Magnetar Studios Podcast

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Magnetar Studios is a podcast about movies, stories, and the ideas they pull into orbit. Each episode starts with a work and follows the thinking wherever it leads, through film, mythology, politics, culture, personal experience, and the standards we use to judge art in the first place. Raw, associative, analytical, and often recorded as the ideas are forming. No polished critical authority. No pretending the conclusion came first. Just an attempt to take the work seriously, follow the connections, and see where they lead.

Episodes

  1. Aug 21

    The Odyssey: The Forbidden Meat We All Ate

    Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey sent me back to Homer, and unfortunately, the more I read, the more problems I started having with the movie. This episode started as a review and turned into a two-hour investigation into why the film feels so fundamentally different from the poem it’s adapting. I get into the gods, the violence, masculinity, death, humor, color, IMAX, practical effects, the politics of the film, and a ridiculous number of details that started bothering me once I put Nolan and Homer next to each other. My problem isn’t that Nolan changed things, obviously an adaptation has to change things. My problem is that the changes keep going in the same direction. Homer’s world is supernatural, violent, bizarre, contradictory and completely governed by the gods. Nolan keeps grounding it, rationalizing it and turning it into something much more recognizably his own. I also get into Emily Wilson, the discourse around the movie, the completely exhausting racial panic over the casting, and why I think a lot of the conversation around this film is focused on the least interesting things about it. I wanted to love this movie. I still think there’s an enormous amount to admire about it. But at some point I stopped feeling like I was watching Christopher Nolan adapt Homer. I felt like I was watching Christopher Nolan adopt Homer to adapt Christopher Nolan. The title of this episode was derived from when Odysseus’s men eat the cattle of Helios, the god of the sun, thereby sealing their demise. In the myth, the roasted meat bellows, starts to bleed, and the hides crawl. I’m using it as a reference to how everyone seems to have an angle about this film after consuming it while never fully grasping the scope of the original poem nor its distance from what Christopher Nolan has made. Film Rating: 6/10 ​Direction / Technical Craft: 10/10​Production Design / Costumes: 8.5/10​Performances: 9/10​Action / Music / Audiovisual Execution: 9/10​Pacing / Narrative Construction: 8/10​Political / Thematic / Philosophical Construction: 5/10​Adaptation / Relationship to Source: 4/10​Personal Attachment / Emotional Effect: 6/10​Awe / Spectacle Factor: 7.5/10 The cover art is an original photograph. When I opened my copy of Robert Fagles’s translation to take it, the book happened to fall open to “The Cattle of the Sun,” the exact chapter that inspired the title of this episode. Listener discretion advised. This episode contains explicit, detailed descriptions of sexual and physical violence, pervasive strong language, and mature themes. A few additional corrections: ​I conflated the Chryseis episode in the Iliad with the separate tradition of Iphigenia’s sacrifice at Aulis. ​Cassandra’s standard curse is that her true prophecies are not believed, not that belief itself triggers catastrophe.​I cannot substantiate my claim that Polyphemus was approximately three years old and retract it.

    The Odyssey: The Forbidden Meat We All Ate

  2. Aug 11

    Wicked and the Anatomy of a 10/10

    I watched Wicked knowing almost nothing about it. I’ve never seen The Wizard of Oz, I’ve never seen the musical, I haven’t read any of the source material, and I deliberately didn’t research anything before watching it. Most of what I knew came from random TikToks, memes, the insane amount of marketing, and just existing around a movie that was basically f*****g everywhere for a year. So this is not me pretending to be an authority on Wicked or its history. This is literally me sitting down after watching the movie and talking for 48 minutes straight about what I thought I was seeing and why it worked so f*****g well. I get things wrong, I make assumptions, I forget names, I change my mind, and at one point I basically argue with myself over whether the movie deserves a 9 or a 10. I wanted to leave that process intact. This is what Wicked looked like to someone going into it almost completely blind, and somehow I came out of it thinking it was a 10/10.

  • 2 Episodes

About

Magnetar Studios is a podcast about movies, stories, and the ideas they pull into orbit. Each episode starts with a work and follows the thinking wherever it leads, through film, mythology, politics, culture, personal experience, and the standards we use to judge art in the first place. Raw, associative, analytical, and often recorded as the ideas are forming. No polished critical authority. No pretending the conclusion came first. Just an attempt to take the work seriously, follow the connections, and see where they lead.

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