July 16, 2026

OH, THAT AGAIN:  Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”. And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.

X-CANCEL.

 

Posted at 2:00 am by Sarah Hoyt

THAT:  Calm Yourself on the Drones for a Bit, if You Don’t Mind… …be interested, but keep your pants on…

Posted at 1:27 am by Sarah Hoyt

SOCIETY SHOULDN’T DEMAND YOU SUPPRESS YOUR RATIONALITY TO FIT IN:  The Courage To Be.

Posted at 12:31 am by Sarah Hoyt

July 15, 2026

FIRST REVIEWS ARE IN FOR CHRISTOPHER NOLAN’S ODYSSEY:

Kyle Smith: ‘The Odyssey’ Review: Christopher Nolan’s Aptly Epic Adventure.

Certainly “The Odyssey” is among the year’s best pictures. Yet I can’t call it one of Mr. Nolan’s best pictures; nor is it as satisfying as Peter Jackson’s“Lord of the Rings” trilogy, which constitutes perhaps its nearest contemporary equivalent. Its characters are not as sharply drawn, nor the confrontation with evil as urgent, as in Mr. Nolan’s Batman films; the emotions are not as deep as in “Interstellar” or “Dunkirk.” Its many action scenes, spirited as they are, sometimes feel rushed and squeezed in to keep the running time (just) under three hours; oddly enough, “The Odyssey” isn’t as propulsively exciting or as suspenseful as “Oppenheimer.”

Speaking of Oppenheimer, Sonny Bunch describes The Odyssey as “The concluding epic in Christopher Nolan’s Death Drive trilogy:”

In a way, both films are about men who ended the world; as I wrote in my reviewof Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb sees the world as both intact and consumed by nuclear fire simultaneously, existing in a sort of Schrödinger’s Annihilation. Humanity, in his view, is incapable of being trusted with the gift of nuclear fire. Odysseus, too, sees a civilization coming to ruin thanks to his works, sees chaos spreading to all corners of the known world as cherished norms are torn asunder. He sees the fall of one empire and the rise of another, knowing “our mistakes will once again be forgotten.” And Tenet is centered on the efforts of a dying Russian to reverse the flow of entropy at the behest of future dwellers convinced that the past’s destruction is the only way to ensure their own existence.

These films, like the bullets in Tenet, flow backward through time, from the near future to the recent past to ancient history. Yet we speed headlong toward our own destruction ever faster, the Freudian iteration of thanatos compelling us.

Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post writes: Christopher Nolan’s magical epic is mammoth and fantastic.

[Nolan’s] stunning and captivating “Odyssey” is the director in his David Lean era, eschewing the cerebral topics that tickled him in “Tenet,” “Inception” and, to an extent, “Oppenheimer,” and building his own “Lawrence of Arabia” with a transportive, sprawling and emotional adventure with visuals that will reduce even the most jaded movie buff into a giddy child.

Curiously though, Stephanie Zacharek, now with the left-leaning Time, but previously with the very leftist Village Voice isn’t impressed by Nolan’s film: The Odyssey Is Just Another Reason for Despair.

It doesn’t help that Nolan’s Odyssey—even when viewed, as he hopes audiences will see it, in IMAX—looks muddy and underwhelming. The Return was shot in Greece and Italy, and its landscapes are part of its vitality; cinematographer Marius Panduru made Ithaca look like a place worth coming home to. In Nolan’s Odyssey, shot by his frequent collaborator Hoyte van Hoytema in a host of locations including Italy, Greece, Morocco, Iceland, and Scotland, almost every landscape—a churning sea here, a set of cliffs there—just looks like business as usual, only bigger. There’s soil, but you don’t feel its texture; there’s sun, but you don’t feel its warmth. When Damon’s Odysseus is greeted by his ancient, dying dog Argos, who has waited patiently and poignantly for his return, Argos’s little tail wriggles mechanically as he takes his last breath. Odysseus expresses a flash of grief, and then it’s on to the next beat. There isn’t a minute to lose here, even in a runtime of nearly three hours.

There are other problems, among them Nolan’s failure to make use of Nyong’o’s gifts. The issue isn’t that her casting plays into any of the advance criticism the movie has received; it’s that it barely feels like a choice at all, representing not a burst of imagination but a failure of nerve. Nyong’o plays two roles here, that of Helen and of Clytemnestra, Helen’s twin sister. But there’s so much decorously, Homerically faithful story swirling around these two figures, glimpsed mostly in passing—and so many men around them, doing seriously manly stuff—that neither role registers. Through no fault of Nyong’o’s—who’s both accomplished and, though it should go without saying, uncommonly beautiful—these are almost blink-and-you-miss-them portrayals, the kind of thing a director can magnanimously hand out like candy. We’re supposed to applaud Nolan for bravery in casting, but the result comes off as tokenism, surely the opposite of what he intended.

Nolan’s stunt-casting has alienated both the hyper-online right and the left. A uniter, not a divider!

UPDATE: 20 minutes into the future:

MORE: Alan Ng of Film Threat was not impressed:

The sound was the toughest element for me to get over. Right off the bat, from Travis Scott’s poetic performance to simple dialogue, the sound mixing was off. I couldn’t understand what anyone was saying. I experienced this exact sensation with Hamnet, but eventually it got better. So frustrating that I checked out of the movie because… what the hell is going on… and it was hard to get back in.

Yes, going in, I had my reservations about The Odyssey, but my colleagues kept telling me this is Christopher Nolan. He’ll come through. That’s how I felt about Oppenheimer, but with The Odyssey, it all just felt like amateur hour. I couldn’t take anything about this film seriously. But at least we’ll get to see the end-credits song performed at the Academy Awards…that will be a hoot.

In the end, I just wanted The Odyssey to feel like an epic, grand adventure, and, like the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I wanted this story to say something about humanity. Anything that felt inspiring or profound. Instead, we just got this grand adventure all for the sake of being a grand adventure. Sure… many will find that enough for a fun summer movie, but what we really want is a great movie. One we’ll remember for decades to come. We’ll be lucky to remember this film a month from now.

This wouldn’t be the first Christopher Nolan movie knocked for its sound:

Posted at 9:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.

Posted at 9:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

BOMB CANADA, THE CASE FOR WAR: Welcome to America, Eh? Canadian Woman Allegedly Slaps Minor in Trump Gear, Ends Up in ICE Custody.

In this episode of “Play Stupid Leftist Games, Win Stupid Leftist Prizes: Canadian Edition”…

In the larger sense of today’s serious goings-on, this story is irrelevant. In the sense of the mind-crippling affliction of Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s not only a bit humorous; it’s also indicative of the unwarranted hubris of our leftist neighbors to the north.

A Canadian citizen seemingly thought the Jersey Shore Boardwalk was the perfect place to pick a fight with two minors who had the audacity to be dressed in “patriotic-colored” sweatpants featuring “Trump” and “ICE.” In America on Independence Day weekend, no less. Yeah, bad idea.

Yep, that was all it took to launch the poor TDS-riddled woman into an apoplectic fit to the point of physical assault. Police said she struck one of the girls in the face and body.

According to authorities, 33-year-old Kaitlyn E. Tracey didn’t just confront a group of girls on the Point Pleasant Beach boardwalk — she filmed herself doing it. You know, because if you’re going to make a stupid decision, you might as well document it for the evidence file.

Septum piercing rule remains undefeated:

Related:

(Classical reference in headline.)

UPDATE: I hope we’re not too messianic, or a trifle too satanic, but we love to play the blue states:

Posted at 9:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

APPEASE AND BE PUNISHED:

[Ro] Khanna came face to face with the lunacy of the mob that he’s been trying to please with tweets, speeches, stunts. And he let Scahill down by refusing to speak the monstrous words that would have admitted him into the esteemed ranks of the radicals. Khanna instead called October 7 a terrorist attack, denied Hamas’s right to kill Israelis, and offered some mush about nonviolent resistance.

Here’s the thing: If you genuinely believe the terrorists’ narrative about apartheid, genocidal Zionists, and the righteous Palestinian resistance, then Scahill has the more “logical” argument. If you buy into an insane premise, you will necessarily arrive at an equally insane conclusion.

Khanna, like Scott Wiener before him, wants credit for agreeing to the radicals’ premise without having to pay the price of following through. He’s now learning that the radicals, like the terrorists they support, will not be pacified by anything short of lawless violence. There’s some hope in this. Because as the radicals reject Democrat after simpering Democrat, the liberal establishment will be forced to rethink its calculated acceptance of leftist anti-Semitism. Hey, Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emanuel, hope you’re watching.

But how did the 21st century left arrive at this stance?

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

AS ALWAYS, LIFE IMITATES SEINFELD: Florida woman receives unfortunate new license plate.

An elderly woman in Pompano Beach, Florida, is asking for a new license plate after receiving one with a combination of letters and numbers she finds inappropriate.

The license plate reads “SQZ A55,” but those numbers can be interpreted as letters, creating a message that has become a topic of conversation in her retirement community, especially among the men.

“I looked at it, and I said, ‘I don’t think so,'” Nancy Dello Stritto said.

She shared the plate with one of her 89-year-old neighbors, which added to the buzz around the community.

Cosmo Kramer could not be reached for comment:

Posted at 6:45 pm by Ed Driscoll