If there's no one to pick on, where's the fun?

Wow. Remember when I commented that I had that fleeting feeling of disgruntlement with 300 because of its possible racial undertones with the depiction of Persians as the evil villains trying to disrupt the society of the good guys representing Western civilization? Well, I let it pass, and enjoyed the movie for the entertaining action movie that it was. But it turns out the Iranian government isn't so amused. Apparently, Xerxes is considered sort of a legend in Iran, and Iranians, who are direct descendants of the Persians, were quite offended by the movie:

Warner Bros.' "300" is being greeted in Iran with about as much warmth as a U.N. weapons inspector.

While U.S. auds see the film as a comicbook come to life -- replete with hyperstylized action and broadly drawn heroes and villains -- it has a deeper resonance in the Mideast, where it's seen as a distorted view of very real events.

"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," exclaimed a headline in Iranian daily Ayandeh-No.

Javad Shangari, a cultural adviser to Iranian prexy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, attacked the film as being "part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture."

This leads me to wonder who you can depict as the bad guys in television and film these days, without pissing off a major ethnic group or country, regardless if it's fiction or historically accurate. 300 may have come out at a somewhat inopportune moment, but history seems to remember that the Persians got beat by the Greeks. It's difficult to distort that too much, although I guess if a national hero of mine were depicted as an overgrown, overplucked, and high maintenance homosexual, I'd be a bit miffed, too.