See What Show: “300” special


300 Special

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A See What Show special! mrbrown and Steve give you their views on the movie “300″, based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel! Right after they watched it an hour ago at the Gala Premiere! Fresh off the podcast oven! Are we hardcore or not?

Was it good? Listen and find out!

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We have our winners for the 300 movie contest!

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Thanks See What Show for the Tickets! My gf and me really enjoyed ourselves at this movie, esp after a long day at work. Was apprehensive at first as i thought its more like a guys show. But turns out my gf was like going “Oh he’s so cool! Spartans are so cool!” throughout the whole show. She thoroughly enjoys it. hehe, makes me wanna get my own six packs.
For me, it was the most realistic Greek fighting formation i’ve ever seen and the action simply blows. And to knowing that this battle really happened in history and watching it on screen was simply surreal.
My only gripe was the Persian’s “Human-Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction” seems too far fetched and goes into the realm of fantasty.
Besides that, go watch it! Its a must watch, weekend movie!

[…] read more | digg story Posted by junioz Filed in Uncategorized […]

Speaking of over the top ( that fact that an army of 300 took on an army of 1 million)…it reminded me of the show, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ which Orlando Bloom starred in, he was in virtually the so-called ‘GOD’ mode..only wearing a chainmail, he hacked his way to victory unscathed. haha movies just love to sensationalise things somewhat but well it makes the ticket price worthwhile i guess.

Wow, my first exposure to your podcast. Very entertaining.
This is my first time I’ve seen an embedded podcast in an blog. How do you do it?

Norlinda

Hi Norlinda! Thanks for dropping by! Glad you like the show! We use a Flash-based player that pulls the show from our server. We think it’s pretty nifty too, and great for when you want to listen to the show on the site directly. We use the same player on mrbrownshow.com and wtfshow.com too!

Thanks for the recommendation, Steve and MB. I wasn’t sure about this one, not being a fan of the war genre. But after your review that made it sound like the fanstasy meets comicbook film that it was, I am glad I saw it.

I am surprised you didn’t have more to say about Xerxes. I loved the way they portrayed him and his duality in every aspect- Man-God, cruel-kind, man-woman, straight-gay. He was the ultimate bad guy.

heya nalinee,

i know i didn’t say much cos watever ramblings i might have said, would not have done it justice.

instead you get to go to the movie and see it in all its glory without my rubbish clouding your mind like some 50c sith lord.

woot~

Congrats to the winners again! I read the graphic novel and I really really really want to watch the movie, but I’m a few years too young to pass the rating…

Still, fingers crosses for the 300 DVD!

http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/190493

Sparta? No. This is madness TheStar.com - artsentertainment - Sparta? No. This is madness
An expert assesses the gruesome new epic
March 11, 2007

The battle of Thermopylae was real, but how real is 300? Ephraim Lytle, assistant professor of hellenistic history at the University of Toronto, has seen the movie and offers his view.

History is altered all the time. What matters is how and why. Thus I see no reason to quibble over the absence in 300 of breastplates or modest thigh-length tunics. I can see the graphic necessity of sculpted stomachs and three hundred Spartan-sized packages bulging in spandex thongs. On the other hand, the ways in which 300 selectively idealizes Spartan society are problematic, even disturbing.

We know little of King Leonidas, so creating a fictitious backstory for him is understandable. Spartan children were, indeed, taken from their mothers and given a martial education called the agoge. They were indeed toughened by beatings and dispatched into the countryside, forced to walk shoeless in winter and sleep uncovered on the ground. But future kings were exempt.

And had Leonidas undergone the agoge, he would have come of age not by slaying a wolf, but by murdering unarmed helots in a rite known as the Crypteia. These helots were the Greeks indigenous to Lakonia and Messenia, reduced to slavery by the tiny fraction of the population enjoying Spartan “freedom.” By living off estates worked by helots, the Spartans could afford to be professional soldiers, although really they had no choice: securing a brutal apartheid state is a full-time job, to which end the Ephors were required to ritually declare war on the helots.

Elected annually, the five Ephors were Sparta’s highest officials, their powers checking those of the dual kings. There is no evidence they opposed Leonidas’ campaign, despite 300’s subplot of Leonidas pursuing an illegal war to serve a higher good. For adolescents ready to graduate from the graphic novel to Ayn Rand, or vice-versa, the historical Leonidas would never suffice. They require a superman. And in the interests of portentous contrasts between good and evil, 300’s Ephors are not only lecherous and corrupt, but also geriatric lepers.

Ephialtes, who betrays the Greeks, is likewise changed from a local Malian of sound body into a Spartan outcast, a grotesquely disfigured troll who by Spartan custom should have been left exposed as an infant to die. Leonidas points out that his hunched back means Ephialtes cannot lift his shield high enough to fight in the phalanx. This is a transparent defence of Spartan eugenics, and laughably convenient given that infanticide could as easily have been precipitated by an ill-omened birthmark.

300’s Persians are ahistorical monsters and freaks. Xerxes is eight feet tall, clad chiefly in body piercings and garishly made up, but not disfigured. No need – it is strongly implied Xerxes is homosexual which, in the moral universe of 300, qualifies him for special freakhood. This is ironic given that pederasty was an obligatory part of a Spartan’s education. This was a frequent target of Athenian comedy, wherein the verb “to Spartanize” meant “to bugger.” In 300, Greek pederasty is, naturally, Athenian.

This touches on 300’s most noteworthy abuse of history: the Persians are turned into monsters, but the non-Spartan Greeks are simply all too human. According to Herodotus, Leonidas led an army of perhaps 7,000 Greeks. These Greeks took turns rotating to the front of the phalanx stationed at Thermoplyae where, fighting in disciplined hoplite fashion, they held the narrow pass for two days. All told, some 4,000 Greeks perished there. In 300 the fighting is not in the hoplite fashion, and the Spartans do all of it, except for a brief interlude in which Leonidas allows a handful of untrained Greeks to taste the action, and they make a hash of it. When it becomes apparent they are surrounded, this contingent flees. In Herodotus’ time there were various accounts of what transpired, but we know 700 hoplites from Thespiae remained, fighting beside the Spartans, they, too, dying to the last man.

No mention is made in 300 of the fact that at the same time a vastly outnumbered fleet led by Athenians was holding off the Persians in the straits adjacent to Thermopylae, or that Athenians would soon save all of Greece by destroying the Persian fleet at Salamis. This would wreck 300’s vision, in which Greek ideals are selectively embodied in their only worthy champions, the Spartans.

This moral universe would have appeared as bizarre to ancient Greeks as it does to modern historians. Most Greeks would have traded their homes in Athens for hovels in Sparta about as willingly as I would trade my apartment in Toronto for a condo in Pyongyang.