Showing posts with label 300. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 300. Show all posts
Clash of the Titans trailer
I'd forgotten they were even doing a remake, but lo, it has come! Accompanied by some seriously cheesy hair metal...
Post-Apocalypse is the New Zombies
Trailer here for the upcoming Denzel Washington/Gary Oldman post-apocalypse flick. I'm not really digging it based on the too-slick action trailer, but dammit, it's a big budget post-apocalypse movie and it seems like it should be on the blog.
C'mon blog ladies...
...give us your hunky celeb lists. There's no need for it to be just the guys perving out. Not while Gerard Butler lives...
"This...is...BEEFCAKETOWN!"
"This...is...BEEFCAKETOWN!"
Randoms
Because Dave wanted to see it again...
Baby Trader. Again Dave suggested that this be posted
Family Friendly 300
An expert weighs in
Sparta? No. This is madness
The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.
History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.
We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.
And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.
Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.
Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.
300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.
This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.
No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.
History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.
We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.
And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan "freedom." By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.
Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta's highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas' campaign, despite 300's subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300's Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.
Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.
300's Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan's education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb "to Spartanize" meant "to bugger." In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.
This touches on 300's most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus' time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.
No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300's vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.
This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.
Re: Quotable 300 Review
Here's Another (from AICN; maybe a bit more satirical than the first one):
Somehow, this review makes me want to see 300 more and less all at the same time. Or maybe it makes me want to see it but also makes me slightly ashamed of that desire...
I just saw a movie that’ll give your eyes boners, make your balls scream and make you poop DVD copies of THE TRANSPORTER. It’s called 300. I don’t know what the title has to do with the movie, but they could’ve called it KITTENS MAKING CANDLES and it’d still rule.
It’s about these 300 Greek dudes who stomp the sugar-coated shit out of like a million other dudes. I have a feeling that a lot of high school sports coaches are going to show this film to their teams before they play. Also, gay dudes and divorced women are going to use screen captures for computer wallpaper.
The movie takes place about a million years ago, and it’s sort of like a prequel to SIN CITY. Except way less guns and cars but twice as much skull splitting. If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell, and say to the cashier, “I need some extra sauce packets” guess what? You’re getting twenty sauce packets because your face will punch him in the brain.
I can’t spoil the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.
TWO COOL THINGS ABOUT THE MOVIE AND ONE THING I DIDN’T LIKE:
COOL THING ONE:
HEAVY METAL DURING BATTLE SCENES
Who gives a shit if the music isn’t historically correct? LORD OF THE RINGS could’ve used some Journey. This movie has that chu-CHUNG kind of metal that you hear in your head when your shift supervisor at Wetzel’s Pretzel is telling you that you’ll have to stay for clean up and you wish you had a sock filled with quarters in your hand.
COOL THING TWO:
FOES, MINI-BOSSES AND A BIG BOSS
Basically, the Greek dudes are fighting these Persian dudes, but the director, who must have a dick made of three machine guns, does it all like a video game. The Greeks fight every death metal video from the last ten years. There’s wave after wave of giants, freaks, ninjas, mutants, wizards, and a hunchback who looks like he’s got Rosie O’Donnell on his back.
Would I have been happy if Dom DeLuise from HISTORY OF THE WORLD, PART I had shown up? Maybe, but this movie more than makes up for that glaring oversight.
NOT SO GOOD THING:
DUDE NUDITY (“DUDE-ITY”)
These are Greek times, when there were a lot of naked women around. And there are some naked women in this film, but almost every naked woman scene has a muscular dude giving the screen an ass picnic. Dude-ity is something directors put in their movies so people will think they’re serious, I guess, and not just throwing in naked hotties.
Any directors reading this – IT’S OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES.
Can’t someone make a movie about naked Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?
My final analysis is 300 the most ass-ruling movie I’ve seen this year, and will probably be the King of 2007 unless someone makes a movie where a pair of sentient boobs fights a werewolf.
Somehow, this review makes me want to see 300 more and less all at the same time. Or maybe it makes me want to see it but also makes me slightly ashamed of that desire...
Quotable 300 Review
From the Arizona Night Buzz (whatever the hell that is). Amusing, and a little frightening in that the reviewer seems to be sincere in his over-hype. My favorite quotes are:
"High school football coaches who show this to their players before games are guaranteed to win 55-0. Should opposing coaches show the DVD to each of their teams before the matchup, a rupture in the space-time continuum will occur and the game will be declared a tie."
and
"The film has a stylized look that matches what would happen if "The Matrix" had hot, dirty sex with "Clash of the Titans."
"High school football coaches who show this to their players before games are guaranteed to win 55-0. Should opposing coaches show the DVD to each of their teams before the matchup, a rupture in the space-time continuum will occur and the game will be declared a tie."
and
"The film has a stylized look that matches what would happen if "The Matrix" had hot, dirty sex with "Clash of the Titans."
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