![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
300, books, and other stuff
Mar. 17th, 2007 05:41 pmAm masochistically enjoying present job and workplace - it's a bit like being locked in a room with a series of increasingly difficult logical reasoning puzzels with a time clock and I happen to adore logical reasoning puzzels. In short - I'm being paid to analyze stuff and then explain the analysis in laymen's terms to people. Plus translate it in workable form in database or log. It's stressful, long hours, but also unpredictable, and fun in a weird inexplicable way.
The topic of conversation this week was the flick "300" which all the guys (the men at my company) were psyched to see. Saw it last night during the blizzard with CW. Was exactly what it was meant to be - a visual spectacle. Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but CW and I adored it. Surprised a bit that we did, considering.
Would you like it? Don't know. It's not politically correct. And apparently is pissing off the Iranians. Go figure. Yeah, I can see why a "Persian" might find it offensive. But honestly, it's based on a graphic novel, is told in a clearly "fantasical" manner, and is based on something that happened over 4,000 years ago. If anything - I thought the movie did a very good job of driving home the point that we tend to demonize the enemy and make them in-human and monsterous to justify going to war with them or decimating them. This does not mean the enemy is truly monsterous - just that in our point of view they are. The movie has a tight and strict pov that it never wavers from - it's the pov of the troubadour that Leonides, the Greek Spartan King, sends back to Greece to tell the tale. And the pov is emphasized with "voice" over narration. We see everything through his eyes. And the closing sequence - explains a lot of why he chooses the images he does. One of the best examples of a tight unwavering POV I've seen done on film. You have to remember when watching or reading a historical record, a film, a book, or a story - that it is important to know who the storyteller is - and what their goal or motivation is in telling the tale. In 300 the storyteller's goal (not the movie-maker, but the narrator, the pov of the person telling it)is to raise an army to defeat Persia, to convince men and women who hate war and are against going to war and whose priests have advised against going to war - that this is a great thing to do and the enemy is monsterous.
The movie does not tell us what to think necessarily. It tells us what the person telling the story believes and why they believe it. It depicts a specific pov.
The film is visually stunning. And is a nearly perfect adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". CW who was friends with Miller while he was writing 300, remembers him giving word-by-word the same speech that Queen Gorgo gives in the flick - about how liberty and personal freedom is worth fighting for. She said, "that's Miller's typical rant - I can almost hear him saying it in the bar right now." It may be the most beautiful war film I've seen, which is an odd thing to say. Yet by the same token, it felt like an anti-war film.
Chilling. Depicting how we destroy each other for silly things like pride, vanity, hubris, and the desire to be gods.
Not at all what I'd expected. And in some ways, I liked it - visually speaking at least, a lot more than Lord of the Rings (also a war film - this one is prettier and visually speaking more fluid less jagged in places), and V is for Vendetta (a graphic novel film). Although all three are very different. This one has the prettiest men though, which is of course a huge plus or minus, if you don't like that sort of thing.
If you like graphic novels and enjoy visuals such as ahem half-naked men with pretty chests moving about and fighting - you'll like this film. If you don't - you won't. Wales would have hated it for instance, hence the reason I went with CW. Wales is my art-film/chick flick movie pal, CW is my fantasy/sci-fi/action film movie pal. My tastes are so eclectic I need more than one movie pal, or I just see a lot on my own or via netflix.
Speaking of eclectic tastes - I finally finished Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. Wary of saying too much about it, since Dean has an lj and a good percentage of the people on my flist seem to love her work. Suffice to say: I did not love the book.
I have read five books that deal with the same subject matter Dean's book does - three of which take place in a college setting. Of the five, Dean's is by far the weakest and least interesting. The five are:
( Read more... )
Oh in other news: Bought myself BTVS S2 DVD (was on sale at Borders - Slim Set - which by the way I prefer to the other version - it's easier to get the Discs out of and the artwork on the discs is better. I'd seen the other version - when I borrowed it briefly from a friend of mine over two years ago. The Slim Set is similar to the Firefly DVD set - each DVD has it's own container. Much better packaging.), and Casino Royale (because I'm shallow and like to look at Daniel Craig in ahem certain sequences.)
The topic of conversation this week was the flick "300" which all the guys (the men at my company) were psyched to see. Saw it last night during the blizzard with CW. Was exactly what it was meant to be - a visual spectacle. Not everyone's cup of tea, certainly, but CW and I adored it. Surprised a bit that we did, considering.
Would you like it? Don't know. It's not politically correct. And apparently is pissing off the Iranians. Go figure. Yeah, I can see why a "Persian" might find it offensive. But honestly, it's based on a graphic novel, is told in a clearly "fantasical" manner, and is based on something that happened over 4,000 years ago. If anything - I thought the movie did a very good job of driving home the point that we tend to demonize the enemy and make them in-human and monsterous to justify going to war with them or decimating them. This does not mean the enemy is truly monsterous - just that in our point of view they are. The movie has a tight and strict pov that it never wavers from - it's the pov of the troubadour that Leonides, the Greek Spartan King, sends back to Greece to tell the tale. And the pov is emphasized with "voice" over narration. We see everything through his eyes. And the closing sequence - explains a lot of why he chooses the images he does. One of the best examples of a tight unwavering POV I've seen done on film. You have to remember when watching or reading a historical record, a film, a book, or a story - that it is important to know who the storyteller is - and what their goal or motivation is in telling the tale. In 300 the storyteller's goal (not the movie-maker, but the narrator, the pov of the person telling it)is to raise an army to defeat Persia, to convince men and women who hate war and are against going to war and whose priests have advised against going to war - that this is a great thing to do and the enemy is monsterous.
The movie does not tell us what to think necessarily. It tells us what the person telling the story believes and why they believe it. It depicts a specific pov.
The film is visually stunning. And is a nearly perfect adaptation of Frank Miller's graphic novel "300". CW who was friends with Miller while he was writing 300, remembers him giving word-by-word the same speech that Queen Gorgo gives in the flick - about how liberty and personal freedom is worth fighting for. She said, "that's Miller's typical rant - I can almost hear him saying it in the bar right now." It may be the most beautiful war film I've seen, which is an odd thing to say. Yet by the same token, it felt like an anti-war film.
Chilling. Depicting how we destroy each other for silly things like pride, vanity, hubris, and the desire to be gods.
Not at all what I'd expected. And in some ways, I liked it - visually speaking at least, a lot more than Lord of the Rings (also a war film - this one is prettier and visually speaking more fluid less jagged in places), and V is for Vendetta (a graphic novel film). Although all three are very different. This one has the prettiest men though, which is of course a huge plus or minus, if you don't like that sort of thing.
If you like graphic novels and enjoy visuals such as ahem half-naked men with pretty chests moving about and fighting - you'll like this film. If you don't - you won't. Wales would have hated it for instance, hence the reason I went with CW. Wales is my art-film/chick flick movie pal, CW is my fantasy/sci-fi/action film movie pal. My tastes are so eclectic I need more than one movie pal, or I just see a lot on my own or via netflix.
Speaking of eclectic tastes - I finally finished Pamela Dean's Tam Lin. Wary of saying too much about it, since Dean has an lj and a good percentage of the people on my flist seem to love her work. Suffice to say: I did not love the book.
I have read five books that deal with the same subject matter Dean's book does - three of which take place in a college setting. Of the five, Dean's is by far the weakest and least interesting. The five are:
( Read more... )
Oh in other news: Bought myself BTVS S2 DVD (was on sale at Borders - Slim Set - which by the way I prefer to the other version - it's easier to get the Discs out of and the artwork on the discs is better. I'd seen the other version - when I borrowed it briefly from a friend of mine over two years ago. The Slim Set is similar to the Firefly DVD set - each DVD has it's own container. Much better packaging.), and Casino Royale (because I'm shallow and like to look at Daniel Craig in ahem certain sequences.)
