Nobody's Allowed to Notice Anything About Elliot Page

This week, Ellen Page in a suit, Elliot Page in a suit, walked the red carpet in London for the premiere of The Odyssey. Elliot Page was cast as a soldier in the Trojan War. Here's the thing you're supposed to do, applaud, say nothing, nod along. Well, I want to talk about when exactly that happened. When did we go from a culture that debated these questions to a culture where even noticing basic things is treated like bigotry? That is the actual story here, not one premiere, but the rule that you're supposed to pretend a thing that is clearly happening is not happening. Here's the thing, all this controversy about The Odyssey, there are a lot of people online who are like, this is going to destroy The Odyssey at the box office. It will not, it will not. No one's films are event movies. The politics are secondary to the vast majority of people who are watching movies like The Odyssey. It's tracking right now for a domestic opening weekend between $100 and $120 million. It could do $220 to $250 million worldwide, which would put in like Project Hail Mary territory. And the word of mouth, I'm sure if it's good, will be exceptional. All the theaters are already sold out. Amazing pre-sales, obviously higher ticket prices because of the IMAX of the film. It's always kind of interesting to see which controversies bleed over into real life and which just sort of stay online. I feel like this one is mostly going to stay online. And the reason that I think it's mostly going to stay online again is because it is not an overt political controversy. Basically casting controversies tend to not really have a major impact. It tends to be plotting controversies, maybe full-scale sucker punch controversies. So when Snow White, Disney's Snow White was set to premiere and the original version of Snow White was set to make it a sort of woke fantasy that was focused in on dwarves were not dwarves, they're actually tall. And it just felt like a fundamental betrayal of the storyline. There's no real indicator from the point that The Odyssey is a fundamental betrayal of the storyline. I know there are a lot of people talking about the translation that was used by Nolan in The Odyssey because there are a bunch of translations. He used sort of the newest and most feminist leaning one. But I think people are going to wait to see it and see if the themes are actually embedded there. Again, it's not as though Nolan hasn't had some politics in his films. I mean, Oppenheimer is a liberal leaning film, for sure, because Oppenheimer was pretty clearly a commie. But the entire movie is based around the idea that he was not and that he was somehow the unsung hero and all of this. With that said, Nolan does have a gift for being able to strip politics out of his films almost entirely. And I have a feeling that this movie is going to perform really, really well. I just don't think this bleeds over into regular life in the way that so many people in the online world seem to think that it will. So here's my deal. I will get hot and bothered about The Odyssey once I see it. But playing this game where I get extremely, extremely upset about The Odyssey before I actually see it, I'm just, eh, meh. Do I think that they could have cast somebody who is not Lupita Nyong'o as Helen? Sure. Am I wildly bothered by this? Not particularly, given the fact that pretty much no one in the movie is Greek. Matt Damon is playing Odysseus. Matt Damon is of, what, Scotch-Irish extraction or something? He certainly is not Greek. In fact, none of the people in the movie, so far as I'm aware, are Greek. So there is that. Now, is it more of a leap to Lupita Nyong'o for Helen? Sure. Is it something that, like, breaks me? Not particularly much. Ellen Page is a bit of a different story. This is ridiculous. Casting Ellen Page as a man in The Odyssey is incredibly stupid. It is just a dumb, kind of woke acknowledgement. I'm not going to judge the entire movie by that because, again, it's an entire movie, and we'll see how it plays out. But it is indeed stupid casting. It's kind of hilarious, too, and sad, honestly, because Ellen Page is obviously a person with great mental disturbance. That is the only thing that can explain why you'd mutilate your body and call yourself Elliot. And Ellen Page has been trying to, or Elliot Page, has been trying to bring herself off as sort of a virile and masculine man. And that's why, the other day, she released footage of herself boxing. And Elliot Page is about 5'3 and weighs maybe 105 pounds, which means that my 12-year-old daughter could probably destroy her in a fight. But the picture released is supposed to, what did she find? The shortest person she knew to stand. And again, I'm not Captain Tall over here. I'm 5'9. But I would dwarf Elliot Page because I'm a normal-sized human male. In any case, this was made perfectly obvious when Elliot Page was spotted coming out of a hotel. Apparently, next to George Murison, her security guy is probably, I don't know, 6'3, 6'4, and looks like he is 8'9. And Elliot Page walks out looking very much like a woman wearing a man suit, and is a tiny, tiny human. And it looks as though the security guard is going to prop her on his knee and use her as a ventriloquist dummy. I mean, that is a tiny human being. And again, as a female, that's called normal. But the idea that this is like a virile masculine man, we're all supposed to pretend that Elliot Page is a man is really, really silly. Bad casting decision there by Nolan. I don't understand it. It makes no sense to me. We'll have to see how it plays out in the film. But it's definitely bizarre because, again, every so often, reality sort of peeks through. So if you just saw the picture of Elliot Page next to the short man in the boxing ring, you would say, oh, like a normal looking male. And it turns out that actually Elijah Wood in Lord of the Rings is not 3'6". It turns out that Elijah Wood is like a normal sized human, maybe slightly short. Well, perspective can play a lot of tricks on you. And Elliot Page is actually a very, very small human, a very, very small woman. And that is not the only controversy surrounding the release of The Odyssey. Lupita Nyong'o was asked what question she would ask Homer. And she then dropped one of the most ignorant and stupid things I've heard about literature in quite a while, which is saying a lot. I'd be like, so, Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women, considering how little you spent with them? Oh, OK. And then do you lean forward and look at him like that? Remember? Oh, good Lord. Do you have you not tell me you haven't read The Odyssey without without telling me that you haven't read The Odyssey. At this point, I would refer to a tweet by an account called Wandering Asian Girl, who points out, did we read the same epic? Helen starts a war. Athena outplays gods and heroes alike. Penelope humiliates an entire household of suitors for years. Cersei turns grown men into pigs. Calypso keeps the hero stranded for seven years. Cassandra knows the future while everyone else plays the fool. Nausicaa rescues the hero when he washes ashore naked and helpless. And Varamaki delivers one of the greatest anti-war speeches ever written. Hecuba becomes the face of war's devastation. Aphrodite, Hera and Thetis literally influence the fate of nations and the decisions of Zeus himself. But sure, maybe Homer just forgot about women. And that is some of the stupidest nonsense. You know what that is? You know what that is? That is she definitely did not read the book. And now she's going to go to sort of the stock woke response to any question. Because if you ask somebody who's not read the book about a book that was written hundreds or thousands of years ago, the first thing you're going to do, just the safe answer always is, it's kind of sexist, wasn't it? Because it turns out that, you know, 2,000 years ago, 3,000 years ago, a lot of ancient literature does not focus on the ladies. But she picked the one piece of ancient literature that actually focuses quite. So, oops, oops. Insert LeBron meme reading the first page of every book. Guys, don't do this. Don't do this. Don't let the wokeness overcome your ability to read basically. Like, didn't you go to high school? We all read Homer in high school, didn't we? I feel like we did. OK, as far as the movie itself, I will I will wait. I will I will hold. I don't like reviewing movies I haven't seen, but sometimes they surprise me. So I will hold my review. But I will say again, bad piece of casting in Elliott Page as a dude because that's a bad piece of casting in real life. And also, I don't need lectures from Lupita Nyong'o about feminism in Homer or some such nonsense. What an amazing video you just watched. Wasn't that amazing? Well, you know, if you think so, head on over to Dailyware dot com slash subscribe to watch the full show ad free or check out this crazy story here.