I rented this movie a few weeks back because I was preparing to honor Kirk Douglas on Hot Toasty Rag. I groaned and rolled my eyes during the first fifteen minutes. The production values weren't very good, some Italian actors had had their voices dubbed in English, and the acting style was extremely dated. As the scenes progressed, I started to get a sense of déjà vu. Halfway through, I started predicting what was going to happen! "If they meet a giant with one eye and get him drunk, I've seen this movie," I said to myself. Turns out, I saw the movie in a high school English class!
My teacher had assigned Homer's works for required reading, but when the entire class flunked the test afterwards, she knew something was wrong. No one understood what had happened in the story! She tried explaining it and cited passages to help our little brains connect the archaic language to what she was saying, but again, it went over our heads. Finally, she knew there was only one way for us to learn Odyssey: she showed us the movie.
The second time around-once I remembered I'd seen the film before-I was taken on a very enjoyable trip down Memory Lane. "There's the giant! There are the sirens! The pigs!" My review, as you can probably tell, is a little colored by my past. I have no idea how much I would have liked or disliked Ulysses if I'd seen it for the first time last month. You might turn it off and think it's ridiculous, or you might think it's a clear, understandable adaptation of a very dense classic poem. I consider this movie a sentimental favorite, like the first version of The Nutcracker my teacher showed the class in fourth grade. Plus, for half the movie, Kirk Douglas practically prances around in his underwear, so that's always fun.
My teacher had assigned Homer's works for required reading, but when the entire class flunked the test afterwards, she knew something was wrong. No one understood what had happened in the story! She tried explaining it and cited passages to help our little brains connect the archaic language to what she was saying, but again, it went over our heads. Finally, she knew there was only one way for us to learn Odyssey: she showed us the movie.
The second time around-once I remembered I'd seen the film before-I was taken on a very enjoyable trip down Memory Lane. "There's the giant! There are the sirens! The pigs!" My review, as you can probably tell, is a little colored by my past. I have no idea how much I would have liked or disliked Ulysses if I'd seen it for the first time last month. You might turn it off and think it's ridiculous, or you might think it's a clear, understandable adaptation of a very dense classic poem. I consider this movie a sentimental favorite, like the first version of The Nutcracker my teacher showed the class in fourth grade. Plus, for half the movie, Kirk Douglas practically prances around in his underwear, so that's always fun.