Iced Matcha Latte For Zeus
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I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
Cited as the Korean title that made it to the front table, with a sad footnote about its author.
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Crying in H Mart
Prompts the real question: how does the diaspora memoir land back in Korea?
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Trick Mirror
Imagined finding its true audience in the Philippines, nodding along to Instagram face.
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Lloyd's building
Summoned to explain the Dyson vacuum: all the guts hung on the outside.
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Centre Pompidou
The backup reference when the first inside out building didn't land.
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A Court of Silver Flames
Two bookstores sold out, so Bezos got the money; performed aloud at the anniversary party. Brian Park
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The Odyssey
The ur text, met late by one host who kept realizing everything descends from it.
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The Odyssey
The main event: a Marvel movie for people who think they're above Marvel movies.
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Walden
Occasion for the episode's great humiliation: Thoreau, or Ralph Waldo Emerson?
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The Iliad
Absorbed on cassette in childhood, read by Matthew Broderick and Sidney Poitier no less.
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Hercules
Offered, half apologetically, as the extent of one host's classical education.
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The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson)
The translator's verdict on Nolan quoted admiringly: Jason Bourne with trauma.
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Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Another thing that turns out to be the Odyssey once you start noticing.
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The Sopranos
Where Jon Bernthal belonged, in a world of things falling off the back of trucks.
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Saving Private Ryan
Becomes "Saving Private Odysseus," the joke that nails Damon's remorseful soldier.
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The Hurt Locker
Invoked for the very modern idea of a warrior haunted by what he did.
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The Northman
The counterexample: a film willing to leave you inside a pre Christian moral system.
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The Dark Knight
Ledger cited as the necessary wrench thrown into a self serious machine.
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The Royal Tenenbaums
Hackman refusing to bend to the house tone, exactly what the Odyssey lacked.
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The Talented Mr. Ripley
Philip Seymour Hoffman, five minutes onscreen, all mischief: "how's the peeping, Tom?"
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King Lear
One phrase survived into Godard's film: nothing will come from nothing.
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Hamlet
Understood only a third of the way, which is apparently enough to film it.
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