{"id":554,"date":"2007-03-10T09:38:43","date_gmt":"2007-03-10T15:38:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php\/index.php\/2007\/03\/10\/300\/"},"modified":"2007-03-10T09:38:43","modified_gmt":"2007-03-10T15:38:43","slug":"300","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=554","title":{"rendered":"300"},"content":{"rendered":"

I don’t often take the City Pages’ arts reviews very seriously; most of the criticism is dragged through enough of each revewier’s personal agenda to the point where you can identify the writer just by the little tics in each piece.<\/p>\n

I have no idea whether 300<\/em>\u00a0 – the screen version of Frank Miller’s comic book adaptation of Herodotus’ account of Spartan king Leonidas and his 300 warriors self-sacrificing stand against the Persians in 480BC –\u00a0 is any good.\u00a0 I may have to go see for myself, because Nathan Lee’s review<\/a> tells us more about Lee than about the movie:<\/p>\n

Long ago there reigned a clan of Speedo-wearing militaristic psychopaths called the Spartans. They lived beneath a copper-colored sky, on a copper-colored land, amidst copper-colored fields, in copper-colored homes made from copper-colored stone. Legend has it they would outline their copper-colored pecs and abs with ash to enhance their manly buffness, and yet these were men of action and honor, not \u201cphilosophers and boy lovers\u201d like their namby-pamby rivals the Athenians….Yet aside from the fact that Spartans come across as pinched, pinheaded gym bunnies, it\u2019s their flesh the movie worships. At once homophobic and homoerotic, 300<\/em> is finally, and hilariously, just hysterical.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Victor Davis Hanson might disagree:<\/p>\n

Again, purists must remember that 300 <\/em>seeks to bring a comic book, not Herodotus, to the screen. Yet, despite the need to adhere to the conventions of Frank Miller\u2019s graphics and plot \u2014 every bit as formalized as the protocols of classical Athenian drama or Japanese Kabuki theater \u2014 the main story from our ancient Greek historians is still there: Leonidas, against domestic opposition, insists on sending an immediate advance party northward on a suicide mission to rouse the Greeks and allow them time to unite a defense…They are finally betrayed by Ephialtes, forcing Leonidas to dismiss his allies \u2014 and leaving his own 300 to the fate of dying under a sea of arrows.<\/p>\n

But most importantly, 300 <\/em>preserves the spirit of the Thermopylae story. The Spartans, quoting lines known from Herodotus and themes from the lyric poets, profess unswerving loyalty to a free Greece. They will never kow-tow to the Persians, preferring to die on their feet than live on their knees.<\/p>\n

If critics think that 300<\/em> reduces and simplifies the meaning of Thermopylae into freedom versus tyranny, they should reread carefully ancient accounts and then blame Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus \u2014 who long ago boasted that Greek freedom was on trial against Persian autocracy, free men in superior fashion dying for their liberty, their enslaved enemies being whipped to enslave others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Arts criticism in the Twin Cities would seem to be a similar battle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I don’t often take the City Pages’ arts reviews very seriously; most of the criticism is dragged through enough of each revewier’s personal agenda to the point where you can identify the writer just by the little tics in each piece. I have no idea whether 300\u00a0 – the screen version of Frank Miller’s comic […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-n-e"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}