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.

Was it just me, or did anyone else feel like they had to go home and do some sit-ups after this movie?

Hmmm. With all the hype behind this movie (from myself included), the stellar box-office returns it raked in for its opening weekend ($70 million), and the fact that it enthusiastically had Frank Miller's endorsement as being completely faithful to his source material, I'm almost a bit afraid to write my opinions about 300 on this page, for fear I'll be ridiculed and thrown off a cliff like a defective Spartan baby. But my fortune cookie from last Saturday's dinner said, "Do what you believe is right," so I'll just say it--300 wasn't great, it was just OK.

The star of this film, of course, was the stylized visuals created with a mix of cinematography and green screen CGI magic. The faded out colors with the somewhat golden-bronze wash emphasizing the crimson red of blood and ominous shadows certainly make this film look more like a painting than a movie, and pays respect to its graphic novel origins. This may be the only reason why I would highly recommend seeing 300 on the big screen before it hits DVD. Unfortunatly, I think there may have been too much exposure to the final product in the promotional trailers prior to the film's openings. I remember seeing The Matrix for the first time and being completely blown away by the bullet time visuals that completely changed how action films were shot ever since. With 300, I wasn't so much impressed, as I was satisfied, having seen so much of the slow-motion/realtime-motion action sequences prior to sitting in the theater.

The biggest disappointment with the film, though, was that I never really got the sense of the importance of this battle. There's a lot of talk about fighting for freedom and the preservation of Greece, but I never got the essence of what that really meant. Was living under Persian rule really that bad? I don't know. Perhaps the modern take on this story and its implications on the world as we know it today is that the stand of the 300 helped preserve Greece, and therefore Western civilization. Instead of the United States being the world superpower it is today, the Middle East would be the center of the world had the 300 crumbled easily under Xerxes armies. No wonder audiences are trying to weave some political propaganda into this movie. But that's just me trying to put some greater importance on this event in history--the director never really developed that for me, which is a shame.

The secondary story with the Spartan Queen trying to rally up reinforcements for her husband seemed unnecessary. In the end, her efforts seemingly had no impact on anything that went on in the movie, and may only have been included to give the audience a bit of a break from the tense action going on at Thermopylae. And although I can't say I mind seeing Lena Headey's boobies, the sex scene between her and Gerard Butler seemed a bit gratuitous to me. I guess we're supposed to understand the deep love between Leonidas and his queen after this, which is supposed to resonate throughout the entire movie until his glorious death, but it just doesn't work. In fact, Gladiator, a film where you only get a glimpsing shot of the protagonists family, does a much better job of conveying that sense of family longing without resorting to some cheap eye candy to pander to the nerdiest of comic book fanboys out there.

Alas, in my mind, 300 will fall short of being the groundbreaking film that the hype made it out to be. Essentially, it was good action movie eye candy that was entertaining, but not all that satisfying. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow actually already accomplished much of what 300 does visually, and has since been lost in the bins of DVD obscurity. Both of these films essentially forget what makes a truly great film--characters and good plot development. But until a director can meld these new technologies to tell a compelling story, I guess we'll have to snack on these kind of movies for awhile.

Let the arguments commence--the comments section is now open.

(**1/2 out of *****)

300 hasn't even premiered, and he's already creating buzz for his next movie...

Of course, the video above is yet another trailer for 300. It's a bit NSFW for some decapitations and a couple of flashes of boobies (the female kind, not the pumped up man ones). I post this not to go overboard with the 300 praise before I've even seen it, but to tell you that according to Ain't It Cool News, a flash of Rorschach that Zack Snyder intentionally put in as an Easter egg is 1 minute 52 seconds in. If anyone's forgotten, Synder is already in preproduction for the film adaptation of Watchmen, and the photo of Rorschach is from one of the test shots he's been working with.

With all the building hype, this better be much better than Cats...

Frank Miller seems to be the hot topic du jour at the moment. I seem to be finding specials and articles about him all over the media from television, to radio, to print. Even Esquire magazine of all places has a brief interview of him in their most recent issue. Yes, we were all much more GQ than we realized back in the day when we were already talking about The Dark Knight Returns, Batman: Year One, and Miller's run on Daredevil. ;-)

Of course, this is all part of the publicity machine trying to build up buzz for the premiere of 300 this weekend. Wander has already posted about what we might expect with this movie, so I won't belabor the point. Interestingly, though, this movie is generating quite a bit of unexpected controversy, with some audiences trying to tease out political overtones in Miller's story that weren't his intentions. From The New York Times:

Shortly after his press-junket grilling Mr. Snyder — an established commercials director, whose best-known previous credit was a remake of George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” — ran into some surprising reactions at the Berlinale film festival in Germany. Some attendees walked out of a screening there, while others insisted on seeing its presentation of the Spartans’ defense of Western civilization in the face of a Persian horde as propaganda for America’s position vis-à-vis Iraq and Iran. (By contrast it drew applause at a Los Angeles screening last month.)

Perhaps the oddest thing about this political slant on 300 is that different audiences have come up with completely opposite views of how this so-called allegory to the Bush administration matches up, with some seeing George W. Bush as the invading Persian emperor Xerxes and others seeing him as the Spartan king Leonidas. Stranger still, this is a story that predates the existence of modern civilization that has been used countless times simply as an example of sheer bravery, and not as some political flagpole. Or maybe Herodotus really was that prescient.

To be honest, though, I did have a slight wave of disgruntlement when I was watching the trailer for the movie a couple of nights ago. Is there something to be said about the racial aspects of a movie where the "good guys" are all essentially white and the invading "bad guys" are made up not only of Persians, but also deformed freaks of nature?

But now I'm convinced I'm thinking way too much. Frankly, I could care less about it's political or social implications. I just want to see it because it looks damn cool.