Odyssey, Oddy-Do

“Kill the Wabbit, KILL THE WABBIT!” Elmer Fudd as the O.G. Christopher Nolan fanboy

Scoffing that critics are just a bunch of wannabe rock musicians, movie directors or what have you has always struck me as a calumny. I think I can speak for the breed in spilling the true gen. Like so many of you, we’re frustrated assassins. We have nothing but cowardice to thank for our gutless Plan B.

Given that predilection, is it any surprise that “Lighten up” is our least favorite advice ever? It’s often followed by a helpful reminder that Such-and-Such is “only a movie” -- or, to quote one Facebook commenter on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, “It is a movie, not a classics lesson.” Nice to have that clarified.

I have no idea why “I’m just not interested” strikes people as an inadequate gloss on my non-eagerness to goggle along with the rest of the world at Nolan’s plus-size Trojan. I don’t like his work much and get no thrill from Event Movies. Done; next.

While it’s possible I’ve led a sheltered life, I’ve also never detected any huge public keening for a screen adaptation of Homer’s helpful guide to what James Joyce was on about. It’s no Gone With The Wind, whose readers began casting the movie three years before David O. Selznick released his pathetic flop. They were right about Rhett from the get-go, but nobody had Vivien Leigh on their Bingo card.

More to the point, the days when I miss being a working critic can be counted on the fingers of Mickey Mouse’s gloved hand. However, the days when I go akimbo all over from gratitude at not having to earn my keep anymore by weighing in on movies I don’t give two hoots about are known here on the prayer rug as Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.

On Sundays, I rest, because all that akimbo indifference is exhausting. As a born-again kibitzer, though – a repentant frustrated assassin, if you like – I hope I’ll be forgiven for enjoying the ongoing intellectual Whack-a-Mole over Nolan’s moom pitcher. (Again: haven’t seen, don’t wanna.) Anytime a debate over only-a-movie spills over from the usual print and social-media suspects to the nation’s high-whinnying punditocracy, it’s a giveaway that ineptitude has become no deterrent to weighing in.

Glutton for punishment that I am, I couldn’t resist checking how long it took the NYT’s Maureen Dowd, whose major claim to expertise on the topic must be her eyewitness view of the sack of Troy in early middle age, to add her two drachmas. Answer: eight days, and wow. She must be getting as lazy as Mitch McConnell about providing hot-off-the-presses proof she’s still au courant.