On If You Love 300, You Might be an Idiot at 10/03/2007 12:02pm

I liked the movie. A lot, actually.

Like the commenter Silverglade said, the film and comic were intended to be stylized and exaggerated from the beginning. They're loosely based on actual events. It's all completely on purpose. It's hyper-reality. Someone complaining about it not being historically accurate might as well complain that an apple isn't an orange.

I believe the black-white nature of the plot is intentional too. The movie isn't saying that these Spartan characters are objectively good, nor the Persian characters objectively bad. The story is told through a lens. You don't experience the movie as an outsider. You experience the movie as a Spartan, and all the Spartan beliefs about their superiority and righteousness come with that position.

I think this is where people get confused, because movies aren't made this way very often. We seem to have this assumption that we're always situated on a level above the action and the plot in any movie we see and we're provided with more insight and information than the characters are. If the movie had been made in an objective fashion, we would see that all of the characters are flawed and primitive, and thanks to our modern sensibilities we know better how things should be done. But the movie, instead, puts you inside the skin of a Spartan. The entire universe they exist in is drastically skewed to their beliefs and biases. Being allowed to keep their baby-killing society IS freedom, to them. Propaganda expects YOU, the objective viewer, to believe something. But what if you were to BE the believer for a day? That's what's happening here, expressionism rather than naturalism, and a lot of people just didn't catch on.

This is a legitimate story-telling approach, and a totally fascinating one, I think. Dropping the viewer into a fully subjective perspective is frequently done in novels, but the technique has been largely neglected in the film medium. I think 300 might be the best demonstration that we've seen so far of the possibilities of it.

On 24 Great Films You Can't Watch Again at 10/02/2007 2:09pm

As soon as I read the first paragraph I thought, "Well, Requiem for a Dream would be my #1." And then lo and behold.

I don't think I'd call it "great" though. I know it was technically and artistically great, and I'm supposed to like it if I want to be hip and all, but I don't think I've ever cared less about a cast of characters in my life. I almost turned it off before it ended, and I never do that.

Characters with some great strengths and some great weaknesses, you root for. But characters who are all weaknesses just inspire this odd Darwinian urge to strangle them and remove them from the population.

Maybe I need a shrink too.