Word: troy
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Casting agents did, and the starlet quickly won leads in the English costume drama I Capture the Castle and the upcoming U.S. remake of the French thriller L'Appartement. Brad Pitt's virginal sex slave in this month's Troy is a role with considerably more heat. And so, at 24, Byrne finds herself on Vanity Fair magazine's "Coming Attractions" list, and the cover girl for "Hot to Trot '04" in the New York Daily News. So will she attain her Moscow - that longed-for thing over the horizon called stardom...
...never waited as much in my life," says the Sydney native, who's now based in Los Angeles. Byrne is talking about last year's shoot of Troy, on which she spent much time holed up in a trailer outside Cabo San Lucas, Mexico. "And even when you get on set, you wait for days and days and days. Everyone was waiting. Brad was waiting. There was no discrimination. There was one point where people were like, 'What's going on down there...
...film needs battles, and Troy has nearly a dozen of them, employing arrows, spears, great balls of fire rolling down a slope to crush the enemy. The beach blitz has Achilles and his Myrmidons capturing the territory for Agamemnon in an Omaha Beach--like assault (Saving Priam's Rival). But thousands fighting thousands is war; man fighting man is drama. Troy boasts plenty of good old Hellenic fist power. Paris vs. Menelaus, Hector vs. Ajax the Great, Achilles vs. Hector--it's a dream card at Madison Square Garden, and the movie choreographs each set-to with burly ingenuity. This...
...look great, and everyone does here--fit for battle (the guys) or for bed (the women). Pitt and Bana carry the film on their dishy delts. Bloom is so winsome as Paris that he almost makes the cowardly girly-man a teen idol. And for echoes of epics past, Troy has David Lean's Lawrence and Lara: O'Toole, sere and majestic, and Julie Christie as Achilles' mother Thetis...
What gives Troy its maturity is its refusal to take sides. Who's the hero here? Achilles? If so, he's a tragic one. Hector? He's on the losing side. For all its surface glorifying of war bravery and the brooding introspection it allows the leads, the film's view is from above, where the gods watch men kill one another for real estate and destroy the land they would occupy...