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Saturday, March 10, 2007
Epic Dimness
This reviewer of 300 is simply clueless. The last paragraph:
[...] keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule - never compare anything to Hitler - it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a "300" screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again.
Check out how Dana Stevens starts the review:
If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war.
Of course. If a movie -- based on the events of 480 B.C. -- doesn't quite jive with your modern political views, then that makes it a horrible cinematic experience.
Links via Rotten Tomatoes via Winds of Change.
Posted by Isaac Schrödinger at 04:14 PM in History, Pop Culture, USA | Permalink
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» 300 is off to a good start in the press... from Code Monkey Ramblings
Thanks to Isaac Schrodinger, I am reminded that conservatives by no means have a monopoly on reading asinine political messages into a movie. I have not seen 300 yet, but based on the reaction that V for Vendetta got, I... [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 12, 2007 9:18:10 PM
» 300 Review? Me too! from Code Monkey Ramblings
Everyone seems to be doing it, so I'll add a few new words of my own about the movie 300. Great movie, and it lives up the hype in every respect. Yada, yada, yada. You've seen that several times over... [Read More]
Tracked on Mar 20, 2007 7:29:22 PM
Comments
I have no idea whether critisism of "300" is deserved or not, but I have noticed that most of our society seems to have learned the wrong lessons from the civil rights and peace movements (and our history of wars etc).
One would hope that we learned to disregard race and consider humanity as a whole...
But instead we learned some stupid rules:
1. Critisism is forbidden. At least when those critisizing are white.
2. Shut up.
One implication of all of this is that the people who interpreted the civil rights movement this way did so because they never stopped being racists... the lesson they learned was not that humans are made equal, but that it's embarassing to, in any way, display the prejudices that they actually have.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Mar 10, 2007 8:43:48 PM
By the way, please forgive my spelling mistakes...
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Mar 10, 2007 8:44:28 PM
Or perhaps I got the matter of subject and object confused here.
Perhaps what the PC police are assuming is that white people are all prejudiced and they just feel that they must cause as much pain as possible to as many targets as possible to keep that assumed prejudice suppressed.
In either case, it's a disappointingly unprincipled and illiberal approach to prejudice since it often ends up supressing the real liberalism that might, for instance, fight for human rights (and to use an example from recent threads) women's rights in all societies. The rule that whites must always bite their tongues is idiotic. A sane liberal wouldn't bother to notice whether a critic was white in the first place.
All that said, I'm afraid I may have projected a topic that interests me onto the wrong subject.
I suspect that what's wrong with 300 (from many people's point of view are):
1. It makes Persians the enemy just at the time when some people are talking about going to war to end Iran's nuclear program (take my word for it, that war will never happen)
2. It's probably a movie that glorifies war and fighting.
3. If it was made for a right wing, war-loving, macho American audience, it probably only makes the the villians look effeminate. Never mind that Spartans probably had a gay positive culture (I'm not bothering to look that up), if they want the shit-kicker audience, they'll hide that bit of history.
And yes, there is the whole:
4. Don't insult any Muslims (or in this case, their ancestors).
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Mar 10, 2007 9:19:59 PM
Such reviews make me glad. It means that the movie did what it was supposed to do - namely, it explains that some fights MUST be fought. And that freedom must be bought by blood.
Josh -
"a gay positive culture"?
Heh. What an amusing choice of words.
Posted by: The Raccoon | Mar 11, 2007 5:00:52 PM
"a gay positive culture"
Perfectly common California speak, northern California speak. I live in San Francisco, after all.
Posted by: Josh Scholar | Mar 11, 2007 8:27:07 PM
Heh. As an Israeli, I find it amusing... translated into Hebrew, it makes no sense whatsoever :)
Posted by: The Raccoon | Mar 12, 2007 7:29:07 PM
