The 300

I realized today that it has been almost 2 full months since the last significant update. Mostly I’ve been very busy with schoolwork and the concerns of preparing for graduation at the end of May. There’s just a lot to get done with it all. Given that this is my final semester and I’m just busy focusing on other things, I’m not going to put up my usual post about how midterms went and all that. Long story short, they basically went fine. There are a few events upcoming that will be more significant, and more worth posting about, but for now I figured I would chime in with my thoughts on the film ‘300’.
I was kind of excited to go see this leading up to the release, especially when I found out that Gerard Butler was playing Leonidas. (He played the Phantom in the recent Phantom of the Opera movie) My Lit Hum class, which is far & away my favorite class here at Columbia, went to see it together as a group, which I'm sure would have been fun; I was planning to go with them but something came up at the last minute. Overall, I thought the film was pretty good. Now you have to consider, it is Frank Miller, which means a lot of sex & violence, so one should know what they’re getting themselves into.
This movie felt different than ‘Sin City’, Miller’s other graphic-novel-to-movie story. Sin City felt as though it were really telling a story, really saying something, or a couple of things, on a subtle level beneath all the carnage. This movie (and the graphic novel it is adapted pretty faithfully from) felt more just like carnage for its own sake. The movie tried somewhat to imbue it with some message about the defense of freedom against tyranny and all this, but as someone from my Lit Hum class pointed out, “OK, this is a civilization that practices infanticide. Not exactly the paragon of democracy that’s being held up here.” Interestingly enough, another student from the Lit class saw a subtext of the current US administration in it, which I could also see, except that it would have meant that Bush was out in Iraq fighting, which made the entire class burst out laughing.
Professor Jill Muller, our professor in Lit Hum, said she was a bit thrown off by seeing the Persian army including “the random assortment of orcs and other extras from the Lord of the Rings”, which after having seen the movie I thought was hysterical, and sadly accurate. In terms of differences between the graphic novel and the movie, Xerxes was depicted the same way, same with Ephialtes, and much of the dialog was fairly true to form. The subplot with trying to get the queen to convince the council to send the army was entirely new, as were the “orcs”. So it wasn’t as faithful a translation as Sin City was, but *shrugs* what are you going to do?
The sex is explicit only in a scene between Leonidas and the Queen, though there are some things hinted at in a couple of other scenes that made me a bit uncomfortable (though in fairness Sin City was that way too). The violence is … well there’s a lot of it, but honestly it was more restrained than I’d expected. It all has a very cartoon-ish quality to it, and most of the blood & gore is fairly stylized. All that being said, it isn’t terrible, but I don’t think it quite garners the hype surrounding it currently. If you wait for it to come out on video, you aren’t missing much. If you decide not to go see it, you aren’t missing that much.

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I've had to turn off annonymous posting to my blog, as I was getting a lot of porn spam posted into the comments section. I don't have time now to go back through my old posts and root it all out (midterms), so if anyone runs across it in the comments, sorry about that. It shouldn't be an issue from now on.