Friday, February 16, 2007

Fascism And Hags

Premiere man Glenn Kenny has called 300 "the most overtly fascist Hollywood film thing to come out of the North American movie industry since, oh, I dunno, Robocop 2", all the whole speaking in defense of Erik Davis, who has been taking a beating for comparing the film to Showgirls.

I can believe it on both counts. The question remains, however, how well made a fascist thing is it exactly?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is the most incompetent movie of all time. The whole history had been exaggerated and mostly revised to make Persians look like barbarians. Greece, a country who learn most of their education and philosophy from the Persians which are ARYIANS! WHO HAD MORE WARS WON AND CONCOURED HALF THE F**KING WORLD...YOU HAD 300 VS. 1MILLION???? You couldn’t even take 100thousand people that far from home, and even if there were 1million, that’s 3334persians vs. 1spartan!! LOL Try to make some logic before making a false fictional movie and even if you had geography on your side, before you try to put down a nation who would even to this day not is able to take down Persia, learn the history correctly and then start making some false and fictional movie. And the only reason no one knows that Persians had all the educations and books way before Greeks started writing books that the world recognized them on, it’s because through centuries people like Alexander the homosexual, and Arabs invaded us and burned our books because they were too incompetent to be able to read to understand what they were. In addition, through history and proven records, Persians never used or had slaves!! We were the one who first wrote the "human rights" on a cylinder which it’s still viewable in the British museum, and FYI we paid our people more then Spartans or any other empire paid their men for their heroic efforts! In contrary, the most dent in our civilization that ruined our purpose as Persians were Arabs who put us back in life when they invaded us and changed our religion, language and writing. Make a movie about that!

Anonymous said...

I'm not going to touch most of the political points here (regarding the superiority of either Greeks or Persians etc) with a barge pole, but i'd like to take up a few issues from anonymous above:

But this film is based on a heavily fictionalised graphic novel, itself based upon the point of view of Herodotus, who, as a Greek was not surprisingly biased against the Persians (who did, after all invade their homeland).

And besides, there is a lot of controversy about the size of the Persian army in 481 B.C.; although most commentators reject Herodotus' claims of 2 and a half million, there are certainly respectable theses that claim up to 400,000 troops and support personnel in total.

I also think it's hardly fair comparing Alexander to the Spartans who fought at Thermopylae, since they were separated by 150 years and by different cultures (you talk about cultural imperialism, but in you are just as guilty if you conflate the Spartans with the citizens of every other Greek city state).

Anyway, some of your points are possibly fair enough, I haven't seen the movie to comment. However, I do think that the apparent presence of quasi-trolls and orcs in this film will make sure that very few treat it as factual, so you've little to worry about on that score...