300

300 Blew me, all my friends, and everyone in the IMAX theater who saw it away. Now that is how you make a comic-book movie adaptation! Hell Yes, this director Zack Snyder (whose first movie was the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake - which although not the original by a long shot, was an entertaining post-apocalyptic zombie movie with its own share of visionary moments) is a young director with promise. I understand Snyder is primed to adapt Alan Moore's notoriously "unfilmable" (according to the great Terry Gilliam & a host of others whose hands it passed through, to no avail) WATCHMEN comic book, and by what he was able to achieve with Frank Miller's 300 -- I have a shred of hope that he might actually be able to pull WATCHMEN off. There almost always comes a time when oldschool directors (like Gilliam) just have to step down to the newbies, who often can pull tricks from their sleeves that no one in the old days would have dreamed possible. I'm saying there is hope that Zack Snyder might just pull WATCHMEN off.

There is no room for doubt that he pulled 300 off, and with such bravado it was enough to have folks in the IMAX stand and cheer at the end. Sure they were probably young jocks being groomed to join the service or head out to Iraq, but to say only jar heads would appreciate this movie is to overlook the rest of the male population as well as a certain contingency of the (ass kicking) female population (only a certain kind of girl would be all over this movie - the kind who kicks ass).

All I'm going to say is I had more fun in the movie theater watching 300 since the time I first watched CONAN THE BARBARIAN, all of a quarter century ago. *McFlies*: 300 is a pretty stellar achievement in the order of a true blockbuster. 300 not only soars into actual movie myth making, it features the baddest-ass sword battles since LOTR (albeit a tad over stylized) but hell, Faramir is in it and that's pretty cool. (While I'm on the subject of David Wenham's role in this movie, I will say that his character's speeches towards the end did stray too far into melodramatic territory - even embarrasingly so, but I must overlook this glaring fault in the movie in order to enjoy the remaining bits of grandstanding.)

And Gerard Butler - he who played The Phantom in the movie version (pretty decent movie imo), well he has just put in the most ass kicking performance of a king in the history of kings kicking ass in cinema. Even the Lion In Winter's roar is muffled behind King Leonidas's distilled Kingly rage; here is one king who's not content to simply sit on his throne. There is so much blood shed during the battle scenes, the flying blood drops have blood droplets flying from them. The freaking blood bleeds.

The movie is huge. It is a mold-shattering event. It raises the bar for epic sword battles, for Kings that kick ass, and most importantly, for the kind of killer comic books made great because someone like Frank Miller created them.

We are undergoing that miracle of miracles, something the comic industry never thought we'd live to see: the revival of Frank Fucking Miller on to the silver screen.

All hail Robert Rodriguez, I say lift him up for a movie crowd surf. Without you Robert, none of this would be possible. Frank Miller would never have allowed hollywood to *koff* "ruin" /*end koff* his 300 comic book. And give Zack Snyder kudos for realizing Miller's hyperbolically stylized rendition of the battle of Thermopylae in glorious, living color. As true an adaptation as you're likely to find in recent movies.

300 is nothing less than an historic moment in Hollywood history. It is the logical extension of Hollywood's oldest, most classic ambition: rendering all the epic gladiatorial movies of old (Ben Hur, Spartacus, The Lion In Winter, etc) into terms the 21st century can deal with. In its over-the-top, hyperbolic stylization, it succeeds in rendering the more historic aspects into pure myth, something that current and future generations can actually digest, because it keeps the inherent themes (valor, loyalty, freedom, sacrifice) of such a myth intact by blowing them so out of proportion that it is virtually impossible to miss them.

Sound like the kind of fare you might be too sophisticated for? Ah well. Stick to your, I say ol' boy, "realistic depictions" of historical accuracy then; you never know when life'll give you that POP quiz out of nowhere, right? Meanwhile, the rest of us will just go see 300 again in your place, and be lavishly entertained.

It say it's the whole reason movies were invented in the first place.