold by Byzantine scholars, preserved in manuscripts copied through the medieval world, studied during the Renaissance, and still taught, spoken, and reinterpreted in Greece today.

This is why conversations about representation matter deeply to us.

We are not asking for exclusion or limitation. We are not arguing against diversity, nor against reinterpretation. Greek culture itself has always been shaped by exchange, migration, and encounter across centuries.

What we are asking is something simpler and more human.

That when Greek stories are retold on a global stage, Greek people are not rendered invisible within them.

...

So as you step into Homer's world - into seas, wanderings, gods, and returning kings - we ask that you carry this awareness with you:

That Greece is not only a setting in antiquity.

It is a living country.

Greek people are not historical figures.

We are contemporaries.

...

We did not vanish.

We are still here.

It's interesting, if a little sad, that the only answer to a Muh Representation argument is another Muh Representation argument.

The Mandala Effect and Gorp made $101 million over the four-day (actually five) day weekend, matching the original low projections, but beating the revised, even-lower projections of $80 million. Which I now wonder wasn't an effort at expectations-lowering so that Disney could claim they matched expectations.

Something kind of amazing has been happening since the weekend, beginning Tuesday. The independent, super-low-budget, YouTuber-made horror film Obsession -- which is about a Low-T Beta Cuck who wishes for a hot girl to love him more than she has ever loved before, and then discovers that the love of an obsessed, magically-deranged psychotic stalker isn't so wonderful --has been slowly catching up to the Star Wars film's daily takings, and has now overtaken it.

Obsession' Has Dethroned 'The Mandalorian And Grogu' At The Box Office

By Paul Tassi

There is effectively no precedent to describe what's happening with Obsession right now, the low-budget horror film that has achieved milestones like increasing 39% in revenue in its second weekend after word-of-mouth spread.

But that was even more impressive given that it was going up against the first new Star Wars movie in seven years, The Mandalorian and Grogu, which did win the weekend handily. But now? Obsession is...beating it.

Daily box office tracking is now showing that Obsession is now beating The Mandalorian and Grogu handily as of this Wednesday, earning $5.6 million domestically to Mando's $4.1 million on that day. And again, this is the second week of Obsession's release (this Wednesday is practically a non-existent drop from last Wednesday) and this is Mando's first week.

It also appears that Obsession could be heading into a third weekend where its revenue increases from last week's $24 million. That would now be going up against both The Mandalorian and Grogu and fellow YouTuber-directed, low-budget horror film Backrooms, which is now projected to make a mammoth $40-60 million, resulting in back-to-back hits for the genre. But Obsession is still in a league of its own in terms of its earning trajectory.

Backrooms itself is based on YouTube short films, and directed by the original YouTuber.

There's every chance that Obsession will battle Backrooms for the #1 spot, dropping Mufflerrepair and Gauges to #3 in its second weekend. Beaten by two low-budget YouTube movies.

Film Threat's Chris Gore says it's "riveting." He says it's "going to be huge." Allen Ng agrees it's "anxiety-inducing" but also says that the mysteries posed by the film aren't resolved. They both agree that this is intended as the first film in a franchise, so they're not going to properly finish it now.

Eh, I'm not sure I object to that. The thing about WTF Bizarro Mysteries is that they're not supposed to be resolved. The solution to the mystery would be antithetical to the point of posing a question which is supposed to be imponderable, without an answer.

I have thoughts about this. I'm a big fan of thrillers. Thrillers are just mysteries with simpler plots and lots of running around and yelling.

I'm also a fan of Twilight Zone WTF premises. This kind of thriller just has something impossibly strange happen in the opening, and promises you, don't worry, by the end, we'll have explained this impossibly strange situation in a logical and satisfying manner.

But here's the thing: That promise is a lie 95% of the time. The more bizarre and fantastical your opening gambit is, the less likely it will be that you can conjure any sort of explanation of any degree of plausibility or satisfaction. And this whole subgenre depends on starting off with the most outlandish and impossible premise you can think of.

That's why 90% of these stories end with some variation of "It was all a dream... or was it?" or "Oh my God, we've been dead the whole time! We're in hell!" The most original and startling the opening, the more you can be sure that the cameras are all in comas imaging it all in some kind of group hallucination.

Because seriously, what the hell kind of "logical" explanation can you actually come up with to explain this nonsense?

Normal thrillers-- those without the sci-fi/fantasy/bizarro weirdness premise -- also struggle to explain why anything in the movie actually happened. North by Northwest famously makes no real sense, and is just one set piece after another.

So my point is that anyone who likes this kind of thing and has been around the block a few times goes into it knowing there will almost certainly not be a satisfying and logical third-act explanation, and that the enjoyment will just derive from the freaky-deaky premise and the exploration of that through the second act. These movies (and books and stories) are all journey, no destination.

Every once in a long while, a thriller or Twilight Zone thriller will actually conjure up an ending that does make sense and does answer all of your questions. And that will become an instant classic.

But that is definitely not the way most of these go.

So if Backrooms never explains what's going on -- 1, it's not supposed to, the question is more interesting than any possible answer and 2, any answer they give will be stupid so why don't they just save us the disappointment and say We May Never Know the Motive.

The NY Post says Hollywood is afraid... of interlopers from YouTube beating them up and stealing their lunch money.

Hollywood trembles in fear of the havoc the internet has wrought and will continue to wreak on its core business. Execs wake up in a cold sweat from a nightmare that blockbusters have been replaced by 30-second TikTok videos. And, yikes, they almost have. But perhaps the key to a prosperous future is collaboration.

Enter "Backrooms": A disquieting and smart new horror film from A24 that, for now, can only be seen in theaters, yet is the brainchild of 4chan and YouTube users. Its director Kane Parsons is just 20 years old and his movie is already an uncommonly hot title with the younger set. Eighty-eight percent of its packed preview night audiences around the country were under 35.

You can see why. While the main character of "Backrooms," Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is a sleep-deprived, middle-aged man whose dreams of being an architect have been crushed as irreparably as his marriage, a youthful energy pervades Parsons' strange and engrossing journey into the unfurnished abyss.

The seed of "Backrooms" was planted in 2019 when a user posted an image on the website 4Chan of an architecturally unsettling room -- tinted yellow with fluorescent lights, patterned wallpaper, ceiling tiles and gray carpet. People wrote horror stories online about the picture, which led to the detailed lore of the Backrooms, a labyrinth of eerie spaces accessible by hidden portals around the world.

Parsons turned the trend into a popular YouTube series with millions of views when he was 16. And he rooted his creation in documentary-style "found footage," like "The Blair Witch Project."

The director used that same on-edge aesthetic for his debut feature, which is set in no-smartphones 1990. Clark, who runs Cap'n Clark's Ottoman Empire, a failing furniture store, stumbles into the Backrooms when he walks through a wall in his building's basement.

The confused man tells his therapist, Mary (Renate Reinsve of "Sentimental Value"), who has her own demons, about what the messed-up oddity he's found. And Clark sounds completely insane.

"It's like the store just continues, I guess?," he says.

I love when arrogant but untalented people find out they're completely untalented and that their previous "success" had just been due to connections in the industry.

It's got a 78% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is good, but not as good as Obsession or some other recent horror offerings.

Now, reviews are coming for Backrooms, and while decent enough, they are not sky-high like a few other horror entries this year, including the runaway hit from just two weeks ago, Obsession, which is on its way to make 100x its budget amidst 95% and 94% critic and audience Rotten Tomatoes scores. Backrooms, in contrast, has a 78% Rotten Tomatoes score right now with three dozen reviews in. How does that stack up against the other horror offerings of the year? Here's the list of major releases:

Obsession -- 95% critic score
Send Help -- 93% critic score
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple -- 92% critic score
Hokum -- 88% critic score
We Bury the Dead -- 88% critic score
Backrooms -- 78% critic score
Primate -- 78% critic score

Und so weiter.

Eh. I'll see it on streaming.

Either way, The Marzipan and Gorget will drop to #3 in just its second weekend.

Last week, I mentioned that I would put up a thread for older/less-known movie recommendations. Please consider this that thread!

No corporate slop. Movies from an earlier, less stupid era, or smaller/unnoticed movies that people might have missed.

Oh: Question for y'all. I tried to watch Spider-Noir but I don't see any way to choose the "Authentic Black and White" version. I get a title screen that tells me I can select this, "Below," but there's nothing "below" for me to click on.

The "True-Hue color" version looks decent and I'd probably watch a lot of it in color anyway but I'm cheesed that I don't have the option to watch in B&W as promised.

Can you help a blogger out? What am I missing?

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 03:45 PM

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