Saturday, March 17, 2007 |
09:32 - Yeah, it was a real chick flick
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Well, 300 certainly is a movie that's bound to make a lot of people angry. And not just the Iranians.
I might go so far as to say "all the right people", too, but warily—not only does it treat with subjects that are bound to provoke people with a certain historical view, it also goes sharply against what have become well-established norms in movies for domestic American consumption. For example, up until last night I could have (and often did) challenge people convinced that Hollywood is a right-wing, fascist propaganda machine to point out all those movies it's made lately that glorify war, eugenics, racism, homophobia, vocal outing of traitors, and glorious death in battle alongside a bunch of identical supersoldiers. Yet that's pretty much what 300 does, and wraps it all in an envelope of aggressive rational secularity and a difficult-to-miss mantra of Western-style freedom conquering all. As much as Star Wars: Episode III was the anti-war movement in sci-fi script form, 300 is the movie for the opposite side of the Force, just as heavy-handed, and just as likely to piss of the half of the audience that wasn't already amenable to its message.
Though from the sound of it, that would have been a pretty small "half". I don't see too many highbrow latte-sippers flocking to this one. And though packed full of man-candy (I don't think I've ever seen so many abs in one place before), somehow I doubt they'll be showing this on the We channel anytime soon. Nonetheless, almost all the women who were in attendance jumped up and cheered when the Queen stabbed the dude in the Senate; so for whatever it's worth, this movie seems to be pretty effective at filtering for a certain stratum of society.
Don't get me wrong—I don't think that 300 is some modern incarnation of Triumph of the Will, nor do I think it taps into a bubbling groundswell of American sentiment that would buy tickets for a remake of it. I could just as easily point to Lord of the Rings as an extraordinarily popular set of movies that traded—explicitly or not—on age-old human affinities for pureblood royal breeding and racial conflict as a surrogate for cultural conflict. It doesn't mean Americans secretly want kings descended from demigods leading them into battle against orcs at Dagorlad or Thermopylae; but it does mean they're hungry to see those things on the big screen. Because they're cool. They make for great stories. Especially because we've banished them from the realm of polite conversation in the real world.
But I know what a lot of reviewers will probably be saying; and I'll put a tenner on someone at some point saying "At least the Persian army was diverse."
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