There are a lot of reviewers missing the point about #TheMandalorianAndGrogu, but talking it over with my son showed me The Way. I wrote about it for @slashfilm slashfilm.com/2177616/the-ma…

The weakest part of this article is that it treats every objection to casting as bigotry before it deals with the actual question. A serious reader can reject racist or cruel attacks on actors and still ask whether a modern adaptation is being faithful to the world it claims to inherit. That question does not disappear because The Odyssey contains gods, monsters, ghosts, and mythic creatures. Myth is not a free for all. Homer’s world has ancestry, geography, lineage, beauty standards, family honor, sacred memory, and cultural identity built into it. Calling Achilles and Helen fictional does not settle the question. Fictional characters can still carry centuries of meaning. Achilles is bound to Greek heroic culture and glory. Helen is bound to beauty, desire, war, and the memory of Troy. A serious adaptation can reinterpret them, but it has to show artistic judgment. They were fictional is an escape from the argument. The whole point of adaptation is judgment. What do you preserve? What do you change? What do your changes reveal about the age making the film? The article also plays a dishonest game with Troy. Yes, Troy changed Homer for the reasons mentioned in the article. That does not prove every new change is automatically wise. One bad adaptation does not become a license for another. If anything, Troy proves the opposite. When filmmakers strip ancient stories of their religious, moral, and cultural structure, they make the myth smaller. The Oscar argument is also too perfect. The Academy rules may not require diverse casting in every film, but Hollywood plainly rewards certain ideological signals. A film can meet those rules through crew, training programs, or studio leadership, but that does not erase the wider pressure on prestige filmmakers to make ancient stories fit modern representation politics. The most revealing part is the tone. The article spends more energy mocking critics, Elon Musk, Kevin Sorbo, and Twitter trolls than explaining why these casting choices serve Homer’s story. That is usually a sign the argument is weak. If the casting is artistically strong, defend it on artistic grounds. Show how it deepens the myth. Show how it clarifies Achilles, Helen, Odysseus, Ithaca, longing, glory, grief, and homecoming. Ancient stories survive because people return to them with reverence and imagination. That is the real issue. Modern Hollywood often treats inheritance as raw material for its own moral performance. Then, when people notice, it calls them backward for caring about the thing being inherited.

A new ‘ADVENTURES OF TINTIN’ movie is officially happening. Peter Jackson is currently writing the script with plans to direct the film himself. (Source: @Variety)

I think I finally understand what is wrong with Nolan: his universe is adverse to myth. It is made entirely of causality, and causality alone. He may be the most gifted filmmaker working in big-budget Hollywood today. But he is going to crash on myth the way sailors crashed on the rocks below the Sirens. When I criticized the teaser, I was told: wait for the trailer. When I criticized the trailer, I was told: wait for the film. Then I read the two-hour interview Nolan gave to Time Magazine, and something clicked. The tell is in a detail Nolan offers with obvious pride. He found a solution to what he saw as a narrative problem: why would the Trojans believe the horse was empty and drag it inside their city? His answer is to make the horse half-submerged, sinking into the sea, so the Trojans would rescue it rather than accept it as a gift. It is a solution to a problem that never was one because it is a myth. The Trojans bring the horse inside because it is a gift and it has wheels. The poet tells you something plainly impossible with the same tone he uses to describe the sunrise, and in doing so he is signaling that the level of reality goes beyond mere causality and exists on other levels. He is the kind of guy who would explain that Santa can fit through the chimney because he designed it wide enough from the start, using proper construction methods and reliable materials. And then explain how the reindeer are fed to sustain that much effort in a single night, and how Santa elaborated a clever logistics route to deliver all the gifts on time. Watch him justify the armor despite its fantastical look, or explain the absence of orchestra because there was no orchestra in Ancient Greece. There were no IMAX cameras either, Christopher. A simple authorial act would have sufficed: because I like it better that way. That honesty might have opened a door out of causality. This narrative prison is precisely why people eventually seek out avant-garde and experimental cinema, why they feel something release when causality finally breaks. Because causality is already the weight of our ordinary lives. As long as Nolan stayed away from myth, his causal world of mirrors and clever tricks and puzzles worked beautifully, sometimes brilliantly. But this is something else. This is the gut of myth. This is the Dionysian spirit of mud and blood and the salt of the sea. This is the beautiful lie that makes you erupt with sacred joy.

Animated StarWars is the best StarWars. I said what I said.

House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal claims the race swaps he made are in reaction to the world being "different" than when Lord of the Rings was made: "The world is very different now than it was 10 years ago when Game of Thrones all started. It's different than 20 years ago when Peter Jackson made The Lord of the Rings. These types of stories need to be more inclusive than they traditionally have been. It was very important for Miguel [Sapochnik] and I to create a show that was not another bunch of white people on the screen, just to put it very bluntly." What is different about the world now?

Rings of Power showrunner Patrick McKay on his vision for the show: "We never approach making this show as trying to add to Tolkien’s vision. I think we approach it as wanting to unearth his vision and, hopefully, unearth aspects of his vision in his world that hadn’t been brought to the screen before." Did he do this?

Did Disney lie to us? We grew up believing the good guy always wins. Turns out… the real world doesn’t work like that.

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