What the Hellenic! Why is Christopher Nolan’s new Greek epic entirely devoid of Greeks?

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Set to be this year’s biggest blockbuster, The Odyssey’s cast has been selected to ‘represent the world’. Fair enough – except that one key country seems to have gone completely unrepresented … There are the American accents, gleaming body suits and a muddy Dunkirk palette. And then there is Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy, a casting choice that recently drew racist attacks from the usual moaners of the internet , including Elon Musk, who complained it wasn’t authentic. Authenticity matters. He’s just focusing entirely in the wrong place. To many Greeks, what concerns us most about the first look at Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey is the whereabouts of Billy Zane. Zane, like other beloved members of the Greek diaspora in Hollywood, has recently appeared on “Alternative Odyssey” lists on the Greek side of social media, as well as over dinner table debates from Patras to Palmers Green. (Theo James, Jennifer Aniston, Hank Azaria, and Dave Bautista are among the other no...
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Raging Grace review – scary movie suffers an absence of scares

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An undocumented Filipino cleaner is employed at a vast, remote mansion to care for a bedridden David Hayman, while hiding her daughter Grace

There are interesting ideas – and a tremendous final choir sequence – in this scary movie; it offers a critique of British colonialism, and also plays with the text of Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem The White Man’s Burden that urged the United States to assume the thankless imperial task of civilising and subjugating the people of the Philippines, and nobly overlooking how ungrateful they are going to be. There is ingenuity here, and good acting, but the film for me feels flawed by its strained melodrama, an absence of scares and by a very odd scene of almost unreal, farcical absurdity.

Joy (Max Eigenmann) is a Filipino woman in the UK with a young daughter, Grace (Jaeden Paige Boadilla); Joy is doing undocumented work as a cleaner and faces racism and exploitation and imminent expulsion. But then she is employed by the haughty Katherine (Leanne Best) to work in a remote, vast mansion as a housekeeper to Katherine’s bedridden and ailing uncle, Mr Garrett, played with relish by David Hayman. Katherine has no idea about Joy’s daughter and there are some weirdly Feydeau-ish scenes when Joy has to hide the girl and somehow distract Katherine from spotting her.

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