I wonder why these filmmakers who created this obviously homo-erotic film, are marketing it to heterosexual males. Why would a straight man want to pay $12, sit for 2 hours and watch ripped abs, chiseled biceps, muscles flexing, powerful thighs, bulging crotches, beads of sweat, hardened nipples, slow motion, heart pounding, tanned, cape wearing, feathered hats, mini skirted, perfect specimens of the male form, in gladiator outfits no less, chase each other around? Sounds totally gay (not to mention hot!) to me...

It's absolutely amazing to me the practically invisible line between "a guys flick" and gay porn. If the only basic difference is an "orgasm", what the hell is wrong with these homophobic "men's men" who feel threatened in some way by homosexuals?

More proof that the world has gone completely nuts.

"300" is being heavily advertised on the Logo channel. Some canny marketer obviously saw an opportunity to do some niche marketing of a movie about insanely muscular, nearly naked men. I'm sure Andrew Sullivan has his ticket already. Maybe Victor Davis Hanson can be his date?

Oh that's easy!

He would be the one who appears early in the film, just as the first battle gets underway. You can see his backside briefly as he runs away over the nearest hill and goes A.W.O.L. It's a bit part.

Herodotus wrote that 300 Spartans were accompanied by 2700 allied soldiers at Thermopolae. Not to put too fine a point on it but that makes 3000 against the Persian hordes.

but their cultural guardians assuredly are.

Ms. Zacharek evidently wants an action movie with a laugh track.

Did you like it? I understood you had issues with aspects of the film and dynamics of its creation and its implication for future films, but did you like it? Was it enjoyable if you allowed yourself to let go your critic's eye and just sit back and see a movie?

I like the analysis, but you forgot to sum up :)

Randall

...but I have just finished Tom Holland's superb Persian Fire about the Persian/Greek wars and I don't think I could sit through it now without wanting to hurl something at the screen.

Its ironic that as a model for defenders of freedom, both the Persians and the Athenians would be far more appropriate. This juvenile lionisation of the murderous, rapacious and utterly facistic Spartans is ridiculous if it wasn't such a sad commentary on chicken-hawk anxiety.

The jibe thrown at the Athenians in the movie- "boy lovers"-- would as accurately describe the Spartans themselves. Pederastia was a central part of Sparta's martial training.

All those sweaty fascist alpha male bodies, overlaid with the homophobic taunts of the girly boy-loving Athenians, the ultimate enemy formation of the Persian bad guy as a cross-dressing queen—sounds like this movie is made for the Jeff Gannon/Matt Sanchez end of the gay political spectrum.

I thought when Oliver Stone made JFK, he was taking dramatic license for polemic reasons when he portrayed the conspirators as a bunch of big homo fascists. Now we know he was merely striving to be accurate.

It sounds like I'll have the same problem with 300 as I did with Sin City: a movie I'd like to see (I like film noir and 'toga movies' (cf Gladiator), but I wonder what's the point of all that CGI to make it look exactly like the graphic novel, especially if they're beefing up the manliness factor to epic proportions. If you're going the whole superhero/homoerotic hog, why not draw them that way and make an animated film?

The movie seems to be more about narcissism than homoeroticism. The young men and boys the movie is for don't want to have sex with the spartans, they think they ARE the spartans. The false victomhood (we are but 300 against hordes!!) is at the heart of facisism, too. Though facisists are generally the powerful oppressing the weak, they achieve power by creating a fiction of oppression at the hands of the weak. Hence the Bush allegory: we are the pure and virtuous few fighting the greatest battle of all time against the vast evil hordes (homosexuals, Mexicans, terrorists, liberals, the UN, **Persians** and reporters).

The comments here are more about the commentors than anything else. Is Spartacus a gay flick? Gladiator? Ben Hur? You folks seem terrified of seeing an ungarbed pec. Lemme guess, a movie about women boxers is about empowerment, isn't it? Yeah sure.

For The Win!

I'll be skipping this one not because of any historical inaccuracies or political allegories (I'll leave whether or not they're there to people smarter than me). No, I'm gonna skip this one because it looks like the kind of movie where characters shout pretentious declarations and exposition AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS every five seconds. "Our Arrows will BLOT OUT THE SUN!" "This is Madness... No, this is SPARTA!" etc. There's a difference between bad and good comic book dialogue, and this sounds like the bad stuff, i.e., "I will CRUSH you, Batman").

Adaptations of Miller's stories run from good ("Sin City") to godawful ("Daredevil" and "Elektra"). "Sin City" was a good adaptation of Frank Miller because it was levelled with humor and creative energy by Rodriguez and Tarantino. And those filmmakers were smart, because they took several Miller stories and mixed them together, rather than trying to make an entire movie out of just one. With "300" they're taking a short work by Miller that was focused much more on art than dialogue and trying to stretch it to movie length. Even though Miller is involved in the project, this stretch already feels problematic (and it may explain why they're shouting bad dialogue that sounds like it comes from a z-grade sword-and-sandals movie from the 1950s).

I haven't seen the movie yet, although I plan to. It looks like it could be fun. I know too much history to think this is based on much more than the bare outlines of history, and I like to think I'm too smart to begin with to get my history from Hollywood. But something bothers me about this review, and the kinds of attitudes it pushes forward.

It's this: why is violence and the exposure of the male form connected into "homoeroticism" with a sneer attached to it? Sure, I know a couple of leather men; I know about the same number of straight males who exhibit the same degree of what I consider to be overhyped masculinity. I know far more truly violent straights than I do gays. But always, in these kinds of reviews, there's a wink, a nod, a sneer at the mention of the exposure of the male form and its connection to sexuality--also, a belief that the male form must be attractive only to gay men, that women cannot find such beautiful or sexual.

I find all this to be almost as reflective of a deep and troubling prejudice and covert hatred of homosexuals as the overt gay-bashing we see from the Right.