Have YOU Read “The Odyssey”? Never have, but they’ve made a movie:
Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey movie has all the hopes of a summer blockbuster pinned to it, and all the promise – as the trailers have showed – of magnificent effects, shocks and thrills. You will be taken inside the cave of the terrifying one-eyed giant, the Cyclops Polyphemus, who likes to dine on human flesh. You will visit the dim and misty shores of the land of the dead, where no warm-blooded human should ever tread. You will flee the pounding tread of cannibals. You will be tossed on stormy seas sent surging by vengeful gods.
And all of this spectacular adventure, for sure, is part of the Odyssey, one of the first great works of world literature, which was written down soon after the Greeks acquired the technology to do so, probably in the 600s or 500sBC. The ancient Greeks attributed the poem to a man called Homer, often described as a blind bard from the island of Chios.
In recent centuries, though, the idea that the poem can be meaningfully called the work of one single creator has been firmly called into question. Particularly after the 1930s, when the American classicist Milman Parry studied the composition techniques of nonliterate epic singers in the Balkans, it became clear that the Odyssey, and the other Homeric Greek epic, the Iliad, were written forms of poems that drew on a long oral tradition. That means that versions of what we call the Odyssey were – perhaps for centuries, long before they were consigned to writing – performed by bards, using a combination of memory and on-the-hoof improvisation.
Imagine then, for a moment, not the darkness of the cinema so much as the darkness of the king and queen’s pillared hall, where guests are gathered for feasting and for telling stories. Against the flickering fire, the bard strikes up with his harp and starts to sing, performing tales of adventure and loss, return and homecoming, of war and death and the fragile, tender threads that hold a husband and wife and a family together.
The question is: why are we still connecting with stories that were told in those ancient halls, their animating sparks perhaps as old as the Greek bronze age? Why has the director of Inception and Oppenheimer been so determined to adapt them, and why will so many people want to experience his vision of them?
The answer partly lies in the fact that the Odyssey – the story of a warrior’s homecoming, his long and tortuous journey to reintegrate himself within his own household – has passed into the bloodstream of many storytelling traditions. In his introduction to his recent translation, classicist and essayist Daniel Mendelsohn lists Dante’s Inferno, Star Trek, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, The Catcher in the Rye, Gladiator, Pride and Prejudice, and Game of Thrones as works in which the Odyssey’s ideas and motifs resurface.
How To Do Stunts For The Movies:
There were stunts in films before there was talking. Long before Tom Cruise dangled from the wing of a plane, the silent film star Harold Lloyd originated an enduring Hollywood image, hanging from a clock face in “Safety Last!” (1923). Though the slapstick and sight gags of Lloyd and his peers Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin once shaped cinema, opportunities in the stunt industry, like many aspects of film production, are now changing because of technologies like CGI, A.I. and robots.
“If we find the right way to show our perspective in a way that a machine could never do, I think we can still make stories and do stunts and still provide a human element,” said Greg Poljacik, an instructor at the International Stunt School in Seattle with 18 years of film credits. Last summer, the school opened its doors to train a new class of performers on falls, fights, fire and the artistry of stunt work.
At a morning fight-choreography session in a gym at the University of Washington, R&B slow jams blared over speakers as students methodically worked through throwing punches and kicks at one another in slow motion. Alongside learning physical performance, students were coached on how to verbalize getting hit: Instead of repeating the same staccato sound (“oof!”) they were encouraged by teachers to “use the whole alphabet” (“ah!” “ugh!”).
Training covers 15 different skills over a three-week course, with a focus on fighting and falling down because those actions are the basis for most stunt work, Jeff McKracken, the school’s owner, explained.
Chuck Johnson, a stunt performer with over two decades of experience, led about 50 students through choreography rooted in martial arts, at times getting philosophical with his direction. There was talk of “swimming” through movements as performers pushed and pulled one another. Johnson used words like “clarity” and “beauty” to describe the impact of a precisely located hit on a performer’s body.
Replete with videos and photos, this is a cool visual piece.
From the outside, the church looked like a plain brick storefront, the mirrored windows peeling, a sign above painted white with blue letters. THE WELL, it read, and underneath, REVIVAL HUB.
There were older and grander churches in Maryville, a college town in East Tennessee where you could barely drive a minute without passing a cross or a sign about Jesus. But when Mike and Andrea Brewer established the Well, in 2016, they understood themselves to be part of something more mystical and revolutionary than any existing denomination—a charismatic-Christian movement that has drawn millions of Americans with the promise of supernatural encounters with God and visions of cosmic battle.
By his own account, Mike had been an exhausted factory worker and a lapsed Pentecostal addicted to pornography when one night, at home and praying for a better life, he heard an unfamiliar voice calling out to him and believed that it was God. At church a few days later, he would write, he felt a “tangible explosion” in his chest, followed by “the purity and righteousness of God moving through me in waves.” He came to believe that a demon had exited his body and that the Holy Spirit had taken its place. He decided that God had chosen him for a divine assignment.
The Brewers began attending conferences with names such as “Voice of the Prophets” and “Voice of the Apostles” in places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. At one gathering, Mike claimed to have seen an actual angel, and at another, a manifestation of the Holy Spirit that he described to me as “like five fog machines, like a cloud just rolling into the room.” He and Andrea came to believe that God was unleashing new signs and wonders and raising up modern-day apostles and prophets, including, it turned out, them.
By the time the Brewers returned to Maryville, they saw themselves as hardened spiritual warriors. They founded the Well to continue the battle, joining an international network of churches and ministries called Global Awakening, which also had a seminary, where Andrea began studying demon history and hierarchies. When Mike asked God for their exact assignment, he told me when I visited in March, “the Lord spoke so clearly. He said, ‘I’m giving you and the Well a mandate for the full eradication of witchcraft and demonic activity in the region.’”
Oh, the ‘Satanists’?:
And that was what led the Brewers to look across the street one day a few years later and determine that the central hub for demonic activity in the region was roughly 100 yards away. It was a bookstore called Southland.
The owner was Lisa Misosky, and she was chatting with customers one afternoon when she found out that people in town were accusing her of demonic activity, and not in a metaphorical way.
Over the course of three decades in Maryville, Misosky had made Southland Books and Cafe into a local institution, a sprawling maze of old bookcases where people could find a leather-bound Mark Twain, a paperback Charles Bukowski, shelves of military history, and flyers for a local mah-jongg group. Misosky had a bar downstairs where she hosted trivia nights, readings, all-ages punk shows, and fundraisers that sometimes involved drag performances. She occasionally provided space to the local Democratic Party. But none of that had drawn public protest until a new church moved in across the street.
“You’re not gonna believe this shit,” a friend texted her, and then sent the first of several videos posted by a man who introduced himself as Mike Brewer, the leader of an “apostolic hub” called the Well. Sitting at a desk, he explained in a calm and methodical manner that the bookstore had been identified as a “regional demonic stronghold.” A high-ranking demon named Lilith was involved, Misosky would learn, and the bookstore was being targeted for something called “strategic-level spiritual warfare,” the goal of which was to “remove the enemy.”
That sets up the rest of the story.
You may have read that Charlie Crockett had dumped an opener due to alleged Satanic ties. We’re talking Satanic doo-wop. What better way to send us out?:
