300

[w/o horse]

I went in all pumped up because I liked the Dawn of the Dead remake and the left side of the theater was me and my friends.  It was a midnight showing and there was very little action from the crowd.  So figure that out.  The after-movie talk was full of fun, though.

Things we had fun with:

1.  So the hunchback comes up to the king and says, "I want to fight" and the King says, "Well you look sort of funny" and the hunchback goes, "Well watch this" and then he jabs with his sword and the king goes, "Wow, that's a really great thrust, where did you learn the secret ancient mysterious Spartan warrior code thrust from?" and the hunchback says, "My dad taught it to me."

2.  They fight a bunch of people and then the narrator goes, "Yeah, there was a lot more fighting after that.  Man, I remember this one moment in particular, a rhinoceros was brought to the battle line.  But then the valliant son threw his spear, as to render him dead.  And then later there were elephants, like three of them.  And there was this guy, man, he must have been huge, and he had, like, chains around him because he was so effin' crazy and tall, and he was a really fast fighter too."  Because the fight scenes were random and the narrator said random things.

3.  Comparisons between this movie and the NBA All-Star Game.

4.  Thrust, jab, thrust, jab, jab, jab, thrust, jab, thrust, running spear jab, credits.

[Gold Trumpet]

I don't think I've been irritated this much by a movie in a while. I didn't expect to love the film going in, but I was staying away from reading advance word.

The film is fucking awful. Easily a candidate for worst of the year. The screenplay is the equivalent of a propaganda pamphlet and the visuals aren't spectacular, they're draining. Every shot is obsessed to be beautiful and glorious, but the sky shots resemble cliche painting and the other shots are bad poses by soldiers to look heroic.

Then the violence is just numbing. The depths is how disgusting the violence can get but by the second battle you've seen everything. Every new thing leaves little effect and little to be desired because the battle scenes really do become monotonous.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 1 simply because their were some good tits in the movie. I don't know who the Queen was, but man...

[noyes]

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 1 simply because their were some good tits in the movie. I don't know who the Queen was, but man...

are the tits worth 10+ bucks?
i doubt it haha.

[Pubrick]

i'm sorry you freaks pay 10+ to see it. i will pay $5.00.. many relevant months later.

tits should be worth 2 at least if they're any good.

[MacGuffin]

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give it a 1 simply because their were some good tits in the movie. I don't know who the Queen was, but man...

are the tits worth 10+ bucks?
i doubt it haha.

i'm sorry you freaks pay 10+ to see it. i will pay $5.00.. many relevant months later.

tits should be worth 2 at least if they're any good.

Except GT bought the Alexander DVD which came with a free 300 movie ticket.

[grand theft sparrow]

I saw this in IMAX tonight.  I can't say I didn't have at least a little fun with it but it's not a good movie.  Prime "asshole movie" stuff.  Lots of killing, lots of faux-eloquent speeches yelled to the extras/stuntmen, lots of beats designed to make most audiences cheer, but never really gets interesting.  Between Gladiator, Braveheart, and Lord of the Rings, we've seen everything this movie has to offer already.  Not necessarily that they did it better, but we've seen it already.

Also, it's so homoerotic that I don't think I can ever again say I've never seen gay porn and feel that I'm being honest.  The tits that GT mentioned (which weren't so great, really) were there specifically to mask the gay undertones.  "Dude, he's not gay!  He banged the queen."  But they should have had the balls to just go Oliver Stone with it, if for no other reason than it wouldn't have dragged as much.  Speed up all the slo-mo shots and it would have been a reasonable 90 minutes instead of a bloated-feeling 2 hours (and if a movie feels bloated at 2 hours, there's a problem).  I was hoping for something better from Zack Snyder, as he managed to make a respectable genre film out of Dawn of the Dead. 

I will say one positive thing about it.  The CGI is pretty seamless.  I never once remembered that it was filmed mostly in front of greenscreen, whereas with films like Sin City, Sky Captain, and the Star Wars prequels, I was constantly reminded.  For this reason alone, I'm still holding out hope that Snyder won't fuck up Watchmen.  And Watchmen is the only reason I won't grumble about 300 making the $60+ million it's going to this weekend; Watchmen is as good as fast-tracked after this.

But Frank Miller is right to distance himself from it.  Let Zack Snyder take the credit/blame for this one.  It won't be the worst time you've ever had at the movies but you'll have no real desire to see it again. 

The after-movie talk was full of fun, though.

Our post-movie talk consisted of me and my friends shouting qrandiloquently at each other while we waited for our friend to get his car from the parking garage.

[matt35mm]

tits...

tits and ass.

I haven't seen the movie.

[MacGuffin]

Guess I'm the minority here and an asshole. I got what I wanted; it lived up to my hype of the trailer.

I don't know who the Queen was, but man...

I loved her character. She was tough and strong yet, sensitive; and she had the best lines too. And, based on this, Lena Headey is a great choice for Sarah Conner.




But what do I know, I voted for Children Of Men for Best Film.

[MacGuffin]

300 is such a blast. There will be no other movie ever, that is able to combine killing children, stabbing half dead Persians and guys with swords for arms in such a cool way. Gerard Butler has teamed up with visionary director Zack Snyder to bring the ultimate historical graphic novel by Frank Miller to life. Butler plays King Leonidas, who declares war on the invading Persians, after they insult his queen and his city. Without permission from Sparta's high courts, Leonidas gathers 300 of his best soldiers to battle Xerxes army of 10,000 Persians. 300 takes what Robert Rodriguez did with Sin City to the nth degree creating a colorful and sometimes even horrifying story of courage. I got a chance to talk with Snyder at the recent 300 press day in Los Angeles about what it takes to inspire an army, making fun movies for adults and his upcoming film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen.

Daniel Robert Epstein: First thing, tell me about when you threw the spear perfectly into a target on set.

Zack Snyder: Who told you that, Gerry [Butler]?

DRE:Gerry told us in front of a huge crowd of people.

Zack:I'm a physical guy. I like to throw rocks and I like to play soccer and football. I like to play sports and I do a lot of fighting myself. So in that scene Gerry is supposed to throw the spear at Xerxes. Gerry goes "Where should I throw it?" We have like a little thing of Xerxes head up on a stick lifted up across the stage. I grab the spear and go "Like this!" and I threw it. It went through the stick thing we had and it hit the back of the stage. Gerry was like "Son of a bitch".

DRE:Was that luck or focus?

Zack:I'm lucky with that sort of thing. I have skills at throwing shit.

DRE:Donal Logue told me a story about Stephen Norrington when they were doing Blade. It was the scene where Donal's character is all burned in the hospital. Stephen wanted him to jump over a table a certain way. Donal was like "I can't do that, who can do that?" Then Norrington, from a standing position, just jumps the table and Donal said "Something is so wrong with you both physically and mentally." That reminds me of the spear story.

Zack:I was filming a commercial with [300 stunt coordinator] Damon Caro. We've been working for a long time together. There was a scene where a guy had to leap over a hood of a car to get away from a bull that was loose in the street. The stunt guy that was going to do it went to put some pads on and I said "Oh you know what, I want him to run and leap over the hood and not touch it. I think I can do it, let me try it one time." I jumped it. I landed and rolled and got up and said "Okay that's cool, lets see how it looks." I wanted to show the stunt coordinator that it was possible. So the stuntman comes back and we totally set him up because once Damon saw that I could do it he was like "Okay you got to fuck with him because this is awesome." The guy comes back and I go "Listen I want you to jump over the hood of this car but I don't want you to touch it. I want you to clean it." He said "That's impossible, you can't do that." He's acting all cowboy and Damon goes "Maybe you should show him what you want." I did it again and he was like "Son of a bitch."

DRE:When the film shifts from the army back to the Queen in Sparta, were you looking to contrast the action?

Zack:Absolutely. Not only did you need a break in some ways from the Spartans, because it's just so relentless and insane, but I also wanted to show that life back in Sparta goes on. Then as we started to work on it we ended up ramping that up and turning it into a freak show anyway. The intent originally was to show the home life. Since we don't spend that much time in Sparta at the beginning of the movie we had to check back in with that. It was also a way to do that without loading the front of the movie with Sparta and then running for a quick fight up in Thermopylae.

DRE:You don't feel bad when the Spartans die because that's what they're meant to do, how do you make people feel sympathy for people who are doing exactly what they want?

Zack:Yeah and that's why, in some ways, we avoided that sentiment or sympathy for the Spartans. It was whether or not they fulfilled the task they set out for. That's what was at stake. I always said "We're not Spartans in the movie." They throw their kids off cliffs and beat the snot out of them. Whenever I could I tried to remind the audience, "Guess what? You're not a Spartan. It is fun to be with them and hang out with them. But it ends in death on the battlefield. That's how that road goes."

DRE:Talking to Gerard on set as King Leonidas was intense then later seeing him again the movie was wrapped he was like a different person.

Zack:He did transform himself when we were there. He's much more relaxed and casual in his other world than he is in his Leonidas world. He was pretty intense, which is good. It was the head he needed to be in.

DRE:One of my favorite scenes is the one right before the love scene between Leonidas and the Queen Gorgo. To bring warmth and love to a scene like that is just amazing because Leonidas knew as soon as he kicked the messenger into the well that that he was going to die.

Zack:Pretty much.

DRE:What's the mindset you want your actors in when you're doing that scene where this is the last time they're ever going to intimately touch?

Zack:I wanted Leonidas and Gorgo to be in crazy love with each other, like stupid love. With shooting a love scene, I don't know how people do it but it's awkward [laughs] and weird. I'm like "Okay, throw her like this! Flip her over! Okay, Lena grab him by the face! Kiss him hard!" "Be more naked!" I don't know what you say to people. It's embarrassing, but at the same time it is part of the movie. I made this movie for adults. One of the things I think is missing from movies is fun for adults.

DRE:Yeah there's a lot of seriousness.

Zack:A lot of seriousness. A lot of "The world is fucked up, this is rated R!" I love movies like Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth. Couldn't fucking love it more. But a fucking a fun ride where a lot of people get killed, good sex and all that doesn't exist. They want to make the movies PG-13.

DRE:They want to get the kids in.

Zack:Yeah! It's for the kids! I'm like "No it's not for the kids! Fuck the kids! I got some shit I want to show you!" I think that's what I wanted to do with 300. I want adults to go "Yeah! That fucking rocked!" not "Oh, I want to kill myself."

DRE:Another scene I really liked is when Leonidas is eating the apple.

Zack:That's my favorite scene in the movie and the reason is, that is totally the movie. It tells you what kind of movie you're in. If you were wondering up until then, that scene says "Don't worry about it. It's okay. Have fun." It epitomizes the movie because you understand the sense of humor of the movie. You understand the over the topness, but it doesn't make fun of it at the same time. It is right out of Frank Miller's book. The dialogue is exactly the same as it is in the graphic novel.

DRE:I read that your cinematographer, Larry Fong, hadn't done many movies before this.

Zack:Yeah, his big thing is that he shot the premiere of Lost. Also Larry was a school buddy of mine from [Pasadena's] Art Center [College of Design]. I did some commercials and music videos with him. Art Center was really small when I went there. It was really small department and you graduate by term because everyone goes term to term there's no "year." Larry and I graduated together in the winter and our class was only three people. It was Larry Fong, me and the second unit director of Dawn of the Dead and 300, Clay Staub. That was it and those guys were all my buddies. I just said "Hey lets make a movie, that sounds cool."

DRE:I'm reading this book David Carradine wrote about the making of Kill Bill. He wrote about how Quentin [Tarantino] was training with all the actors. But then halfway through the day he would go do other work. But for this film you were training right there with the actors the entire time, what made you want to do that?

Zack:I wanted to suffer with them but I'd train anyway even if those guys weren't working out.

DRE:I wanted to cry just looking at you guys on video.

Zack:[laughs] Yeah, you do bond with them a little bit because they're going "Help me" and you're going "No help me!" [laughs]

DRE:I'm sure you were been offered films before Dawn of The Dead but did you always have such vision for what you were creating?

Zack:I've been making TV commercials for about 15 years. I got out of school in 1991 and I went straight to work as a music video and commercial director. Then I got to the point where I was just doing commercials because I was so busy that I had no lead time. A video is short lead time and commercials are long lead time. If you do a lot of commercials you've just got no time so I just got to this place where we were just cranky and I had probably done seven years of TV commercials on every continent. It was funny because I was actually known in the commercial world for doing edgy stuff but mostly I was known for these epic landscapes.

DRE:Like car commercials?

Zack:Yeah, big giant stuff which relates to 300 in the sense that I am, in some ways, a landscape painter. It's a landscape movie, it just happens to a landscape we made up. Knowing what looks good when you're out on location is in some ways harder because you got to get the right angle. In the commercial world I'm the director and cameraman so everyone relies on me to make all the decisions. You can't underestimate that discipline. When I went to do Dawn, they treated me like a rookie, like I'd never done anything but I had probably shot more film than anyone on that set.

DRE:And you showed them.

Zack:Nah, I don't think showed anybody. But I certainly tried not to be an idiot. I think that was the most important thing.

DRE:It's hard to figure out what a guy like yourself might do next just because you don't have a big body of work yet. Besides adapting things like Watchmen and 300, what else are you interested in?

Zack:I'm a bit of an action geek.

DRE:Is that your number one thing?

Zack:No, not at all. My instinct is that movies where people are fighting and shooting are the movies I want to see. I don't really look for a movie that has anything specific in tone, action and story. I'm just looking for something that feels cool to me. Where I think about it and say "Yeah that sounds cool! I want to do that for fucking years!" As a director, you just wake up everyday for a year and go "Yeah! That's cool!"

DRE:Can people sitting around talking be cool?

Zack:It absolutely can. Watchmen has a lot of fucking talking in it [laughs]. Dawn of the Dead had a lot of talking in it.

DRE:Talk to me about the kind of color palette you want for the Watchmen movie.

Zack:The thing about Watchmen is that I'm looking to make a movie that looks more like Taxi Driver than Dick Tracy [laughs]. People bring that up to me "Is it like Dick Tracy?" because that's colorful. Watchmen as a printed medium references comic books itself. It goes "Look, I'm a comic book" and you read it, you're like "You're fucking blowing my mind!" But that's what it tries to do, it draws you in by being a comic book. I think my responsibility is to draw the audience in by saying "Look I'm just a movie" and then you get in there and it fucks you up. That's my hope anyway. It is a weird movie. When you see the trailer and you go "Okay that looks like Richard Nixon. Dude that blue guy is in fucking Vietnam, what is this?"

There's a song you can not put in a Vietnam war movie and it's Ride Of the Valkyries which should not be put it in any movie because of Apocalypse Now. But in Watchmen, you can imagine a sequence in Watchmen where Dr. Manhattan is 100 feet tall stomping through the jungles of Vietnam with Hueys all over him, zapping the Vietcong while Ride of the Valkyries is playing. It is transcendent of itself so you can reference Apocalypse Now and that's okay. It is pop culture.

I've been drawing the storyboards and I'm very careful with sequence and things like that. There's a sequence where Rorschach shoots his grappling gun up to the window and climbs up there. I just kept pulling shots out of the book and putting them in my boards. There's no reason not to just shoot it like that.

DRE:I can't wait to see him shoot the grappling hook into the SWAT guy.

Zack:Yeah, that's cool. When Nite Owl says "I made that for him!"

DRE:The best line of the whole book is when Rorschach says "I'm not trapped in here with you, you're trapped in here with me!"

Zack:That's awesome. One of the things that I think is cool that in the movie there'd be a poster of Dr. Manhattan with silverware and trays floating around him and in America it would say "Superman is real and he's American." That same poster in Europe would say "God is real and he's American." That's good shit.

DRE:Tell me about your tattoos.

Zack:[points to his right forearm] This one is my wife Debra's name. This one means white and this other one means red. That's my alert status. This one on my back has a Buddha.

DRE:It's not done though.

Zack:Nah, it's not done yet but it will be black and white so I'm just going to get it shaded a bit. The top of it is going to say "Present beware, future beware." [laughs]

DRE:Are you getting a new one in honor of 300 anytime soon?

Zack:I don't think so. The movie isn't that good [laughs].

[modage]

i'm with mac.  i really liked this.  maybe its because i was skeptical from the beginning and then there was a lot of hate but my expectations were low and i thought it was really good.  i was afraid from the beginning that the Gladiator genre would restrict the film into certain plotting patterns that would render it boring, but since i hadn't read the graphic novel or known how closely it would adhere to it, i didn't know how wrong i was.  i feel like most movies like this are really leading up to the big battle, but in this film there is 20 minutes of prologue and then the rest of the film is the big battle, broken up.  unconventional, and i liked it.  visually obviously the movie was amazing and the backgrounds and effects were seamless.  i only stopped once to admire the landscape was out of focus but other than that the illusion was not broken.  like sin city i think the extreme stylization works in the films favor, instead of trying to blend it with reality it is so stylized that you believe it.  there were a few places when i thought the movie was going to go in one direction and it didnt, spoilery stuff but again i liked that.  i'm not sure why everyone is hating on this movie so severely.  i think the slo-to-fast motion stuff worked for this film, made you appreciate the images, but wasnt distracting.  i prefer it to rapid fire editing stuff (unless its tony scott doing it).  but whatev.  and Gerard Butler was a total badass.  way to go Snyder, now bring on Watchmen.

[MacGuffin]

Iranians Outraged by `300' Movie

The hit American movie "300" has angered Iranians who say the Greeks-vs-Persians action flick insults their ancient culture and provokes animosity against Iran.

"Hollywood declares war on Iranians," blared a headline in Tuesday's edition of the independent Ayende-No newspaper.

The movie, which raked in $70 million in its opening weekend, is based on a comic-book fantasy version of the battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., in which a force of 300 Spartans held off a massive Persian army at a mountain pass in Greece for three days.

Even some American reviewers noted the political overtones of the West-against-Iran story line and the way Persians are depicted as decadent, sexually flamboyant and evil in contrast to the noble Greeks.

In Iran, the movie hasn't opened and probably never will, given the government's restrictions on Western films, though one paper said bootleg DVDs were already available.

Still, it touched a sensitive nerve. Javad Shamghadri, cultural adviser to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said the United States tries to "humiliate" Iran in order to reverse historical reality and "compensate for its wrongdoings in order to provoke American soldiers and warmongers" against Iran.

The movie comes at a time of increased tensions between the United States and Iran over the Persian nation's nuclear program and the Iraq war.

But aside from politics, the film was seen as an attack on Persian history, a source of pride for Iranians across the political spectrum, including critics of the current Islamic regime.

State-run television has run several commentaries the past two days calling the film insulting and has brought on Iranian film directors to point out its historical inaccuracies.

"The film depicts Iranians as demons, without culture, feeling or humanity, who think of nothing except attacking other nations and killing people," Ayende-No said in its article Tuesday.

"It is a new effort to slander the Iranian people and civilization before world public opinion at a time of increasing American threats against Iran," it said.

Iran's biggest circulation newspaper, Hamshahri, said "300" is "serving the policy of the U.S. leadership" and predicted it will "prompt a wave of protest in the world. ... Iranians living in the U.S. and Europe will not be indifferent about this obvious insult."

[john]

I would bet dollars to cents most of 300's audience probably wouldn't make a connection between Persian and Iranian if you paid them and pointed to a map.

[matt35mm]

This is the first time I've even heard of Iran.

[ᾦɐļᵲʊʂ]

Is it cool to not like this, or something?

This movie was solid.  It was a pivotal moment in history, and although it felt like pro-war propaganda at first, it really began to show the Persian empire saying the exact same things America says.  Both sides were fighting for the purpose of blending their cultures against the other, it's not like Spartans were America completely and it was just a blunt stick to the head.  The fight scenes were intense and they were as you'd expect a group of 300 to maintain a fight (whether or not it was true).  It was based on legend and the special effects put emphasis on that, Xerxes being a giant, the elephants being more gigantic than ever, the exotic armor, etc.  It wasn't just a stylized war epic, but to show you what you would've heard if you heard it from a Spartan or even how you might've seen it if you'd never seen rhinos, mutants (since your society rejected them) and gun powder (seen as magic).

[Gamblour.]

Finally saw this. I have to say I can't believe it wasn't as bloody as I thought it would be. There weren't limbs flying everywhere, so what was the point? And why did they even bother showing the traitor trying to fuck the queen? Have a second plot was useless in a film like this. I would fall asleep and wake up during the action scenes and watch those. I also watched everything to do with the Persians, because the carnival atmosphere was so well done, but then again it didn't go very far into that territory. I thought the depiction of Xerxes was brilliant, pure mythology onscreen.