Google image searches can really turn up some strange sights. Below is a work by a Ms. Karen Woods, of the famed Italian twins, Romulus and Remus.

Look at those asses! My God. Round and firm as volleyballs and twice as smooth. Truly mythic!

Not as sinful as it sounds, but this may offend the devoutly ethical.

I've been stealing from work.

Oh, pft. It's a completely natural thing to do, especially in an office setting, with all those Post-Its, ballpoint pens, and miscellaenous dodads that slip so damn easily up shirt sleeves, pant legs, body orifices, what have you. In fact, it might even be argued that one is compelled by law to steal office supplies from one's workplace, but the specifics are for another day ...

I've been grabbing paperclips. Pens, Post-Its, erasers, pencils, I have and mine are cooler, besides. Now, these paperclips -- which I've been sliding off notebooks, file folders where no one important would really miss them, as I keep telling myself -- are something.

At first look, they looked, to me, like Attic helmets (others may see scissors, a pair of golf clubs, or, alternatively, paperclips). By this point in my contract (with about another two weeks to go), I've assembled a sizeable collection of various sizes.

So, without further ado, I present to you, slightly fuzzily scanned, MY UNHOLY GREEK ARMY OF THE NIGHT!


 

Most of you probably think by now I'm either gay, or very, very strange. I'll leave you up to decide which.

Anyway, I'm here to dance about the latest blockbusting, money-raking exhibition to be unveiled at the AGO - Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions, which opens on June 12. The AGO, in my experience, is rather disappointing with its "major" artists, usually unable to procure better known works to temper the glut of obscure pieces. Impressionism, also, has never been a favourite period of mine, due to its massive commercial popularity; I've enjoyed it lightly, but never revelled in it.

I am, however, a big fan of J.M.W. Turner, mostly because I've managed to block out the fact he's an Impressionist, seeing him only as "Man with Deft Touch -- Alarm: Understatement! -- with Light."

As expected, I will be gouged, at $15 for student admission ($18 for adult). I will not know exactly what I am getting, as the AGO press release is vague about precisely which 120 works will grace its repertoire. The scene will be crowded. There will simultaneously be people saying "I could do that", and people saying "postmodern" and "existentialist." Hey, I know what those words mean too, but I don't need to advertise the fact. None of the souvenir postcards in the gift shop will be reproductions of works I liked.

Despite all this, I'm certain that I'll be going on the mere strength that a Turner will be there, because he does just that to me. He will show you the very nature of light, on a canvas. Doesn't that sound deep and mysterious? If you're in town, save a few dollars and go see for yourself.

I saw a sobering thing today at work, and it made me pause.

If you don't know, I work as an archivist for the summer. One of the things I'm doing for the archives is cataloguing old OPP -- Ontario Provincial Police -- diaries, where officers record their on-duty activities. I keep track of when they start, and when they end, which is ordinarily at retirement.  

As I checked up on one officer, I noticed that the last additions were penned by a different hand. The script was not as elegant and easy, but neat, and reverent, and it wrote in the very last entry:

May 26, 1989:
- Passed away -

As I silently entered the date into the database, below so many others and to be followed by so many others, it gave me a strangely sad feeling to know that anyone who would look upon these listings one day in the future would think them all indistinguishable, and equal.

Possibly the worst thing about Troy: I can't read The Iliad in public anymore. For you see, with the popularity of Troy, people will think that I was educated by the movie, that I jumped on the bandwagon. Of course, they can't help it -- it's a fair, logical conclusion nowadays. The Homeric epic has jumped into the top 100 books sold by Amazon.com, and teenagers coming out of Troy screenings have been heard to say, "I gotta read The Iliad!"

I am, my friends, a masochistic cinema-goer. I will watch movies I know I will find cheesy and silly, and I take immense pleasure in it. There is a certain sense of great power and elitism to be able to say, "I hated it!" and to turn my nose up at those who did not, as though by pure virtue of finding fault I am superior in mind.

So on Wednesday, I went to see Troy. I had been planning to see it ever since before principle photography even began. Waiting for some twenty-four months for a movie -- or for anything -- gives rise to certain expectations in a person.

Those expectations that arose in me were unreasonable for something in the nature of, say, Return of the Killer Tomatoes. But Troy is a movie with a budget of more than one hundred million US dollars, filmed in London, Mexico, and exotic Malta, and dropping more glitzy names -- Brad Pitt, Peter O'Toole, Julie Christie, Eric Bana, and Orlando Bloom -- than a Hollywood-poolside schmoozer.

Troy is a movie based on the most famous war story of all time, committed in writing by (probably) the poet Homer, told to generations of famous Greeks and Romans. If you pause to think about it, the story we know now was the same heard and revered by iconic men like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Augustus. The stories of Achilles and Hector and others awed generations of ancients, the very people whom we enshrine today for laying the foundation for most of Western civilization.

By virtue of those things, any movie telling the tale of the Trojan War should be a Great Film -- "great" not as in "very excellent" but "awesome and timeless." By the time I saw the trailer -- the kiss of death for me for any film, since I can more or less gauge my feelings to 99.99% accuracy for hours of celluloid from those two quick-edited minutes -- I knew it was not a Great Film. In fact, I probably knew from the moment they cast Orlando Bloom, another kiss of death for any film, and to a lesser extent, Brad Pitt, who has shown he can act, but usually not as a blockbuster leading man, which undoubtably Achilles would be.

Troy wasn't going to be a Great Film; it was going to be a vehicle for pretty faces, with delusions of cinematic grandeur, flashing with money and flesh but lacking in mind and heart, flocked to by fangirls aged 13-49 hoping to gawp at the sea of man-flesh.

And that's precisely what it turned out to be, so in a way, I was disappointed and yet not. As much as I had prepared myself, I really did and do think that Troy failed to fulfil its own potential; it had all the superficial trappings but ultimately lacked the most basic element for an epic -- simply, a story. It had taken Homer's classic and chopped away the emotion, tension, and urgency. Worse, it lacked creative initiative -- watching Troy felt like an amalgamation of the last five years or so of historical epic cinema:

- The James Horner score with wordless, quasi-pagan vocals is really a rip-off Hans Zimmer's haunting music for Gladiator; even the screenplay felt like Gladiator, with action-packed battles intersliced with long conversations. 

- The computer-generated armies of thousands -- flawlessly done , if I may say so though -- was really Lord of the Rings, the mistake here being that at the time of Lord of the Rings, this sort of thing was actually still novel and impressive. 

I didn't step into the theatre as a book-thumping purist; I knew from previous experience with film adaptations that stories were invariably shifted about in order to be manuoeuvred onto the silver screen. I didn't care that they condensed a ten-year war into a matter of weeks. I didn't care that Achilles began the war a man in his prime rather than a young boy not yet having reached even puberty. I didn't care that they left out the gods and their influences. I didn't care that the Oath of the Horse was now replaced instead of some fluff about Agamemnon forming a loosely united Greek nation. I didn't care that Patroclus was now Achilles's skinny cousin instead of his lover (although I'm sure some of our straight female and gay male readers -- if I'm so lucky to have such a diverse audience -- are groaning with disappointment now).

What I did like, surprisingly:

• Paris's duel with Menelaus. Bloom doesn't talk much, which is a high point. I was immensely relieved they didn't try to idolize Paris and gloss over his selfish cowardice. This scene precisely pinpoints the incredible quandary he puts his brother, and his city, into. The shot of a bloodied -- if rather prettily -- Bloom clinging on Bana's sturdy, hairy legs is precious. 

• The scene with the pyres. There are a lot pyre scenes, and by the end, so many that the funeral for the finest man and hero in all of the story -- Hector -- is pretty damn boring. The one I like is early on. It is a shot of the long, Trojan beach at night, ablaze with dozens of pyres sending the Greek dead on their way to the underworld, survived by the comrades standing in the black shadows. A "director's" shot. 

• Priam pleading with Achilles for the return of Hector's body. It's a scene of simple, human emotion, and the only hint of any character development for Achilles. He has his romantic liaison, but its greatest depths are only really ever sexual; his proclaimed love for Briseis is just that: proclaimed. Here, we get just a glimpse of the void in Achilles for his father, Peleus, and how Priam acts as a surrogate parent to Achilles, in that moment as he mourns for his own dead son. 

• Achilles's duel with Hector and his subsequent defiling of the Trojan hero's body. The screenwriter leaves out Hector's mother, Hecuba, completely, so we never see her collapsing into a dead faint at the terrible sight, but we get a sense of what kind of atrocity Achilles commits by how even his own Myrmidons avert their eyes when he returns to camp. In the original sequence -- which is dramatic on paper but not too sustainable onscreen -- Achilles goads the mourning Trojans by dragging the body in triumph around the city for three days. 

• Per usual Hollywood tradition, Serious and High-minded people speak with English accents, even Serious and High-minded people in ancient Greece and Asia Minor. Within this wonky logic, however, Sean Bean's Yorkshire accent actually works really well, fitting his status as a country king among the polished aristocracy. With my low opinion of the crew though, I doubt they planned this intentionally, since Achilles has a clear American accent for no reason. 

• Aeneas's cameo. Except it was too obvious, and what the fuck is the Sword of Troy?
  

Even so, I still didn't get a lot of things: 

• Brian Cox's turn as a cross-dressing Genghis Khan. His armour is eerily Mongolian, and what is with the dresses and pigtails? For a man who is supposed to be a brilliant if greedy general leading the Greek army of thousands, he sure also does a lot of sitting on his ass and letting talky Odysseus lead the pack. Speaking of which ... 
  
  
• One-Line Odysseus. Since he is famed for his wiles, Odysseus rightly gets all the thinky scenes, and many of the best lines as well -- my favourite of his being "War is young men dying, old men talking" -- but he is also reduced to just that. His solo scene is by the fire in the classic Hollywood "I'm using my brain" pose -- staring vacantly into space and massaging his chin. 
  
  
• Priam's piety. He may have garnered even more sympathy in his meeting with Achilles if he isn't painted as an old, religious nutcase the rest of the time. He always has a deaf ear turned to his best-loved firstborn son who has a beautiful wife and son and has proved his worth in battle, and instead takes the advice of a grimey priest who really needs to pin up his tunic and is probably too fond of little boys. 
  
  
• Paris being randomly privy to plot developments. When the Trojans are deciding what to do with the giant horse left by the Greeks, Paris suggests, "Burn it!" It's never explained how he comes to that conclusion though, or why him, since he's usually a clueless doofus most of the time. 
  
  Then he just says "Burn it!" again, as if mere repetition is the key to persuasion. Then again, he is Orlando Bloom. His powers of rhetoric were never quite up to par. See next point. 
  
  
• Paris's idea of romance. When he's trying to persuade Helen to run off from Troy with him away from her husband's approaching army, instead of promising balmy nights of myrrh and copper and lovemaking, he says, "I can hunt! I'll kill deer and rabbits! We'll live off the land!" No, really. 
  
  
• The endless skin. I never thought I'd say this, but can everyone put on some clothes? I must becoming jaded and cynical, because the nudity in Troy is genuinely annoying -- well-sculpted chests, thighs, legs, and asses galore. Every body running amok is tanned and plucked and toned and young and boring. This sort of perfection make Troy feel like a contrived tableau of beautiful people rather than the grittier, historical epic it's being made out to be.  
  
  
• Worse, the passion and chemistry between Helen and Paris, and Achilles and Briseis, is completely lacking, and their romantic scenes end up sterile, staid and non-erotic. Rose Byrne, playing Briseis, is the most passionate of the lot, but is stuck with an aloof Pitt. The couple of Hector and Andromache, with their devotion and eventual bitter separation, might have produced a scene of some more touching, delicate, tender intimacy, but this visual representation of their love, however, never materializes. Supposdly we're just to assume that they're deeply committed to each other because they say so. There's a lot of this in Troy, where things are said and left at that -- a bad sign for a visual medium.  

• The use of slow motion. Achilles is often briefly paused in his jumping and flying indecently over rival soldiers' heads, and also strikes statuesque poses while he's fighting. It's a weird mix of Matrix bullet-time and stylized kung fu choreographed by someone who's never seen proper kung fu, and it's all the more disorienting when it's on the barren plains of ancient Troy.
  
  
• Achilles getting into Hector and Paris's wardrobes. In movies, there's a classic and useful device in colour-coding disparate groups. The Trojans are blue. The Greeks are ... grungy. Maybe this is to represent the unity of the Trojans, but this seems too clever and subtle for the Troy crew.
  
  
• Taking this half-baked coding a step further, Achilles appears in the exact same vivid blue vest-and-skirt ensemble as Hector and Paris on their return ship to Troy. You'd think that a hundred-plus million dollar production could conjure up a few extra costume changes for their principle stars, especially when they're supposed to be war enemies, but evidently not. And speaking of fashion:
  
  
• Trojans inventing tie-dye. It was bad enough with the apparent rule that to be a member of the Trojan political council you must wear fake toga-sari-type dealies, but they also must be tie-dyed by the children of hippie-surfers. Then in the worst of indignities, Priam dies in what appears to be a long nightshirt. It is not only tie-dyed at the shoulders, but it also has those crinkly pleats that characterize peasant blouses (don't ask how I know). 

Maybe I'm just getting older and more cynical, but I've never laughed so much at a movie intended to be a serious drama. It's pure cheese and silliness -- tie-dye togas, twisted surfer locks, staring off intently into the distance, excessive intensity and breathiness passed off as subtle depth, bad poetry passed off as dialogue ... Troy was bad.

Worse of all, it wasn't so much as its "bad"ness that galled me, but its delusions of "good"ness. On any day, I will be more impressed by my grade school brother's crayon scribblings than a crumpled wire hanger in an upscale gallery, because there's a degree of redeeming quality in honesty. During most of its two hour and forty five minute running time, Troy didn't give me that honesty.