After reading this hilariously overblown review by Slate clown Dana Stevens I am damn sure going to see 300.
I loved Sin City, but one Sin City was enough. I like Frank Miller well enough too, and graphic novels are fine, but the Sin City blue-screen effect was rather like watching one of those new roto-scoped movies, but very well drawn.
I mostly liked it because Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro and Bruce Willis were fantastic, Willis and Rourke as iconic hero and anti-heroes in their respective stories.
And the babes were hot and sassy. Miller even made Jessica Alba seem tough and sexy at the same time, something her TeeVee show never did (at least not for me, the one or two times I sat through it).
But, I usually like more naturalism in my movies. If I want a cartoon, I watch a cartoon or read a graphic novel or a comic. I don’t really care for the hybrid of the two. Plus, I’ve never heard of anyone in 300.
So, I had no intention of seeing 300 until I read her whinging drivel about “heroics” and “incitement to total war”.
But gems like these have forced me to rethink:
One of the few war movies I’ve seen in the past two decades that doesn’t include at least some nod in the direction of antiwar sentiment, 300 is a mythic ode to righteous bellicosity.
You know she’s right. Hollywood has been breaking its back to kiss its own ass, pacifist-wise, even more than back in the 70’s and 80’s when anti-Vietnam wars were all the rage from lefties like Oliver Stone.
Nowadays, even a tough-guy righty like Clint Eastwood made a couple movies pointing up the “futility” of even the Good War. All that killing of Nazies and Imperialistic Japanese, what did it really accomplish? Miller and 300 director Zack Snyder (Dawn of the Dead remake is about all I can see he’s done) should have done the same thing, dammit. Who the hell do they think they are?
That’s the kind of twisted moralist pig-ignorant bullshit that goes on in Hollywood- they spout the conventional party-line lock-step far-left crapola about what’s so funny about peace love and understanding, even with Nazies or Islamofascists, and claim its speaking truth to power or taking risks or being edgy. It’s not, ok? It’s fucking trite and the easiest route to take because if Miller and Snyder had done that, this bint would be sucking their dicks over this cartoon.
As it is, it celebrates defending your country, and they would maybe have gotten away with that, but they committed to other cardinal sin- they made the sympathetic protagonists white instead of brown. Had it been Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of El Obeid instead of Thermopylae (dead link) she’d a loved it.
Leonidas likes to rally the troops with bellowed speeches about “freedom,” “honor,” and “glory,” promising that they will be remembered for having created “a world free from mysticism and tyranny.” … So, if Spartan law is defined by “whatever Leonidas wants,” what are the 300 fighting for, anyway? And why does that sound depressingly familiar?
Oh gee, I dunno, their homes, their families, their way of life maybe? How about freedom, you remember that one Dana? You know it will never happen, and God grant it never happen in the real world, but I wish Dana would get dropped into some parallel universe Twilight Zone episode where hard men were not willing to do bad things to keep wimpy little wussies like her safe.
And that all those lovable brown men would come swarming over the U.S. of A. and force lefty feministas like her and Jane Hamster into burqas and reduce them to chattel under Sharia law. Because culturally, you know, its valid right? Whose to say what’s right and all that? Plus they’ll cut your fucking head off if you cross them, and no heroic Spartans or Marines are there to save your fucking pinko pacifist ass Dana. You’re all alone. You think 300 scared you, try a roomful of jahidis who want to school you on the first rule of the New Order? Honor killings and genital mutilations for all (women)!
But what’s maddening about 300 (besides the paralyzing monotony of watching chiseled white guys make shish kebabs from swarthy Persians for 116 indistinguishable minutes) is that no one involved—not Miller, not Snyder, not one of the army of screenwriters, art directors, and tech wizards who mounted this empty, gorgeous spectacle—seems to have noticed that we’re in the middle of an actual war. With actual Persians (or at least denizens of that vast swath of land once occupied by the Persian empire).
I guess it’d never occur to her that they did fucking notice and that’s the entire point. In her infantile leftoid lizard brain the idea of fighting for freedom, sacrifice, honor, all that bad old moralist stuff just doesn’t make sense, and glorifying it is downright Satanic, if there were any good or bad. Which there isn’t.
Except we should all not eat meat, cause global warmage nor fight any wars for no reason no way no how and gays should be allowed to get married and minorities get stuff since we been mean to them so long. Those are givens. And all Republicans and all their works are evil. That’s the only black and white absolutes people like Dana will allow. Not that black should be used in a perjorative sense. Blackball, blacklist, bad guys wear black – musta been a white guy that started all that! Word.
I’mma go see this movie just to piss old Dana off. Her review just backfired on her ass big-time. I hope its a blockbuster and incites millions of teenage boys to join the Marines and kill them some Persians. I mean Iranians.
UPDATE: over at Ace of Spades they expound on some of the same stuff I’m saying, also as they point out, I forgot she also accuses Miller of fag-bashing as well as racism. Well hooray for the first movie since Silence of the Lambs to have a decent fag villian! Isn’t that what equality is all about, when we all get our chance to do evil on each other, instead of minorities always being the victims? I call this progress.
They do eventually kill all the straight white guys, so cheer up Dana, its not all bad.
Also, I re-read Dana’s piece and noticed this:
Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people.
Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him.
Ok, what I’m getting here is lesbians, a plus for any movie, but not hot lipstick lesbians, but deformed, dykey ones. That’s not so good, but I’ll still see it anyway. I mean, that same exact detail didn’t fuck up Thelma and Louise did it? No sir, it did not.
And what the fuck is Dana’s problem with elephants and rhinos? Jeez. Join PETA or something, respect nature. Humans is the filthy creatures, not rhinos, biatch.
Lastly, as if all this isn’t enough, Neil Cumpston has the ass-ruling review to end all reviews of this flick.
UPDATE 2: Allah makes some nice points too.