Movie notes

The movie 300 is reprehensible, knuckle-headed, ridiculous, completely wrong, and totally awesome.

It's a movie you either go with completely and have a great time, or don't and find yourself continually amazed at how terrible it is.  The second was my experience, but maybe I can offer some pointers about how to enjoy this movie.

1.  Don't think deeply about it.  Especially, don't try to link it to the politics of our day.  The Spartans don't represent the United States, and neither do the Persians.

2.  To the extent there is a message, it's a celebration of a grim, relentless warrior's code.  The movie admires the Spartans' dedication and intensity, while trying not to concentrate on the evidence that they're, kinda, completely insane psychopaths.  

3.  Much of my lack of enjoyment came from the fact that the film celebrates values that are repellent to me.  But they're supposed to be alien, extreme values.   Keep in mind that nobody's going to come out of the theater and become a Spartan.

4.  Every frame in the movie looks like it came from a heavy metal video.  Similarly, the dialogue, characterizations, acting are as broad and unsubtle as a heavy metal song.  It's a heavy metal movie.  You could enjoy it on that level.

5.  Cool fight scenes.  Except for the final, everyone-dies battle, the fight scenes are kind of like Jackie Chan fights - each good guy has dozens of bad guys flung at him, but somehow manages to fight them one at a time, and only the bad guys get hurt.  The relentless slow motion annoyed me, but at least it wasn't Michael-Bay-style fast cutting, my pet peeve.

6.  Xerxes - awesome.  The bad guy of the year.

7.  Whatever its flaws, at least it's not boring.

8.  The movie founders on the contradiction between how seriously it takes itself and how ridiculous it is.  Maybe you could see that as funny.  There's a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode here.

Here's an interesting analysis from film-and-comic writer John Rogers, who blogs as Kung Fu Monkey.  And below is a video my son Evan showed me, which (and this rarely happens) we both think is hilarious.

Black20 Trailer Park: 300 - PG Version

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TMNT is a missed opportunity.  The filmmakers have come up with a great CG visual style - terrific cityscapes, a great bad guy's lair, good character design - it's a style that one can imagine carrying the Ninja Turtles for a whole slew of movies.  Then they have a script that wouldn't pass muster as a made-for-Cartoon-Network movie. 

My son Andrew had been looking forward to this movie for weeks, and his first reaction was "That was awesome!", but later, he said "Dad, I was kind of disappointed in the movie."  He had 2 complaints  - there wasn't much of a part for Michaelangelo, his favorite turtle, and the bad guy turns out to be not all that bad. Andrew's a perceptive critic.  Both complaints get to real problems with the movie. 

When you've got a group of heroes, everyone needs some screen time and a story point.  It's a sign of the writer's incompetence that he ignores Michaelangelo and Donatello to waste an enormous amount of time on the tense relationship between Raphael and Leonardo, a ridiculous subplot that too often pushes aside the main plot.  Seems R. is angry that L. abandoned the group for a year to train in South America, despite the fact that he was ordered to do that by their master.  Makes no sense, and something's wrong when your best, most carefully choreographed fight scene is between two of your friggin' heroes.

And the main plot?  Well, it steals from about a dozen better movies, but it has its points.  Billionaire Max Winter, who is really a three thousand year old warrior-king, is waiting for the stars to line up for some sort of power vortex to emerge; first he must capture 13 monsters, hire a ninja army to do his bidding, and bring 4 stone statues of his former generals to life.  But when it turns out that Max has no evil plan, he only wants to restore balance to the universe, and the 4 generals are the only real bad guys, the tension goes right out of the film.  To win, the Turtles don't have to defeat all those monsters, or the ninja army, or Max - they just have to beat the stone warriors, and not beat them so much as just push them into the vortex.  Easy.  Too easy.   

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So are there any good movies around, besides these CG crapfests?  Well, if Breach, is still playing your neck of the woods, I recommend checking that out.  Chris Cooper is terrific as FBI agent and traitor Robert Hanssen, and the film gets up a good deal of suspense despite the fact that we all know how it turns out.