In a Classical World, Nerds Walk With Gods
Posted in Favorites, Features, Writing and tagged with New York TimesDon’t get Andrea Goldstein started on “Troy,” the 2004 film based on Homer’s “Iliad” that starred Brad Pitt as Achilles. A freshman at the University of Chicago, Ms. Goldstein, 18, was so incensed after seeing the movie that she wrote an anti-”Troy” polemic in her high school newspaper.
“On an absolute value scale of 10 to -10, this film gets a -7,” she wrote, granting it a generous 3 points for set design and for its casting Orlando Bloom, whom she said did a good job “playing himself,” as self-involved Paris. “It’s like a train wreck: you stare in fascinated revulsion.”
I love Latin. And apparently, I’m not alone — as I discovered when I researched this piece for the New York Times about teenagers who are obsessed with the language.
