reviews: 300 and Against the Day
300: piece of shit. don't see it. if you're looking for the violence just rent something better.
the violence honestly gets a little ridiculous and the music makes me think the army was involved in bankrolling it. the ideology is embarrassing. like every other shit thing from hollywood they try and pretend that spartans were like americans. which they weren't. this faux-populism annoys the shit out of me. at least in films like spartacus it makes sense and is actually directed at something.
i have no idea how many times they used the word "freedom" in that thing, but it was enough to disgust one of my friends watching it with us who is a libertarian. he's also intelligent and so pointed out that the spartans were the least free people around, that they had a giant slave class the film of course left out even though it actually mattered in this case, etc.
here's the shit they made up (as opposed to simply taking it from herodotus, because god knows 20 bankers and business majors in Hollywood know how to make a story more timeless than fucking herodotus).
*everything involving Leonidas's wife. all of it. that whole subplot, the bribery, etc. all bullshit. including the stuff with the corrupt priests, or at least they really overdid it.
i guess the hollywood formula is so focused on a subplot that they decided they needed one because 1.5 hours of bloodsport would bore people. in which case i don't know why they made the movie. but they also turned it into their "let's throw in something for the chicks" contribution, again a formula.
now here's what annoys me about it apart from the utter fucking gall and arrogance of such a banal level of historical fabrication. what annoys me is that it seems like stupid business. it's targetted to getting women to like the movie, right? ok, the opening scenes are about the education of a spartan, which in our world translates as child abuse. and there are several scenes where they butcher various animals in combat, including pushing elephants off of mountain cliffs into the sea. that sort of thing tends to play poorly with female movie-going audiences, the child abuse and the egregious animal-slaughter. and the just weird bit is that they threw in a rape scene into the subplot.
now if you're trying to throw in a subplot that's softer and more romantic than the story (which was the clear aim here), why the fuck do you toss in a rape scene? it seems like that would sort of mess it all up a bit. she stabs the guy that rapes her the next day, maybe that's supposed to balance it out, i don't know. is that how you kick off vicarious bloodlust in statistically average female film viewers? if a woman would otherwise hate the film, will she suddenly like it if the female lead is raped and then guts her rapist? i don't know, whole thing was pretty fucked. i don't know, is this how the corporate market interacts with feminism, women are allowed to "enter history" but only as rape victims and through husbands? sort of wretched from any way you look at it.
*spartans didn't believe in or have freedom. they believed in glory, which is very different
*when leonidas dies the final shot is him in sort of a pieta. that isn't accurate or inaccurate, it's just obnoxious and clearly blasphemous if you happen to actually be christian
*they have his death vision as hugging his wife in a field of wheat. this was not how spartans think
*in the film leonidas flips out and tosses xerxes' diplomat into a pit. in the story he very calmly drags the diplomat across town and tosses him into the pit. would have been a much better scene.
*the battle in the end. that didn't happen. they ripped it off completely from braveheart, including that final shot of the film, which was pathetic. what actually happened is that the athenian navy tore the shit out of the persian ships, and the survivors crawled up onto a beach, where they happened to be surrounded by several thousand spartans who then butchered them.
*when they build the wall of corpses and drop them on the immortals, the wall is much much higher and they bury hundreds of them with it. too messy for americans to identify with i suppose
*the immortals weren't ugly ninjas. (though they might have been in the frank miller book?) they lined up twenty peasants in a row and immediately replaced them as they died, so it seemed like they were fighting the same peasant who just wouldn't die.
*they made all the persians black or look like arab stereotypes. don't know where the fuck that came from, miller or hollywood, but pretty sure that bit got made up and it's pretty fucking racist. i'd be more freaked out that americans are flocking to see a film whose main image for them is "killing arabs" if i hadn't heard that in other parts of the world people are associating the persian army with bush and the US. hardy-har har.
*leonidas wasn't that nice to the hunchback, and the hunchback was a theban
*you couldn't bribe a spartan as they hated money and commerce
there's probably more but i don't care enough. don't see it, waste of money, i really apologize to anyone i ever told i was excited about seeing it. piece of shit.
if you have to see it, rent (or pirate if you aren't a big baby) it and fastforward through the speeches till the last lines of each, and skip every part where the queen is involved.
this one will be forgotten soon.
**********************************
Against the Day: not much to report, only a quarter into it. i set it down for a long while and picked it up again on a bus trip. i'm stuck in it now. good pynchon, no gravity's rainbow of course but very good. his perennial themes of occultism against instrumental reason and tragic anarchy. no lead characters yet, just a cluster of them, a family, a detective, a bunch of balloonists. the detective has the most individual definition, although his identity begins with amnesia of some horrible deed he's done that has made him an outcaste. the others are defined relationally to their groups and missions.
one main plot is the roving explorations of a bunch of balloonists. another is this detective guy flitting through the occult world. the largest one proportionally is the killing of an anarchist miner and the differential responses of his children in relation to the event and the folks that killed him (the mineowners and the actual murderers). the main line there so far is that the daughter married the guy who murdered him and promptly became a shared sex doll for him and his partner who also murdered the father. one son is off at college to become a physicist working for tesla. the other sons are less interesting so far.
i've noticed that in pynchon novels most of the female characters are some variety of whore. like almost all of them. literally i mean, they're all prostitutes of one form or another, or else they are defined as characters by generally peculiar sexual habits, for instance double-fucking the men who beat her father to death. i wonder if this has limited his reception. too bad. it'd be interesting to read something with similar style and theme that didn't have the violent misogeny. or if not misogeny, something. i'd just be curious what it might read like. pynchon's books are very male i expect, lots of cartoon references, lots of bad puns and jokes, lots of sports comments and drinking games, no development of female characters outside of sexual decadence really. might change in this one but we'll see.
interesting how that perspectival limitation comes out so clearly despite the genius of the works. or not despite, but it is part of the whole logic of the man. interesting. good study of perspective. even though he wrecks it as much as he can, still have internal unity of the narrative, still have a nice big phallus in the whole thing, and ironically it actually reveals itself most by making all the female characters prostitutes and/or pretty darkly abnormal fetishists.