March 20, 2007

300. Again.

300 While James Wolcott and digby are having a ball watching "wingnut bloggers" go gaga over 300 - and why not - Patrick Goldstein writes the following with a straight face: "Sadly, our critics, who seemed content with hooting at 300, have lost touch with what makes movies different from other art forms. Hollywood's mass-audience films are not a literary or an intellectual genre. Never have been, never will be."

Carina Chocano, though, also writing in the industry's hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, refuses to check her brain in at the front desk: "The latest entry in the annals of Money Changes Everything is Zack Snyder's 300, which about a month ago was being discussed in terms of its allegorical message, but is now being closely inspected for its magical money-making properties.... The interesting question is how 'entertainment' has come to be accepted as a valid, irreducible argument against interpretation; how, in a broader sense, the act of putting things in context has come to be seen as inherently suspect."

Updated through 3/26.

Online listening tip. Once again, at least for Alison Willmore and Matt Singer of IFC News, the question arises: Do critics matter anymore?

Updates, 3/21: "Iran's president today attacked western filmmakers for portraying his country as 'savage,' echoing anger among his aides at the Hollywood film, 300." Mark Oliver reports for the Guardian, where Hywel Williams writes, "[I]t would be mean-spirited to deny 300's actors their buffed moments in the sun, having endured so many months of training. It's when their mouths open, however, that the film falls apart and becomes an American corporation's viciously misleading view of history - both ancient and contemporary."

Online viewing tip. Stephen Colbert: "A-Pop-Calypse: 300." Via C Jerry Kutner at Bright Lights After Dark.

Reprinting Jason Morehead's review in full at Looking Closer, Jeffrey Overstreet explains why he won't be going to see 300.

Updates, 3/23: "The biggest laugh comes when Leonidas, while striding purposefully around in his dun-coloured pants, gruffly denounces the culture of Athens as 'poets and boy-lovers!' Oh Leonidas! Do you really want to go there, your Majesty?" wonders the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw.

"To judge this film's adherence to historical fact (insofar as we understand it) is to do it a disservice, for the film does not even pretend to be historically accurate." Nevertheless... via Movie City News, Eugene N Borza, professor emeritus of ancient history at Pennsylvania State University, for Archeology. He knows his film history, too.

Update, 3/26: "300 is startlingly anti-American." John Rogers has a little fun.



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Posted by dwhudson at March 20, 2007 2:29 PM

Comments

Goldstein overstates it:
"Hollywood's mass-audience films are not a literary or an intellectual genre. Never have been, never will be."
But he is sort of right. Especially if you emphasize mass-audience films and today.

I would say he is wrong if he means the history of Hollywood cinema. Afterall, Gone With the Wind is just one example of a mass-audience film with literary overtones.

Posted by: Matt at March 20, 2007 6:14 PM

That critique is so tired.

Digby and Wolcott are not trying to make 300 into some an intellectual exercise, they're examining what about this (pretty f'd up) film is speaking to people on such a massive scale.

Posted by: Erin at March 21, 2007 2:06 PM