Ok so I admit that I've been thinking of seeing The 300 for purely aesthetic reasons,
as one review put it:"Wholesale human slaughter never looked so pretty..."But many of the other reviews seem to be pinging
my less, shall we say, pristine motivations:Man on Man Action
It's Spartan hotties versus Persian trannies in Zack Snyder's far-too-faithful Frank Miller adaptation
Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly buffness, and yet these were men of action and honor, not "philosophers and boy lovers" like their namby-pamby rivals the Athenians.[Editor's note: this gets me every damn time I read it, the fact that Frank Miller could actually write the Spartans as homophobes...I mean the guys who institutionalized bi-sexuality, it's just...well, laugh or cry I guess and I'd much rather laugh.]
Lunatic machismo was cultivated early. From the age of seven, Spartan boys were trained in the art of humorlessness, and made to beat each other into submission. Little is known of the Spartan women, but scholars assume they were fierce.
[...]
On first glance, the terms couldn't be clearer: macho white guys vs. effeminate Orientals. Yet aside from the fact that Spartans come across as pinched, pinheaded gym bunnies, it's their flesh the movie worships. Not since Beau Travail has a phalanx of meatheads received such insistent ogling. As for the threat to peace, freedom, and democracy, that filthy Persian orgy looks way more fun than sitting around watching Spartans mope while their angry children slap each other around. At once homophobic and homoerotic, 300 is finally, and hilariously, just hysterical.And then the NY Times jumps into the fray:
“300” is about as violent as “Apocalypto” and twice as stupid.
[...]
[I]t offers up a bombastic spectacle of honor and betrayal, rendered in images that might have been airbrushed onto a customized van sometime in the late 1970s.
[...]
The Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers — including ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant — but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities.[Editor's note: Hold up, did they just say ninjas? Fuck it, I'm going!]
Allegory hunters will find some gristly morsels of topicality tossed in their direction, but you can find many of the same themes, conveyed with more nuance and irony, in a Pokémon cartoon.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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scoreboard will really appreciate this one:
