Right, I've got some time to read your comments here properly now...
On Lord of the Rings, of course you're totally right that the timing would mean the Troy team couldn't actually have seen much (if any) of the last two films. It's easy to forget how long these things take to make as a member of the audience.
Excellent point about the presence of women when there is male nudity going on. There are whole reams of scholarship in the field of film and gender studies about the significance of the male and female 'gazes' in the cinema: I'm not fully familiar with them all, but I think the main theory boils down to female characters generally being portrayed as objects of the male gaze (represented both within the film and in the audience), whereas this rarely happens with male characters (the treatment of Spartacus in the film of the same name while he's in the gladiatorial school is an unusual example of male characters being subjects of both the male and the female gaze). I'd need to see Troy again to be sure, but I'm thinking now that if women are present during most of the scenes of male nudity, then this may be helping to contribute to these scenes as explicit displays of male flesh, and of men as sexual objects, by also making the men subject to the gaze of the women. If that's what's going on, credit is deserved for inverting the normal Hollywood practice of concentrating on subjecting women to the male gaze.
Menelaus, Agamemnon and Paris: nice takes on the survival or not of all three. Definitely food for thought there.
Odysseus: yes, he could have been more mendacious, but then again he, like Achilles, seems to have been singled out by the production team as one of the few Greeks to whom the audience's sympathies are directed. I suspect that they toned down his propensity to lie for this reason. I presume the reason they wanted to make him a sympathetic character is that most people have heard of the Odyssey, and / or seen film and TV adaptations of it, so he is another good way of drawing people into the film.
Priam's Treasure: sorry, sloppy expression there (and probably half-baked thinking too). I should have said that they mysteriously disappeared from Turkey soon after their initial display, without, I believe, any permission being sought from or money being handed over to the Turkish authorities for the privilege.
no subject
On Lord of the Rings, of course you're totally right that the timing would mean the Troy team couldn't actually have seen much (if any) of the last two films. It's easy to forget how long these things take to make as a member of the audience.
Excellent point about the presence of women when there is male nudity going on. There are whole reams of scholarship in the field of film and gender studies about the significance of the male and female 'gazes' in the cinema: I'm not fully familiar with them all, but I think the main theory boils down to female characters generally being portrayed as objects of the male gaze (represented both within the film and in the audience), whereas this rarely happens with male characters (the treatment of Spartacus in the film of the same name while he's in the gladiatorial school is an unusual example of male characters being subjects of both the male and the female gaze). I'd need to see Troy again to be sure, but I'm thinking now that if women are present during most of the scenes of male nudity, then this may be helping to contribute to these scenes as explicit displays of male flesh, and of men as sexual objects, by also making the men subject to the gaze of the women. If that's what's going on, credit is deserved for inverting the normal Hollywood practice of concentrating on subjecting women to the male gaze.
Menelaus, Agamemnon and Paris: nice takes on the survival or not of all three. Definitely food for thought there.
Odysseus: yes, he could have been more mendacious, but then again he, like Achilles, seems to have been singled out by the production team as one of the few Greeks to whom the audience's sympathies are directed. I suspect that they toned down his propensity to lie for this reason. I presume the reason they wanted to make him a sympathetic character is that most people have heard of the Odyssey, and / or seen film and TV adaptations of it, so he is another good way of drawing people into the film.
Priam's Treasure: sorry, sloppy expression there (and probably half-baked thinking too). I should have said that they mysteriously disappeared from Turkey soon after their initial display, without, I believe, any permission being sought from or money being handed over to the Turkish authorities for the privilege.