Category: Classics at the Kan-Kan

Looking for the film adaptation of The Odyssey that stays truest to the spirit of Homer’s original epic poem? No, it’s not that Kirk Douglas monstrosity Ulysses, where the only thing more cheesy and frightening than the Cyclops is Douglas’ Odysseus hitting on a way-too-young-looking Princess Nausicaa. No, it’s not the French film The Odyssey, …

Making the ancient myth of Hercules into a kid’s movie was always going to take some adjusting. Case in point: in making their 1997 movie Hercules, Disney revamped the goddess Hera from “insulted wife desperately trying to kill husband’s bastard child” into “loving mom who mostly just stands there smiling” (presumably she’s also not her …

Before there was Troy, or 300, or somehow two Hercules movies in 2014, or whatever that Jon Snow Pompeii movie was, there was Gladiator. In an age where 1960s movies about Ancient Greece and Rome had become synonymous with incoherent scripts and short-short tunics, Ridley Scott and Russel Crowe delivered a sophisticated film that used Imperial …

Ever wonder what it would look like if time-traveling Ancient Greeks made a movie? Forget Brad Pitt in Troy or Dwayne Johnson in Hercules: nothing captures the machismo, misogyny, and sculpted men found in Homer and Herodotus quite like 300. Kings who shout about freedom while treating everyone around them like dirt? Check. Illogically breaking …