The past month there have been many threads (some that had nothing to do with the movie) that randomly derailed into posts screaming "THIS IS SPAARTHAAA!". Meanwhile, people are hard at work doing these hilarious 300 photo manips:
Some of these are fucking great; Worth1000 worthy...
I love the tubes.
Oh and fuck that dude who kicked a girl down the stairs... he goes straight to jail without passing GO or recieving 200 dollars.
Jeremy Roush let the game do the talking. Adam Sandler watched the plasma television as filmmaker Mike Binder looked on. They were demoing a video game for the Hollywood actor in hopes of convincing him to include it the upcoming Reign Over Me, co-starring Don Cheadle.
As usual, I direct you all to the Pajiba review of 300, which is spot on, but beware of minor spoilers (as in all reviews).
http://www.pajiba.com/300.htm
My metric in what i wrote back to tom in the Neal Stephenson thread dealt with it's faithfulness to the book, and it's power as an action film, but fundamentally, Daniel is correct in his assessment here.
My main caveat is that I don't care if it lacks emotional impact, because it was still so fun.
The high priest of heroism | Stars And Stories | Film | Arts | Telegraph
Topic: Miscellaneous
10:13 am EDT, Mar 23, 2007
"This, I hope, will be the last property of mine that isn't directed by me," says Miller as he settles behind the desk in his New York office. "I was directing on Sin City, learning what I was doing, when they started making 300. I had input, of course, but this is Zack Snyder's film. Zack clearly had such a strong focus on exactly where he wanted to take it, and I liked that. To put it really simply, I always wanted this to be like a story told by a soldier over a campfire."
The story of 300 is indeed just that sort of tale, although it is unlikely that any ancient warrior would understand its current incarnation. This is a live-action picture, with real actors (Scotsman Gerard Butler stars as King Leonidas), but, as with Sin City, they play against a CGI background, in this instance a harsh, epic landscape that recalls Miller's original artwork.
Uh-oh.
I'll reserve real judgement until I see what happends, but just from a gut reaction standpoint, I fear this decision.
Both movies were directed extraordinarily well. His statement that 300 is "Zack Snyder's movie" is kind of asinine. There is maybe 7 minutes of screen time that isn't virually a pixel perfect rendition of the graphic novel. I agree that those 7 minutes didn't really add shit to the film, but really, not so bad.
Matthews grilled DeLay about passages in his book where he apparently ripped into fellow corrupt Texan Dick Armey, eventually asking the Hammer about describing Armey as “drunk with ambition.” DeLay denied writing that. “I wrote that he was ‘blinded by his ambition.’” Matthews starts flipping though the book and finds the “drunk with ambition” quote and reads it to Bug Man. And DeLay keeps denying it. Finally, Chris hands the book to Tom and tells him to read it himself. DeLay looks down, pauses, and says “I don’t have my glasses.”
I know it's a partisan site, but for fucks sake. Just how ridiculous can people be.
Talk about creating a false reality. It's written, in front of his damn face, and he can't own up to it.
On top of which, who cares?! It's such a minimal quote... why even lie about it.
This isn't about the quote itself, but about the lengths these fuckers will go to deny reality.
Its bullshit that people need to hire lawyers to solve their problems. Its ridiculous that the law is written in such confusing and arbitrarily convuluted language that ordinary people can't understand their rights or laws that are meant to protect them.
I'm not sure I agree with this statement. I do agree that it would be nice if everything was simple and understandable, but I'm not at all comfortable with the implication that the world is particularly able to offer that simplicity.
In every field of human endeavor, we hire experts to handle things we do not have sufficient time, inclination or intelligence to learn how to handle on our own.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't strive to make the system as reasonable and accessible as possible, but the logical extension of that is not the elimination of subject matter expertise. You can no more do away with lawyers as with programmers or chefs.
That fundie guy uses the education he has recieved in science to (attempt to) dismantle its core assumptions and prove that his view of the world is correct. If I can do something analagous with my law degree, without convincing myself along the way that my core assumptions about humanity were wrong, then I will consider this lawschool thing a success.
I think this is a noble effort, but i worry that the last statement shows what I consider a flaw. If you are able to convince yourself that your core assumptions were wrong, then why should you consider that a failure? It implies that your current beliefs are absolutely correct, and that modifying them is unacceptable. This is a dangerous starting point, of course.
Without question, we can't just accept everything foisted upon us without analysis, else we end up as sheep. But I should think that the metric must rather be that we allow change at all times, after careful consideration. That is, the only failure possible is a failure to adequately try to understand the reasons we think a certain way.
