300
March 6th, 2007
Dulce et decorum est, the movie. A bunch of Spartans swear they’d rather die than surrender or retreat, and then they do just that. Like Sin City, the images of 300 have been heavily post-processed to closer resemble Frank Miller’s comic book, and when there isn’t a slow-motion battle going on, the camera lingers over tableaux of warriors on a mountainside, trees hung with corpses, a fleet tossed about in inclement weather, and sweaty nymphs doing double-duty as corrupt oracles.
It’s all about as exciting as a half hour of the Battle of Helm’s Deep, without the rest of The Lord of the Rings to support, y’know, the characters. Instead, there are lots of speeches, about how freedom isn’t free, about how the only glorious death for a soldier is on the battlefield, and about how, yes, Spartans never surrender. Which is too bad, because Sparta is under attack by the Persians, led by debauched and sexually ambiguous Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro.) In waves resembling nothing so much as the levels of a video game, the good Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) has to fight the turban-wearing villains while he is being stabbed in the back by treacherous politicians who refuse to support the troops and send reinforcements.
I saw 300 on an IMAX screen, and I’m still wobbly from the intense overdose of machismo and stupidity. The best thing I can say for the movie is that it steals liberally from John Boorman’s Excalibur. It looks interesting enough, but so does Triumph of the Will. In the world of 300, there is no room for art, negotiation, or weakness; there is only room for the strong. At the screening, outright murder brought great applause, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find an Army recruiting station outside the theater. Huah!
300. Zack Snyder, 2006. *
March 6th, 2007 at 4:53 pm
[…] read more | digg story […]
March 6th, 2007 at 4:54 pm
Some discussion of the politics of 300:
“Is George Bush Leonidas or Xerxes?” isn’t the right question to begin with. The question is, how come we’re celebrating the values of an ancient warrior state as if they were our own? You’d think the 2,000 years that have passed since the Battle of Thermopylae (not to mention the Enlightenment) would have created some distance.
March 8th, 2007 at 11:31 am
This interview with Frank Miller is pretty interesting. [via]
March 21st, 2007 at 4:45 pm
The ongoing story, and more at IFC Blog.
I particularly like this quote, from Carina Chocano:
Someday, maybe, the “entertainment defense” will no longer hold water. But for now, we’re slogging through the era of the completely implausible denial. Like many films that seem to riff on everything without stooping to make a point (which would be just so hopelessly earnest and dorky), “300″ proudly claims to be about nothing. Or rather, like another type of purchased pleasure, it claims to be about anything you want it to be. As long as a movie is dumb and violent enough, it can quote whatever cultural allusion is handy, then deny that it did with impunity.
March 21st, 2007 at 5:43 pm
[…] 300 debate rages on: roundups at GreenCineDaily and IFC Blog. It’s all fine and dandy, but […]
March 23rd, 2007 at 3:18 pm
When “Dark Knight Returns” first appeared, I became a hard-core Miller fan. But then I began detecting a disturbing thread in his works, culminating in what will surely be an epoch in bad-taste fiction-making: Batman versus Al-Qaeda. That said, I didn’t have a strong objection to “300″ when I read it as a comicbook years ago, but this movie… it’s just utterly repulsive.
And yes, Zack Snyder feigning surprise and claiming it’s all just entertainment and laughing at the people booing at the Berlin Film Festival, that’s just juvenile.
March 23rd, 2007 at 4:22 pm
Yeah, I was into Dark Knight Returns when it came out, but stopped following Miller not long after that. I liked Hardboiled, although more for the art than the story. Sin City never did anything for me, and Batman vs. Al-Qaeda sounds dreadful.
March 25th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
[…] It’s not difficult to argue that all Herzog/Kinski films are attempts at making and remaking the same movie — Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu and Woyzek less so — but that’s the beginning of the discussion rather than its conclusion. After all, most romantic comedies are remakes of the same movie, too. This final collaboration is no less vital than the other films. Kinski plays a Brazilian bandit who comes to the African West Coast as slave trader. Again, here’s the white man in a dangerously alien environment, again, here are Kinski’s borderless mania and passion. We’ve been familiar with Herzog’s grand shots at least since the Machu Picchu opening of Aguirre, and if anything, the extended takes of hundreds of extras in tribal gear are even more breathtaking, as much ethnography as they are drama. It’s also the first time we’ve seen Kinski lead an army of black amazons into battle, a sight that’s not easily forgotten. Take that, 300. […]