Wishing I Could Scrape 300 Off of My Eyeballs ...

[saavedra77]

Y'know, someday, someone should make a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae that doesn't confuse ancient Hellas with Middle Earth. Or the Persian Emperor Xerxes I with Jaye Davidson in Stargate.

Also, those familiar with ancient Spartan and Athenian sexual morés might pick up on the irony of a Spartan king calling Athenians "boy-lovers" ...

Comments

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

I have often held forth the opinion that any Hollywood movie looks like nonsense to anyone with relevant expertise in the subject matter.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Hey, the Spartans loved *real men*, not nancy-boys. Warrior queers.

I've been debating between seeing it on the big screen for the effect, and waiting to rent it at home where I can turn the sound off and just watch pretty nearly naked hunks.

[marginalia.livejournal.com]

yikes. every so often i start to doubt myself on not seeing 300, and then someone i have respect for reminds me why. you won this week's round. sorry :)

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Well, at least some small good has come out of this tragedy, then ... ;)

[sarrabellum.livejournal.com]

Duncan saw it for free and came home to say that "the characters aren't even 2-dimensional... they're 1-dimensional! Barely!"

I don't remember anything else he said about it except that I should think twice before watching it because of violence or possible triggers. I told him that I didn't even have to think once, as I have negative interest in it.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

No, 300 is about as remote from the kind of movie I'd expect you to be interested in as possible. Even if you somehow accidentally found yourself in a room where it was playing, I think you'd end up walking out: above all because of the violence, but also because of the hypersexualized/racialized portrayal of the bad guys, the Spartans' proto-eugenics (which the movie makes seem like a good thing), etc.

And Duncan's right: the characters are totally wooden, as is the dialogue. Significantly, the only remotely clever lines are traditional Spartan jibes and taunts--nothing that the screenwriters themselves could have thought of.

[delerium69.livejournal.com]

*snicker* This why I prefer documentaries. Although I suppose there's no complete guarantee that they're totally accurate either, but at least it's free without excessive sex and violence.

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Y'know, I'd argue that the Bettany Hughes' documentary The Spartans (http://imdb.com/title/tt0416424/) is actually a better movie than 300, too.

[morganminstrel.livejournal.com]

It's Frank Miller. Really, that's all that you need to say. I didn't even make it through the second issue of the comic back in the mid-90s. Ugh. Going nowhere near this thing.

The sad thing is his work was so good in the '80s. What the hell happened?

(I have seen some argument--from people who didn't like the movie--about whether the Spartans were actually pederasts or if it was a more spiritual attachment. Apparently, the ancient sources are contradictory. But both Athenians and Spartans did accuse each other of being "boy lovers." One of the few things the movie got kinda right, apparently, but not really....)

[saavedra77.livejournal.com]

Yeah, God knows what happened to Miller: I did have a lot more respect for what he was doing in the '80s.

Vis-a-vis Spartan pederasty, you're right that the ancient sources tend to differ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartan_pederasty). I thought that the contention that these relationships were "chaste, though still erotic" suggests that the truth might have been somewhere between pro-Spartans' (Plato, Plutarch, Xenophon) portrayal of them as "spiritual" and anti-Spartan slurs about doing it "the Lacedaemonian way" ...

[morganminstrel.livejournal.com]

As is often with history, the middle course between sources does seem the surest. But there's no way to know.

Oh, for a time machine that allowed one to invisibly observe....