300

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jasonxx

300

Post by jasonxx »

300 Hundred Is breaking bow office records and the reviewers are mostly on fire with this movie.

It comes to show audiences are sick of Teen flick Comedies. Movies with an inate question and cartoons.

The masses prefer Warriors,Antion,Heroism and Escapism. Rounded of with Entertainment. With Leonidas we get a warrior King and Hero fighting enormous odds with patriotism. They want the heroism the Patriotism etc. Indeed the story is losely based on Thermopalai. yet it is based and the fundamentals are there.

Hail Leonidas hail the Warriors and go to hell with Alexander.
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Post by Alita »

The movie opens here in Australia on 5 April. My brother's Net friends in the US say it's a ripper. People in Greece are now saying they are expecting a huge influx of tourists to the Peloponnese this summer because of 300 and they are optimistic about the revenue possibilities. From what I've seen on the ads, the film looks like a cross between The Lord of the Rings and The Matrix. I'm not sure, but it seems to have been influenced by the computer game genre. It will certainly draw a younger audience. Then again, I know some seventy-year-olds who want to see it too. I guess it's difficult to predict the global box office impact at this stage. I think we can all look forward to an improvement on Alexander, at any rate.
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Post by ScottOden »

I've seen 300 twice, now. It's a fun movie -- visually stunning, great music, full of carnage and fighting and other bits of hoplite-y goodness. But -- and this is huge -- it is filled with historical inaccuracies.

The movie is not based on Herodotus, or even on Pressfield's superior Gates of Fire. It's based on the Frank Miller (of Sin City fame) graphic novel of the same name. So, like Oliver Stone's Alexander, this is in reality Frank Miller's vision of what Thermopylae should have been. And Miller's vision is influenced equally by Frank Frazetta's savage barbarian artwork and comic books.


SPOILERS!!!!


Among Miller's more egregious affronts to history: having the Spartans fight bare-chested, clad in a leather Speedo, a cloak, a helmet and a shield; Xerxes as RuPaul with an affinity for facial piercings; Xerxes court looking like an orgy of sideshow circus freaks; elephants and war-rhinos; weird Persian ogres; the Immortals as kabuki-style ninja whose masks hide faces only Tokien's orcs could love; Sparta masquerading as a democracy; the Spartan ephors portrayed as degenerate lepers who control a bastardized version of the Delphic oracle . . . the list goes on.

On the positive side, Miller made good use of Plutarch's Sayings of the Spartans (though for the most part they were paraphrased). He also had the Spartan lambdas (their shield devices) in the right direction. Did I mention the fight scenes? Brutal, lyrical, and very apt. Much is made of the film's purported bloodiness, but the Battle of Gaugamela from Alexander was far more gory than anything in 300.

Bottom-line, 300 IS a fantasy movie, so I was able to ignore my inner historian and just enjoy it for what it was.

Scott Oden
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Post by amyntoros »

ScottOden wrote:Bottom-line, 300 IS a fantasy movie, so I was able to ignore my inner historian and just enjoy it for what it was.
I felt exactly the same way. One of the more intellectual of my son’s friends asked me about the movie, saying “Isn’t it based on an historical event?” I told him he only had to know two or three things. That the Persians invaded Greece; that 300 Spartans fought and died defending the pass at Thermopylae; and that a Greek betrayed them. After that, it is a fantasy film. Yes, I know there were a few more details from the history books, but none that really matter.

And if you should question why a 17-year-old doesn’t have a familiarity with the events at Thermopylae, let me say that the entire century was covered during just one class in high school! Alexander didn’t even rate a full class despite my having loaned the history teacher my In the Footsteps of Alexander the Great tapes. I was hoping that he might show some of it to the class to help them visualize events, but unfortunately the NYC curriculum doesn’t allow for any deviation from the lesson plan. (The teacher didn’t tell me this before he borrowed the tapes, however. He had traveled extensively for many years before becoming a teacher, and he took a six-month sabbatical shortly afterwards so he could tour Greece and Turkey again – leaving the students with a substitute who couldn’t have cared less whether the kids learned a thing. Hmm, I had hoped that the students would have been encouraged to learn about Alexander and look what happened. :roll: And I have ceased wondering why it is that many young people don’t know the difference between history and entertainment.)

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Review

Post by sikander »

Greetings,

This was sent to me by another member; I have strong personal opinions on this movie but will probably not post them (I suspect my views- which ar enot positive- would be in a minority, as it happens) other than to say I am not surprised at anything about the movie.. sigh...

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Sikander

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0 ... 77,00.html
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Post by Paralus »

G'day Sikander.

I have not seen it. I have though seen many a clip from it. I suspect my views are similar to yours: it looks complete and utter garbage; from leaping breastplate- bereft Spartans to the ridiculing of the thouroughly degenerate and polyglot Persians complete with strange criiters and rhinos which - seemingly - have availed themselves of some of those marvellous "horn-extending" products my email is bombarded with.

Not for me.
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Ἐπὶ τοὺς πατέρας, ὦ κακαὶ κεφαλαί, τοὺς μετὰ Φιλίππου καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου τὰ ὅλα κατειργασμένους;
Wicked men, you sin against your fathers, who conquered the whole world under Philip and Alexander.

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With all due respect, Jasonxx.

Post by beausefaless »

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Re: With all due respect, Jasonxx.

Post by Mod Hip »

beausefaless wrote:This movie was an expression of contempt (derision)! The ending was in ridicule at its purest phonetics..
I was also quite disgusted - my review is here: wetoldyouwhattodream.blogspot.com
jasonxx

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Post by jasonxx »

Viewing google and reading many reviews on 300,It appears that yours is the only bad one out there. And probably the only good review for Alexander.
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Post by Efstathios »

I must admit that some things like the Spartans without a chest armor were a little bit ridiculous, but you go see the movie knowing that it is not historically accurate. You just go to enjoy it. Not trying to see historical innacuracies in every part. It was comic anyway. It is a good movie.
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Post by Alita »

Amyntoros - I'm not surprised at your comments. I too, thought of using In The Footsteps of Alexander the Great for my History class to, as you said, show various places he'd been and stimulate interest. However, they are way too long and Michael's language is pitched at adults, not teens, so I thought they would find it boring. As it was, I had a hard enough time trying to get them interested in a shorter, 1-hour DVD: Alexander the Great: The Man Behind the Myth. (I think the lead character from the US soap 'House' plays Alexander in it). I, too, was appalled to find that in my school's History curriculum, there was absolutely no place where Alexander was even mentioned. The unit on ancient Greece stopped somewhere in the 400s BC. (This, and it was a Christian school, and it's common knowledge Alexander was a major instrument in the spread of Christianity into Asia :roll: ). I didn't want to diverge from the course outline either, but in the end I settled for showing the students the aforementioned Alexander DVD with a copy of the oath he took in 324 BC to take home with them.

It is puzzling how much emphasis is placed on ancient Greece in school History programs and Alexander's rightful place in it is totally ignored. Greek schools are probably the only place where students get the full story about ancient Greece nowadays. I guess each country's culture and history comes first, in the modern mind.

Then again, perhaps I'm not giving credit where it's due. American students may be more into certain aspects of ancient History than Australians. :)
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Post by Paralus »

Alita wrote:This, and it was a Christian school, and it’s common knowledge Alexander was a major instrument in the spread of Christianity into Asia
Tell me more. I'd be interested to read that.
Alita wrote:It is puzzling how much emphasis is placed on ancient Greece in school History programs and Alexander's rightful place in it is totally ignored. Greek schools are probably the only place where students get the full story about ancient Greece nowadays. I guess each country's culture and history comes first, in the modern mind.

Then again, perhaps I'm not giving credit where it's due. American students may be more into certain aspects of ancient History than Australians.
I gather, as you make the comparison of Americans to Australians, that you too are Australian?

I’ve no idea to what year you refer by “teens”, but the Ancient History syllabus for the HSC (in NSW at least) seems far more wide ranging than that which I studied well over thirty years back judging by this exam. Indeed, I find the study of the Achaemenids most gratifying. Fancy seeing the world from their perspective?

From what I can tell, the study of Greece covers far more than in my day. Not only is Alexander included (at least two possible questions at a glance – “personalities and their times” and “historical periods”) but so too are the Diadochoi and the Hellenistic period. I am pleased to see that, were I to have sat this exam, I will not only have been able to wax lyrical about the Theban hegemony and the belittling of an arrogant Sparta but “go to town” on the Great King’s financing of the Spartan Peloponnesian war effort and the abject selling out of the Asian Greeks.

In any case, far from “stopping somewhere in the 400s” it ranges across the entire Near East, Italy, Egypt and Greece. And, right down to Cleopatra VII and the fall of Macedonian Egypt.

Of course you may be referring to years 7-10. In my day that was not the purview of ancient history - more Australian.
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Ἐπὶ τοὺς πατέρας, ὦ κακαὶ κεφαλαί, τοὺς μετὰ Φιλίππου καὶ Ἀλεξάνδρου τὰ ὅλα κατειργασμένους;
Wicked men, you sin against your fathers, who conquered the whole world under Philip and Alexander.

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Post by marcus »

Alita wrote:It is puzzling how much emphasis is placed on ancient Greece in school History programs and Alexander's rightful place in it is totally ignored. Greek schools are probably the only place where students get the full story about ancient Greece nowadays. I guess each country's culture and history comes first, in the modern mind.

Then again, perhaps I'm not giving credit where it's due. American students may be more into certain aspects of ancient History than Australians. :)
At least pupils in your schools get to study Ancient History. The general attitude in British schools is that after the age of about 8 there's no need to teach Ancient History. In some secondary schools the pupils might be lucky enough to study a bit of Roman history at age 11, but after that Ancient History disappears completely.

There are still a very few schools that offer Classical Civilisation at GCSE and A-Level, and fewer still that teach Latin; Greek is now the almost exclusive preserve of the few remaining public schools, and even then I don't think it's always taught as part of the mainstream curriculum.

So, people don't learn Latin or Greek any more in British schools; and then they wonder why children can no longer spell, have poor vocabularies, know nothing about grammar and punctuation, and have lost all capability of logical thought processes ... go figure!

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Post by Mod Hip »

jasonxx wrote:Viewing google and reading many reviews on 300,It appears that yours is the only bad one out there. And probably the only good review for Alexander.
Unfortunately you are mostly correct. I'm relatively relieved, however, that the Tomatometer rating is only in the 60's.
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Post by Efstathios »

I see that most people here admitt that we cant know if Alexander was bi-sexual or not, regardless of each person's oppinion, but yet Stone in his movie certainly gave a bi-sexual approach.

Alexander the Great made 130 million worldwide, while Titanic made 1,8 billion. By these figures you can understand what we are talking about.
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