Nolan's Odyssey Secrets and Jessica Chastain's Lost Lear

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Coming up on Spotlight: Christopher Nolan's Trojan horse got stuck in customs, Jessica Chastain returns to Broadway as a woman convinced she's rehearsing King Lear, and a Family Guy line turns out to summon a horse in the new Zelda.

The Odyssey comes home on Tuesday. Christopher Nolan's version of Homer, the biggest hit of his career at one point eight billion dollars, arrives on digital November seventeenth, and Universal has started its Oscar campaign. Variety reports the studio wants to match or beat the record sixteen nominations Sinners earned this year.

The opening move was a seventy-five-minute making-of documentary, shown once on the Universal lot Tuesday night, with Matt Damon interviewing a dozen department heads afterward. A shorter cut comes with the digital release, and the stories are good.

In Morocco, Nolan moved the start of shooting up two days while the Trojan horse was still sitting in crates at customs. When the crew finally stood it up in the sand for the opening shot, the tide knocked it over. Tom Holland asked the costume designer, on the sly, to shorten his skirt so he'd look taller. Six weeks later Nolan saw the costume and asked, within two seconds, why the skirt was shorter. Robert Pattinson called the head of the hair department to request a long wig. The answer was no.

Then there's the sound. Damon says he didn't re-record a single line, because Nolan won't allow it. So the sound mixer, Willie Burton, spent storm scenes below deck with microphones mounted on the hull and water pouring on him, while somebody on deck asked him to pass the potato chips. Composer Ludwig Göransson, for his part, shut himself in a studio for ten days with about thirty-five bronze gongs. Something to listen for Tuesday.

Jessica Chastain is coming back to Broadway this spring in a new play called Lost Lear. She plays Joy, a former actress in a care home whose dementia has her certain she's back in rehearsal for King Lear. Her nurse, played by Michael Urie, goes along with it and takes whatever part she needs. Then her estranged son, played by Corey Stoll, arrives with years of things to say, and finds the only way to reach her is to step into the scene.

Dan Colley wrote it and directs. The play started at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 2022 and won a Fringe First award in Edinburgh last year. Performances begin March twenty-ninth at the Booth Theatre for a sixteen-week run, and tickets are on sale now.

Here's a rock story that sounds made up. In December of 1994, with Sarajevo under siege, Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson and his solo band were booked to play for the people trapped there. Their United Nations helicopter was canceled after an attack. They went anyway, over a mountain in an aid truck, played the show, and left their instruments behind for local musicians.

Deadline reports that a movie about that trip now has a screenwriter, Arash Amel, who wrote A Private War. The director is Sacha Gervasi, who made the much-loved documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil. Dickinson, who calls the trip "an act of momentary madness," says this was one story someone else needed to tell. Iron Maiden enter the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this weekend.

Irma P. Hall died Tuesday in Dallas. She was 91. You know her as Mama Joe in Soul Food, the matriarch whose Sunday dinners were the family tradition, and as the churchgoing landlady who rents a room to Tom Hanks's crook in the Coen brothers' The Ladykillers. That one won her a jury prize at Cannes.

She taught school for twenty-seven years and got her first film part at 36, after someone saw her recite a poem. Fame never stopped amusing her. "When I was doing something important like teaching school," she once said, "nobody came to ask for my autograph."

One to put on your list: Iron Boy, an animated film from Louis Clichy, a Pixar veteran of WALL-E and Up. A farm boy named Christophe starts tilting his head, learns he has scoliosis, and has to wear an iron corset everywhere. The trailer, which premiered at IndieWire, shows a watercolor world that now and then tips completely sideways along with him. Clichy's own son voices Christophe. It won prizes at Cannes and Annecy, and opens in select American cities January twenty-second.

Finally, two from the game shelf. Nintendo's Ocarina of Time remake lets you hum or whistle into the Switch 2's microphone instead of pressing buttons to play Link's songs. It's forgiving. IGN reports that saying "Peter, the horse is here," in Lois Griffin's voice from Family Guy, registers as Epona's Song and summons Link's horse. The game sold more than five million copies in four days.

And the new Street Fighter movie is ending its run with about ninety-nine point two million dollars worldwide, by IGN's count. The famously goofy 1994 version made ninety-nine point four. Van Damme wins on points.

That's Spotlight for Thursday. The Odyssey is on digital Tuesday, and Soul Food is a fine way to spend tonight. See you tomorrow.