As you may or may not know, whenever I do walking tours I use a light saber. This is so people following me (I’ve had groups as large as 60) can see me as we trudge down 5th Ave in the middle of mid-day shopping. I use it not so much out of a love of Star Wars, but because it is retractable & light and can fit in my bag — but when I extend it no one can miss it.
However, whenever I have teen boys they all go apeshit for it. 9 out of 10 of the boys love Star Wars and that’s when the Star Wars banter flies. We say things like “Mace Windu is awesome” and “Darth Maul is the bomb” and such. One more than one occasion conversation turns to other like-minded movies (Lord of the Rings and the like) and, eventually, they ask if I’ve seen “300.” I keep having to say I haven’t and, time and again, the 14 yr old boys are absolutely stunned. Most say it is the best movie they’ve ever seen. Seriously.
Anyway, I was with this group from Vancouver — they were really cool, but when they heard I hadn’t seen “300” they were really disappointed. I said I was waiting for DVD and it was as if I was stabbing them each in the heart (in slo-mo and in brown color saturation, I suppose.) They actually made me promise I would go and see it in the theater.
So that’s why Kerry and I went to see this three month old movie yesterday. It’s only playing on one screen here in Manhattan, limping like a wounded warrior off to its life on ancillary media.
So is the movie good? No, of course not, it is beyond idiotic. Is it entertaining? Well, Kerry and I were laughing and talking back to the screen and making “ooooh” noises as people got chopped up, so, yeah, I guess it is entertaining.
It is also GAAAAAAAAAAY! There’s this rampant homophobia that many critics have written about. The “Persians” are all fey and sibilant, but really this film exposes the war of the Butch vs. The Femmes. Our heroes — our Spartans — they look like the rowdiest group of Chelsea leatherboys you’ll ever see. If their speedo-sized briefs were any tighter they’d be massacring threir own sperm count as quickly as they killed Xerxes’ armies! The slo-mo shots of these 300 6-packs (1800-pack, Kerry was quick to point out) marching in unison to tough techno-metal, drenched in the rain — it is an army of rough trade coming to stomp the hell out of anyone who questions their manliness. The voice over states “We were marching to glory! We were marching to destiny!” I added, “We were marching to Abercrombie and Fitch!”
Best, though, was the audible gasp Kerry and I both made when the 2nd-in-command actually weeps and tells King Leonidas (tangent: how do you take a warrior seriously when he is named for a Belgian Chocolatier?) that he never told his son he loved him. This is a culture where they beat their 7 yr olds and shove their 9 yr olds off to the snow to fight wolves with their own hands. I shouted “Omygod!” and Kerry just slapped his forehead. Hilarious.
If you want to, you can read all sorts of current events parallels in “300.” What’s interesting is that there is material for both the left and right wings. I won’t go into it too much, but if you follow the film and “buy it” (ie think the Spartans good guys) you are rooting for Fascism. It’s “Starship Troopers” without the irony. I’ll give “300” the benefit of the doubt and say that it isn’t meant to be taken as any rallying cry for today. But who the hell knows?
On more than one occasion today I thought about “300” and had a nice chuckle. I am this close–*this close*–to bumping it from a C+ to a B-. Somebody stop me before I do something drastic.
Dude, of course it’s a right wing militaristic piece of shit. Bump it down to an F. It doesn’t matter whether Bush is Leonidas or Xerxes, the point is that war is presented as the only possible solution, the way to glory while all others lead to pussification. It’s 100% propaganda: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
I’ll bump this down to an F when you give Battle Royale an F.
I found this entertaining, fascist though it may be.
As Sean Penn said: if I wanted entertainment, I would have gotten an eight ball and some hookers. Seriously though, Battle Royale has a smart, satirical edge that makes the violence digestible. I’ll admit I was amused by the spectacle of 300 (on IMAX, no less), but it has a despicable agenda that I found impossible to get behind.