Father Malone's Weekly Roundup - The Odyssey (2026)

Welcome back to Father Malone's a weekly round up. I'm Father Malone, and weary from our travels. Is miss Ripley, Jean, she is too hot to bark. It has been above one hundred and ten degrees here in Sin City for nearly two weeks now, and I'm considering moving north. Now.

That's not true, not with continued occupation at the Universal Horror unleashed, now with resident evil. Anyway, the temp has been brutal. I cannot wait for fall, and I've made you wait, dear listeners, for lou these many years. But fear not tell me about a complicated man Ripley. Tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the Holy town of Troy, and where he went and who he met, and the pain he suffered in the storms at sea.

That's the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey. I'm using. Most go for the Fitzgerald. I found him to be a bit stagnant and stale. Wilson's translation gets at the fluid nature of the action.

That's right, we're talking the Odyssey. And yes, I was a classics miner in college, so I've spent way too long with dead languages and long gone heroes. I've heard the songs of their fathers. I've committed their valor to my heart. Let's just fucking dive in.

Here's the trailer. Tell me what you remember, well, wife, a son? No, we want more, Help me go home. This is the household waiting for master. I want you to choose me.

I think his king is coming back. No he's not. What would he do if he came back here to find all these suitors in his house? You're pining your Ford daddy you didn't even know, like some sniffling bastard. Who's looking after your wife?

And silent? Do you see my dad is coming home, bring rand accounts, bringing it all that. I need everyone at this party dead, I can still save them. You're a man who needs to control his fate, but you cannot control this. That world is God.

No one could stand between me and home, and even the god. You're both. I think it's a sleepy. Okay right off the bat, the fucking hype surrounding the movie Mostly Toxic has been a stumbling block for me. The way a bunch of keyboard writing dickheads with the intellectual capacity of a slack John yokl have been decrying the movie.

It automatically puts me on this movie's side. Had a very similar situation a decade ago with Ghostbusters Answer the Call Girls Yuck. That backlash was pretty all consuming for the entirety of the time that the movie had yet to be released, and I like Paul Figue and I love Kristin Wig, and it had then SNL stalwart Kate McKinnon as the weirdo science one. I was already predisposed to enjoy that movie. And then the movie was just okay.

It wasn't gone awful, it wasn't great, just kind of there. But opening your mouth against it felt like validation of all these caveman morons in their pre twentieth century worldviews. So when all these racists and homophobes, because that's what they are, started hollering about casting decisions on the honesty, I found myself in the unenviable position of defending Chris Nolan. Look, I know he's beloved, and we all miss Heath Ledger, and that flick Dark Knight isn't altogether worthy? What if of the Batman and Joker?

And I fucking love Memento? One of his earliest works. It's just the right amount of clever and well, not stupid, but very clever. It manages to worm its way into your brain where the structure could have been maddening, but then ends up making total sense. Everything else eh.

I think he makes pretty movies with decent action and some decent ideas underpinning them. I think the movies where his brother Jonathan had a hand of the script are easily a cut above everything else he's done. He makes epics, but I just don't know how interested he is in telling a story. At least that's the vibe I got here with the Odyssey, But we'll get there. Here's the thing I can counter the idiot claim that Lupita Nyongo as a black woman was not the woman from history.

I could tell you Helen was hatched from a swanagg in the Odyssey, so you can't actually know her racial makeup. But you know what, fuck that and fuck them. Here's the response to everyone making criticisms like that, you're racist, piece of shit. The end, Go make your AI version with what I assume will be the palest Nordic women they can have. Gpt conjure up olive skin.

Hell no, it was all whites, you fucking losers. There is so much to criticize about this movie, and casting is not one of them. Hold on, I got these scientists from Done of the Dead on the line. What do you think, doctor jummies suggesting dummies? Dummies?

For all I know, the brains are already dead. It's the idiots that are still alive. Agreed. Now let me digress again and reiterate something I said on the last round up. I'm around tons of kids in their twenties and thirties, and they have for weeks been discussing the finer points of the story of this film and the book itself, comparing who made it to the translation, what subplots were prune and that is so fucking hopeful to me.

The fact that people are diving back into the text warms my classicist heart. Now, then, the casting is not the problem. Everyone is performing at the top of their game. Oh except dnne Hathaway, who, as usual, is operating somewhere in the Dixie fried Ham universe of acting. Every emotion is big.

I will out act you, for I was the best girl in Drama Club and I will be till they put me in the ground. With her as Penelope, probably my favorite name of all time, by the way, With her as Penelope, one begins to wonder if Odysseus weren't angering the gods on purpose. We want to go home, Odysseus. Yeah, but there's a really cool whirlpool over there, fellas, don't you want to see that? Okay, so you all know the story.

Presumably, Odysseus leaves his wife in Newborn's Son to fight for Agamemnon against Troy. The battle is ten years long. On the return voyage, Odysseus runs a foul of bad weather, bad luck, and many many bad decisions on his part that keep them under constant siege for an additional ten years. During his time away, an entire village worth of suitors have taken up residence in Odysseus's house with the hope of taking Penelope's hand and becoming king themselves. She keeps them at bay by promising they can have her hand when she finishes a tapestry, which she quietly unravels each night.

There's a lot of ways you can attack the story linear, which has been done successfully in the past, but we'll get there a little later. Or you can fracture the storytelling and have it be an investigation as it is here, with two simultaneous quests for the knowledge of Odysseus and his exploits and will he ever get home. The first and most annoying is Tom Holland as Telemachus, son of Odysseus, as he travels around trying to learn from Odysseus's old army buddies where the fuck he is, and in doing so is told of his exploits during the war and what has happened in the world since. The other is Odysseus himself, trying to recall his adventures since becoming a lotus eater and spending seven lazy years on a beach with Calypso played by Charlie's Thrown.

That's fine the investigation. It interrupts any fucking narrative flow of the movie attempts, But okay, it hasn't been made this way, so it seems a clever way to do it, So go ahead, ruin any chance to actually get to know any of these characters and grow with them as they try like hell to get home. It wouldn't be so awful if those scenes where present day Telemachus and Odysseus are trying to sort out the past. If they weren't just giant, steaming exposition dumps. For a fucking three hour movie, with all the time in the world to tell us a visual story, we just keep listening to people fucking talking endlessly.

It not only undercuts the storytelling, the immersive thing that we're looking for in drama, it robs the film of any potential visual poetry. There's so much talking and yelling and bellowing. In addition, I have to say, the fucking monsters are terrible. The cyclops should be fucking horrifying from the moment they enter that cave, and instead it's like they're trapped inside with a giant protest puppet. You've all seen them.

They are cool, but completely unreal, and that's what we get here, a giant whose every movement feels like it's at the end of wires. They can have vaudeville actor extraordinary Bill Irwin bite the head off of tiny action figure versions of Odysseus's crew, but the whole thing had me howling with how dumb at all looked. Speaking of dumb Achilles isn't in the film Achilles, whose exchange with Odysseus is not only a summation of his own adventures in the US, but is the spark that drives Odysseus homeward. Achilles tells him he'd rather have lived as a pauper and had a long domestic life rather than been the man he was and done the things he'd done. Achilles is a fucking shell of a man at the end of the Iliad.

I'm not sure how it became unimportant to include that in this three hour snooze fest. Now, I did not see the film in seventy millimeter, and I don't care. I've seen my share of seventy millimeter and been appropriately wowed two thousand and one in the Wild Bunch at the Cinerama Dome, Who Framed Roger Rabbit at Radio City Music Hall? And Yeah it's big yep. Did it make me appreciate those movies any more than I had or will continue to, given how fucking scarce are the opportunities to see them in that format?

Not at all. Now some will say I didn't get the full experience, and to them, I'd say, you were dazzled by trickery, You were overwhelmed and couldn't pay attention to how fucking boring the movie actually was. Also, if you're a rah rah, you didn't see it. If you didn't see it as intended, fuckers, I trust you will never again watch the film, because at home or on your phone is breaking that sacred bond that you share with Christopher Nolan. Let me snip away from this misbegotten tail by saying I know that they were out there in a real boat and using Imax cameras as never before, and they were in real locations, and everything was real, real, real.

A couple of weeks ago on House of the Dragon, there was a naval battle that was as harrowing as anything I'd seen in a future. Film really made use of the environments and the characters, and it was genuinely thrilling, and it was probably all made on a sound stage. And later on, when there were dragons, I fucking believed them too. There's a sequence with Circe the Witch where she turns everyone into pigs in Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. I don't care how amazing those pig transforming heads looked in real life, but what we get on screen felt like all the stuff that they cut away from in an American Werewolf in London.

It's like a fleshy chuck E Cheese animatronic and just as horrifying. Actually, a fleshy chuck E Cheese character would be a walking nightmare and way better than five nights at Freddy's Bullshit. Also way better than what we're given here. Hey, I hate everything. No, not great, because thirty years ago there was another version of the Odyssey and it's also three hours and it's fucking great, with creature effects by Jim Henson's Creature Shop and produced by Francis Ford Coppola and Nicholas Myers.

You know, Wrath of Khans Nicholas Myers. I'm gonna play the trailer here so you can hear some of the bananas cast that got going on, including Christopher Lee as Tyresius, the blind Prophet. He's also played by James Reemar in the current film. Anyway, here's the trailer. Hallmark Entertainment presents you Are You, I Am Odysseus, the greatest adventure.

Of all time. You must make this journey Suckle. An epic voyage into worlds beyond imagining. You don't recognize me an, a good story of wonders beyond belief, all. The secrets of the world.

A movie event unlike any you have ever seen before. Me this is I can'tjoy The Odyssey, a classic adventure, delightful, larger than life, a feast for the eyes, irresistible, a major entertainment event. And Armanda Sarde, Bredescaki, Geraldine Chaplain, Bernardette Peters, Eric Roberts, Isabella Rossolini, and Vanessa Williams. Your destiny is to become immortal for your name on the lips of endless generations. The Odyssey the check this out.

The series starts with the birth of Telemachus and Odysseus at home, and then we follow him through the Trojan War, and then we follow him through his journeys, all the while checking in with Penelope and her trials. So weird to do it that way, making us care for every single member of Odysseus's crew, and watching as the vice slowly tightens on Penelope. And we have Clever Odysseus here. They mentioned him a lot in the book, Clever Odysseus outwitting the Cyclops, and not just Jason Bourne complaining about being on this fucking beach, and there's a journey through the underworld and not just a silhouetted group of Wraiths on a black beach wearing black clothes, writing poetry and black ink on black paper.

And the fucking scene where they have to sail past Charybdis and Scilla in the mini series is fucking awesome. Is it better than anything in Nolan Slick? Yes, yes it is. It's a TV movie, so don't get your hopes up too high. It doesn't have the sweep of a feature film, but I tell you it's not heart and it's on YouTube right now, and I'm going to link it in the show notes, and that is where we're going to part Midnight Viewers.

Tune in this Monday for actually I don't know yet. I have a hole in my schedule, so we'll see. But next Friday, well I don't know that either, but I do know there are new episodes of Step Off and Vault seven oh two over on the Patreon channel. Those are shows about the White Wrapper Show and Fallout, respectively. HP and I on occasion will also do an away Mission Star Trek Away Mission over there, and we'll be viewing that again real soon.

I forced hp to watch the latest episode of Strange New Worlds, The Ghost One. Oh boy, I can't wait to talk about it, So until next time, fellow travelers try to enjoy the Daylight Show.