Madeline Fry Schultz

Christopher Nolan has made an epic blockbuster film from a foundational Western story. Let's enjoy it.

Some on the Right have spent the last several months complaining about Christopher Nolan’s “Odyssey.” The controversy has largely centered on two things: transgender-identifying Elliot Page playing a male soldier (but not Achilles, as rumors suggested) and the race-blind casting, particularly the choice to feature black actress Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy.X owner Elon Musk tweeted in May that “Chris Nolan desecrated the Odyssey.” Earlier this month, the Twitter account Wall Street Mav, which has over a million followers, predicted “financial disaster.”Just a day after its release, “The Odyssey” is already proving haters wrong. Forget the critics’ score (though that is hovering at 95%). On Rotten Tomatoes, audiences gave the film an even higher 97% score. It earned $17.6 million on Thursday, the day before its official release, and the numbers keep growing. Online outrage doesn’t always translate to the real world. And in this instance, perhaps the legendary “Interstellar” and “The Dark Knight” director knew a thing or two about what audiences were craving. “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before,” Nolan said in an interview last year. “And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with — Ray Harryhausen movies and other things — I’d never seen that done with the sort of weight and credibility that an A-budget and a big Hollywood, IMAX production could do.”In a year dominated by sequels — the year’s top films so far have been “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” and “Toy Story 5” — Nolan’s “Odyssey” revives a classic story for a new generation who, if we’re being honest, probably were never going to thumb through a copy of “The Odyssey” (even the Emily Wilson translation favored by liberals). It’s become popular internet slang to respond to a lack of pop culture knowledge by saying “we’re losing the ancient texts.” But when it comes to stories such as “The Odyssey,” we actually are.This means Nolan’s “Odyssey” comes at the perfect time. The archetypes, the themes, and the drama of Homer — it’s all there. Nolan raised some eyebrows by marketing the film with the tagline “defy the gods.” If you know anything about “The Odyssey,” you should know that you cannot, in fact, defy the gods. But in the actual film, Nolan makes that clear. “The Odyssey” is a big, glorious summer blockbuster based on a pillar of the Western canon. It explores mercy, hospitality, vengeance, family bonds, honor, and, of course, homecoming. The score is bracing, the 60-foot puppet cyclops is nightmare-fuel, and Robert Pattinson is particularly chilling as the suitor Antinous. That said, Page’s role as Sinon (a character from Virgil’s “Aeneid”), does distract from the narrative. Nolan worked with Page on “Inception” in 2010 (a decade before she began identifying as a man), and he likes to recast actors he’s worked with before. But with just a few minutes of screen time, Sinon’s brief appearances can’t distract from the greatness of the rest of the film. The race-blind casting, on the other hand, allows for some stellar performances, mostly notably Zendaya as Athena and Himesh Patel as Odysseus’ second in command, Eurylochus. With the “Odyssey” controversy, conservatives are getting hung up on the details (some more troublesome than others) when the headline is that one of Hollywood’s best directors just made a three-hour long film about a father returning home to his family, facing terrifying monsters and deftly wielding his bow and arrows on the way. It’s beautifully shot, it has mass appeal, and there’s little in the film itself to subvert Homer’s epic tale, which is now reaching a new audience. Ignore the performative “Odyssey” hate, and go enjoy the film.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

It's hard to be honest with your fans when you're lying to yourself. Celebrities tend to balk at the idea that they might be seen as role models.

Audiences will reward good storytelling, and “Brand New Day” hits Spiderman's sweet spot.

Not since “Avengers: Endgame” have theatergoers been this happy. “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” just had the biggest opening weekend in box office history, beating out the Avengers finale with $360 million in sales. Audiences love it, and it’s proving that the age of superhero movies isn’t over; just the stupid ones. It’s not hard to see why the movie has been so successful. Despite becoming the third Spider-Man actor in the span of just 15 years, Tom Holland stands on his own, exuding a boyish charm and an innocence without naivete that his predecessors never mastered (all due respect to Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield).“Spider-Man” also manages a few cameos (Black Widow, Hulk) that make the story more dynamic rather than feeling like Marvel product placement. And if you haven’t yet seen Holland’s previous appearances in “Captain America: Civil War,” “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” “Spider-Man: Far From Home,” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” you can watch this one anyway without getting lost.Audiences will reward good storytelling, and “Brand New Day” hits Spider-Man’s sweet spot: sometimes light and funny, sometimes exploring deeper themes of isolation and belonging.After the death of his aunt, Peter Parker has spent four years crime-fighting alone. In “No Way Home,” his secret identity was revealed, so in order to protect the ones he loves — his girlfriend, MJ, and his best friend, Ned — he asked for Doctor Strange to wipe the entire world’s memory of Peter. Now his only personal connection is to an NYPD detective who chastises him for not even knowing the names of her children. These days, he’s all business. But when government facilities start being attacked by a telepath who can jump into people’s minds to control them, danger finds Peter’s friends anyway, and he realizes that his secluded life is hurting more than just himself. Every good superhero film needs a compelling villain, and Jean Grey (played by Sadie Sink) delivers. She’s no Green Goblin or Doc Ock, but her powers are terrifying, and her anxieties existential. Producer Amy Pascal suggested that Jean Grey’s character represents much of Gen Z. “We picked Jean [Grey] because [director] Destin [Daniel Cretton] came in and said, ‘If you guys want to do a movie that is about the way people feel isolated, even more today than ever, because of our technology and everything else — and not just young people, but everybody, but it has afflicted young people so much — if we can do a movie that is about how reaching out and making a connection to someone is the most important thing that you can do, then I understand how to do this movie,’” she told Deadline.Peter’s own struggle with hermit-hood ends when MJ (Zendaya) reprimands him for wiping her memory and staying aloof, not giving her the choice to decide for herself whether she wants to be a part of his life. Peter may have good intentions for his solitude, and even though he can boast that he’s fighting crime bosses and mechanical scorpions, he finds that the results of his isolation are the same as they would be for any of us: He loses sight of who he is and what he can offer the world. To quote the Good Book, “It is not good for the man to be alone.”Near the end of the film, Peter delivers a key line that came from Holland’s ad-libbing. Speaking of a day spent shooting scenes at Aunt May’s grave, director Destin Daniel Cretton said Holland “came up to me and said, ‘I’m just going to try some dialogue.’ I said, ‘Great.’ So we mic’d him up, and he squatted down, gave the flowers to Aunt May, and said the lines that ended up in the movie.”“At the time, I didn’t think much of it,” Cretton continued. “I was just letting him improvise. But as soon as he said, ‘You’d be happy to know that I’ve decided I’m not going to do this alone anymore,’ that statement became the north star of the entire movie. Now it feels obvious that’s where the movie was always headed, but at the time we shot it, we didn’t really have that simple core idea yet. We worked backward from that point and realized, ‘That’s where we’re going.’ To me, that’s the entire movie right there.”Tom Holland’s Spider-Man has the peculiar winsomeness needed to experience great personal tragedy and still believe in the goodness and sanctity of life. No more jaded superheroes, please. Our heroes should inspire us, and that’s exactly what this Spider-Man does.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

The new rom-com with a raunchy premise is shockingly trad. “One Night Only” has an audacious premise, one designed to get people talking long before it arrived in theaters.

“One Night Only” has an audacious premise, one designed to get people talking long before it arrived in theaters. In an alternative universe, Congress has passed a law dictating that singles may not have sex until marriage — except for, in a political compromise, one night a year.A lot of things about this conceit don’t make sense, of course. Why is this movie a rom-com and not a dystopia? Why has every unmarried member of Congress not already been tossed in the clink? And why does this one night of legal free shagging not devolve into utter mayhem, orgies, and a windfall for STD clinics? But none of these questions, as you’ll see, really matter.It seems an odd time for such a film, too. Gen Z is relatively sexless, so such a law isn’t even necessary for most kids these days. And yet we’re nowhere near a law like this being realistic, despite the dreams of the Trad Cons. But the film’s ridiculous premise has little to do with the actual plot; take it away, and you’re left with the misadventures and serendipitous story of young people looking for love.This isn’t a sex comedy à la “Animal House” or “Easy A.” It’s a true rom-com, with all the trappings of the genre: a woman who’s a hopeless romantic, a heartbroken and hunky man, and the plot device that brings them together. Director Will Gluck previously helmed the much more sex-forward films “Anyone But You” (starring Sydney Sweeney and rated R for nudity) and “Easy A” (about a girl who becomes a modern-day Hester Prynne without actually having sex). This time, he said he listened to viewers who didn’t want random nudity.“As we started to show it to audiences, we felt it takes you out of the movie,” he told Variety. “You’re engaged in the characters and what’s going on, and then you pan over and there’s two naked people having sex, and you watch the audience … it’s a physical thing. They turn to who they’re with and … the benefits do not nearly outweigh the negatives of it.”“One Night Only” is still rated R, but what brief sex scenes exist are less “Bridgerton” and more of the 2000s rom-com variety. And if the movie has a message, it is, ironically, that random hookups end pretty badly. At the beginning of the most libidinous night of the year, singer and hopeless romantic Allie (Monica Barbaro) meets up with her friend at a surprisingly un-packed bar so they can both find a “prince,” someone to hook up with for the night who won’t ghost them the next day. They both know the odds are slim. “The chance of having great sex on a one night-stand is like 2.8%,” Allie sighs. When her friend manages to find a literal prince in line for the bathroom, Allie is on her own, roaming the streets of New York in search of love “on the least romantic night of the year.”Meanwhile, pizza shop owner Owen (Callum Turner) is on a date with his girlfriend who breaks the news that she’d like to sleep with someone else tonight just to try it out. She encourages him to do the same, and he walks home, dejected, with an unrevealed engagement ring in his hand. Allie and Owen’s meet-cute is thrown off when he starts puking up the sushi he didn’t want to waste on his expensive date, yet they keep running into each other throughout the night as they look for other available singles. Of course, the plot keeps them from closing the deal with anyone else. In practice, this means that following your, well, not your heart, leads to comical misfortune. For the main characters, being unscrupulously horny leads to almost hooking up with an art thief, almost hooking up with a dopey singer who plays guitar in his underwear, and almost hooking up in your mother’s apartment (where your mother still resides).Marriage, of course, is still on the table. When Owen’s mother suggests that he find some of his buddies to pick up women with, he responds that, due to the mandate, they’re already all married. (We never meet any of these friends as they are either enjoying the night or enjoying that they don’t have to take advantage of it.)And Allie and Owen get trash-talked by the youth who are surprised to find these 30-somethings out and about. When two end up at a bodega fighting over the one available condom, a younger couple behind them balks, “Aren’t you kind of a little old?”Even singer and popular “Repeal” campaigner Ezra has mixed views of the mandate, saying that it makes the night’s choice more significant. “Just maybe the fascists were right about this one,” he muses. Spoiler: At the end of the night, Allie and Owen don’t even have sex. After they finally reconnect with just a few minutes to spare before the mandate is back in effect, they decide to wait and give their relationship a real shot.The concept of a no-sex mandate raises a lot of questions that are self-consciously answered by the film. It does explain some of the logistics; everyone has a tracker in their arm that checks hormone levels and flags the authorities if two nearby singles’ oxytocin levels spike at the same time. A politician on the news claims that teen pregnancies are “near zero,” STIs are down, and, comically, now “it’s a badge of honor to be an incel.”But the film isn’t really about the mandate, and as such, doesn’t need to spend more time explaining it. Our attempts to understand this sci-fi world are as fruitless as the characters’ efforts to oppose it. “Repeal” is to the film’s characters what “resist” has become to today’s coastal dwellers, a futile but ubiquitous expression of one’s de rigueur politics. So, obviously, critics are complaining about the film’s lack of sex and anti-fascist campaigning. “‘One Night Only’ isn’t bawdy or trenchant enough for its concept,” complained the Associated Press. “‘One Night Only’ makes fun of purity culture, yet perpetuates it,” declares a Mashable headline, followed by the improbable subhead, “The rom-com imagines a fascistic U.S. that’s not too different from the one we’re living in.”“One Night Only Might Actually Be the Darkest Movie of the Year,” declared a Vulture review that called the film “thrillingly cynical.”Never mind that the Left would have preferred an NC-17 commentary on #resisting Trump’s America. “One Night Only” isn’t interested in politics or dystopia or any “1984”-esque anti-sex themes it conjures. At its core, it’s about looking for romance when everyone around you is looking for sex, and it suggests that for the two to go together, the latter is going to have to wait.***This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

There's a word for what it's like to become a mother, matrescence, which describes the way a woman's brain and body reorient themselves around providing comfort, sustenance, and safety for a newborn child. There is no word for what happens to a mother when that child is gone.

Fitting for a film that rails against corporate greed and disdain for the little guy, “Coyote vs. Acme” inspired a cult following.

There's a lot of money to be made by defecting to the other side. Hopping across the aisle comes with fame, fawning New York Times profiles (that