What did we talk about in this livestream?
A three-story-tall Trojan horse, three little boats sailing home, and a “village tyrant” whose daughter comes knocking for a husband—why is Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey being called the worst film of his career? And the problem with Kung Fu Girl Soccer isn’t even that the jokes fall flat. It’s that the movie feels like a draft that wasn’t finished, a script that wasn’t even fully written, yet somehow got pushed into theaters.
This livestream starts with my thoughts on these two new films and stretches all the way to blind spots in color-blind casting standards, the real reasons Nolan and Warner Bros. split up, the blind spots in Rotten Tomatoes’ review system, and why geniuses often lose their edge once they hold all the conversational power. The second half answers questions from the audience: why read books in an age of information overload and AI, how to watch America’s released UAP footage, what to do if you’re reported to your workplace by “internet vigilantes,” and representative comments from that period’s The Political Cesspool (written by Ben Shapiro)—why the right isn’t very good at storytelling, why today’s left looks more like the conservative side, and whether the Chinese-speaking world has a conservatism of its own.
The livestream starts with the line dropping and having to reconnect, so the pacing jumps a little. The first few minutes are a fresh start—please forgive me.
Highlights
- The most absurd thing about The Odyssey isn’t the DEI or the casting, but the “scale”: Nolan is so determined to restore the ancient Mediterranean setting that he films Troy as a slightly oversized village. The wooden horse is only three stories tall, Odysseus sails home in three little boats, and the epic feeling all leaks out.
- My verdict on Kung Fu Girl Soccer: it’s not ugly so much as very likely to have been released before even the raw footage was finished—extreme promotion, the official trailer released only after the premiere, and a wildly off-kilter ending all point to the same conclusion.
- “Have we gotten old?” The host gives a firm no, then looks at why this film had to be delivered at this particular moment through the lens of betting agreements and financial pressure.
- Jay Chou, Christopher Nolan, and Stephen Chow’s “three consecutive collapses” reveal a shared pattern: once a genius has seized all the conversational power and no longer has a “big brother” beside him, he often takes one step beyond the limits of his own abilities.
- The psychological concept of desirable difficulties: reading is a low-efficiency way to absorb information precisely because it becomes a high-efficiency way to retain information.
Jump to a section
- 00:00 Opening: reconnecting after the livestream cuts out
- 03:14 First impressions after watching two films in one week
- 05:16 The Odyssey: why the DEI and casting controversy misses the point
- 09:39 Unconventional Helen, and an eloquent Helen
- 12:48 The real absurdity is the scale: a three-story wooden horse and three little boats
- 17:05 When an epic turns into a village feud: the village chief’s overseas dream
- 17:44 Kung Fu Girl Soccer: I suspect even the script wasn’t finished
- 19:42 Stephen Chow is a comedy master, but this version feels half-finished
- 22:18 Extreme promotion and five-cent special effects
- 24:58 Have we gotten old? Even watching it 20 years ago, it was still a lousy film
- 27:46 Betting, financial pressure, and “it hurts to watch”
- 34:15 The three-loss curse and the fate of geniuses: Stephen Chow, Christopher Nolan, and Stephen Chow
- 39:17 Color-blind casting: how should an epic of Greek history cast its roles?
- 43:06 Why read books in the age of information overload: desirable difficulties
- 48:18 Nolan and Warner Bros. split up, and the unfilmed Troy
- 50:26 How should we watch America’s released UAP footage?
- 53:38 What to do if you’re reported to your workplace by “internet vigilantes”
- 57:46 How much water is in Rotten Tomatoes’ 98%?
- 1:00:58 Toy Story and the left-wing values of liberal California
- 1:06:04 Ideology first: too lazy to build characters
- 1:07:37 The right also needs to learn storytelling: today’s left is the conservative side
- 1:10:46 AI and public filmmaking: will liberal California be swept away by the times?
- 1:14:10 Does the Chinese-speaking world have a conservatism of its own?
- 1:16:19 Horror is the most egalitarian, most honest genre
- 1:18:36 Anime, light novels, and my psychology background
- 1:21:50 Is the collapse of civilization inevitable?
- 1:26:03 Closing: The World Cup and the next livestream
Leave a Reply