| 300. the final push of the quarter. |
[Mar. 19th, 2007|01:24 am] |
This morning, Carin and I met up with Rick and Dain to go see 300 at the IMAX. Never, never, never have I seen such spectacle. (Also, IMAX tickets should be purchased in batches, since they have assigned seating.) But really--blood-pounding, heart-stopping spectacle. Sure, it bears only the most distant resemblance to actual history (Xerxes was not, for instance, nine feet tall, and probably wore pants or at least a skirt when commanding his armies), but that's not the point. The bad guys are swarthy, even black, while the good guys are all white. There's a lot of talk of "Freedom" for a military society like Sparta. But, again, that's not the point, and all this was just a tickle at the back of my brain while I was watching the terribly beautiful ballet of blood, guts and man-shouting. It's worth mulling over, but I think everyone else who's written about the movie has done plenty of mulling for all of us.
As Kyle Smith of the New York Post said, "Sensory gluttony is reason enough to see a movie, and few epics overstuff the eyes like this one." Of course, he also complained that 300 lacked the cultural sensitivity and subtle characterization that action flicks are known for. Plenty of film critics seem to be doing the same, which leads me to wonder if they were all on hiatus for the last twenty years.
I enjoyed 300 the book, and I enjoyed 300 the movie. I'm glad comics--non-superhero comics--are getting made into movies that take them seriously and approach them on their own terms. On the other hand, while Frank Miller is without question a seriously talented artist, we seem to be getting a lot of his particular vision. Why does Miller get his vision brought to screen intact, while Alan Moore's work gets mangled into LXG? (I know, Zack Snyder, director of 300, is also directing an upcoming adaptation of Watchmen... which is as unfilmable as A Fire Upon the Deep.) And why don't they adapt comics as animation? Wouldn't it seem obvious to do so? At least they're doing Persepolis right.
After the movie, we got lunch with Rick and Dain, and gushed over how high we were all feeling from the spectacle. We had to go shortly thereafter, because I had homework to do. It turns out that I missed an assignment: I was supposed to add a form with JavaScript validation to my site; it's 3.33% of my final grade, which is apart from that flawless to this point. In any case, the final site is due Tuesday night, and the final exam for Statistics is due Monday night. I was so preoccupied with my review of literature (I had to hand-tweak the damn HTML, since latex2html doesn't grok apacite) that I didn't even bother to check the site for the other classes. Stupid, stupid. I tried to read my statistics notes, but I just glazed over. I'll do it tomorrow at work, then. I'm cranky about this, but it's no one's fault but my own.
Did You Know that the Achaemenid Persians were among the first to wear pants? Well, according to an unreferenced Wikipedia article, anyway. Might be; might not be.
Comments: PunkAssBlog 1 2 | Lance Mannion |
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