which_chick | (no subject)

As an evening, mojito (with rum as it's a Friday) and 300 is probably not the way to go.

The wolf. It's a fake wolf. If there's to be a wolf, it should look real. We have real wolves nowadays. We probably even have trained actor-wolves that (probably) won't eat the actors. Also, I could have done with more footage of young teenaged boys whupping up on each other. Makers of homoerotic sword-n-sandal epics, take note.

The oracle. Man, it must be cold up there.

Practically every shot: Who is doing the camera work? The women are invisible and the men are... filmed by someone who dearly loves looking at men. (Not that I am complaining, here.)

There are a lot of nipples in this movie. No, seriously. More nipples than that. Nobody owns a shirt... but they *all* wear capes.

This is a very gay movie. It could not be gayer if there were a chorus kick line in it.

25:06 -- I want a job as foreground grass-waver.

29:09 -- I rather like how they washed out the other colors and still let the reds pop. I'm looking forward to how that plays when they fight the Persians.

43:00(ish) -- Thing with the hunchback? Ick. Heavy-handed. Do we know who's going to tell the Persians about the roundabout? I think we do.

50:03 -- This dialogue is... er... Yeah.

Y'know, this is an entire film shot in what I honestly can't stop thinking of as posing pouches.

57:40 -- Xerxes is as gay as can possibly be. He's totally gay. Is that eyeliner? Yes, I believe it is.

1:02:20 -- Hey, we get Persian Ninjas!. The Persian Ninjas lose.

1:12:336 -- How did they get those great big elephants there in the wee bitty boats we saw being wrecked? Elephants are like totally huge. I don't think they'd fit on the boats.

1:12:xx -- Can you really slice off a leg mid-thigh with a handheld sword? I can see taking off a leg at the joint or a decap -- there are lots of joints there and stuff, but what about the femur? It's not like small. It's big. It's solid. I am not seeing that.

1:17:50 -- I don't know that I would trust the Persians. Not sure the Persian offers of wealth, women, and whatnot would last fifteen seconds after I showed them ye olde goat track roundabout.

1:19:15 -- While you are off at war, your wife will be home trying to charm the snake. (*Ahem* Yes, I do mean it like that. Always.) This, too, is doomed to failure kind of the same way that you going up against the Persians is doomed to failure.

The Spartans, o'course, all die gloriously or something. They're still dead, but in the end, aren't we all? Later on, the Greeks sort of unite against The Persian Menace and beat 'em up seriously in 479 BC (which is after 480 BC, when the movie happens). That's the thing shown at the end of the movie. (Thank you, Wikipedia!)

One of the really big problems with movies like this is that the viewer knows how it is going to come out. If you didn't know (prior to the movie) that the Spartans lost the battle of Thermopylae, you probably also thought this was a good movie. It is not a good movie. It's an okay movie with a lot of abs and some weird twinking with the time during battle sequences. It is... kind of heavy on the rhetoric, too. It wasn't much of a stretch for me to read the whole thing as a 9/11 allegory and I'm certain I don't know where that came from. Perhaps it was the rum.

Also, while I'm a big fan of dramatic lighting, this was too much dramatic lighting.

For another take on this film, you can read what Mitch thought about it. He didn't notice the homoerotic gayness as much as the fascist overtones, likely because he wasn't spending time comparing package sizes like I was. (Honestly, I've had a very generous mojito. This is as close as I get to drunken posting.)