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

[chronarchy.livejournal.com]

Tina made two comments that I thought you'd appreciate, one during the movie, and one after.

The first comment, during the movie, was, "There's just not enough blood!" She later explained this by the fact that there weren't 6 ft. geysers of blood squirting out of the necks of beheaded folk. "Is it too much to ask for a movie to follow anatomical reality?" I told her that most people thought there was too much blood, and she was astounded. "But there should have been geysers!"

The comment after was, "I thought it was funny how the two guys kept flirting. Wish they would have just kissed and been done with it." And this I found particularly amusing because I never noticed that they were, in fact, flirting. I completely missed that both times I watched it.

[featherynscale.livejournal.com]

She's right. There should, by all rights, have been geysers. When the fellow gets ridden down and decapitated by the lone horseman he is paying no attention to, the whole area there should have drowned in blood. Instead, we got a lovely long shot of his beautiful headless body unstained by a single crimson drop. But what can you do?

Also, the flirting. How did you miss the flirting?
I mean, I'm pretty sure that you and I have dramatically different concepts of what flirting might consist of, but still.

geysers

[rfunk.livejournal.com]

Just what sort of demonstrations do they do in vet school labs, anyway?

I'm sure "just kiss and be done with it" is a common sentiment among those observing flirting of any sort. But it's often not as much fun for the participants.