Sometimes A Cigar Is Just A Cigar
And sometimes a movie is just a movie. In yet another case of a movie reviewer projecting her own beliefs, opinions and ideas onto the movie being reviewed, Slate's Dana Stevens merrily assaults the movie 300. Starting right out with a comparison to Nazi propaganda, she actually deteriorates from there and sees every possible societal flaw in history plainly evident in a movie that is derived from a comic book. This is just plain sad.
In interviews, Snyder insists that he "really just wanted to make a movie that is a ride"—a perfectly fine ambition for any filmmaker, especially one inspired by the comics. And visually, 300 is thrilling, color-processed to a burnished, monochromatic copper, and packed with painterly, if static, tableaux vivants. But to cast 300 as a purely apolitical romp of an action film smacks of either disingenuousness or complete obliviousness. 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. In at least one way, the film is true to the ethos of ancient Greece: It conflates moral excellence and physical beauty (which, in this movie, means being young, white, male, and fresh from the gyms of Brentwood).
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.
Probably one of the all-time worst cases of projection in recent memory. All of Stevens' own perceptions, biases and prejudices are thrown at the movie. Said movie being derived, remember, from a comic book. But it can't just be entertainment, you see. There has to be evil behind it. Just ask Stevens. Prediction, critics will hate it, moviegoers will love it. And Leni Riefenstahl has not been reborn.
By Uncle Pinky, Friday, 9 March , 2007 @ 1:28 pm
I wonder that this reviewer can use the construction “club fag” in a piece carried by the same e-zine that excorciates Ms. Coulter’s calculated lapse. Apparently there is some sort of nebulous double or triple standard that I am not aware of.
Purely informationally, is tableaux vivants grammatically correct? My French is somewhat rusty, it being twenty years or so, but I thought that tableaux as a plural obviated pluralizing the adjective.
Glad your Wi-Fi difficulties seem to have been resolved. I rely on your updates in the Animal Uprising. New Zealander’s have woken up and have made a film called Black Sheep that addresses the problem.
By Chris, Friday, 9 March , 2007 @ 2:44 pm
This is evidence that I should have been a Senator or a journalist, preferably a film critic, because there just isn’t any easier job, or one with less qualifications. It always makes me wonder how people who feel they are qualified to comment on other peoples’ entertainment offerings have so little grasp of the subjects of said entertainments.
Victor Davis Hanson liked it. ‘Nuff said.
I saw the trailer for “Black Sheep” and showed it to my daughter. She kept asking if it was real. I somehow think she was hoping it was not.