300

[featherynscale]

kittenpants, orcjohn, triadruid and I managed to see 300 last night. For the entire length of the movie, three of us sat there like Beavis and Butthead; "This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. huh-huh, huh-huh". Apparently, the thing was too comic-bookish for triadruid's tastes, and he was disappointed. The rest of us reveled in that.

Beautiful art direction, brilliant action sequences, explosions (the Persians had some black-powder bombs, which I'm not sure are correct to the period, but so what?), nice looking men, an excessively hot queen, revenge, glorious doomed gestures, and a rhinoceros. What's better than that? (Well, it would have been better if the captain's son and the blond Spartan he kept bantering with had actually had sex, instead of merely flirting, but that's apparently too much to ask for.)

The Persians were, on the whole, ridiculous. When I eventually grasped that the story was being told afterwards by a soldier to the council, it made a little more sense. I mean, that's what you'd say, right? "There were six million of them! They were monstrous and deformed, and came riding strange beasts. Giants walked among them. Xerxes himself must have been 12 feet tall, and advanced upon us on a golden throne borne by thirty thousand slaves..." All it lacked was the requisite introduction: "No shit, there I was...."

The big question in everyone's mind after the film (other than "Why is it okay to show that much blood and gore and corpses and naked women and transsexual amputees and all that, and you still get an R rating, but if you show a penis, it's NC-17?" and "Why did the Spartans call the Athenians boy-lovers?" and "Why no soldier-on-soldier sex, dammit?") was this:
At that tech level, how do you get a rhinoceros on a boat, *keep* the rhinoceros on the boat, and keep the boat seaworthy, i.e. with no holes in it from rampaging rhinoceros? Discuss.

Comments

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

Oh, I knew the basis for the film, and wasn't expecting anything other than comic-bookish. And with the other thing, I got that it was supposed to be insulting to the Athenians, it just seemed like a curious insult to choose -- I mean, weren't the Spartan men also boy-lovers? Or were they only into screwing the other grown men in their companies?

[ysathora.livejournal.com]

My friends had a discussion about that, and it was decided that "boy-love" is considered unmanly versus "man-love" which is acceptable.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

If it's actually correct (at least in the context of the story) that in Sparta men were acceptable partners for men, but boys were not, that's fine and I can buy the line. I just wasn't clear that that was actually the case.

[ysathora.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I just took it as being "cheeky" and not all that serious.

[chronarchy.livejournal.com]

I was reading last night about the battle, and came across an interesting quote regarding homosexuality in Sparta. Apparently, it was actually uncommon, and monogamy was at a higher rate in Sparta than in the rest of Greece. This was remarked upon by outsiders, who couldn't figure out why Spartan marriages were so weird.

I wish I had the book here so that I could actually type in the quote. It was fascinating, and left me thinking, "Damn, I want to check his sources." But he seemed to back it up reasonably well.

I'll see if I can dig that up tonight.

The Thebians had the Sacred Band of Lovers (or whatever they called it). My first thought, when I heard that in the movie, was "didn't the Spartans have a band of them?" But apparently, it was just the Thebians. Who were, of course, at the battle. Not that the movie would let you know that. . .