Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Yesterday, Josh, Sam, Ian and I went to see 300. At the IMAX. We had to go to the cinema in central London because Sam was meeting Lorna later that night, and it seemed like if we were going to pay £12 to buy cinema tickets, we might as well do it in such a way that gets us superior sound quality and sharper images on the country’s biggest cinema screen. Did I mentioned they play you an IMAX infomercial before letting you see the film? Is it that obvious?

It’s a difficult year for films. Hot Fuzz, while good, proved a little disappointing with its lack of world-ending and complete absence of Zombies. Ghost Rider was mediocre, if a little better than expected. Fantastic Four 2, Transformers and The Simpsons are all intensely worrying prospects because they’re all very, very unlikely to meet whatever expectations might be built up, and Spider-Man 3 simply threatens to crush everything else underfoot.

But then, 300. Much like Sin City before it, it’s turned out to be complete fucking genius. It’s not a particularly deep film, but it’s dripping with style the likes of which you don’t often see. I utterly loathe historical epics - Troy, Gladiator, Braveheart, all that kind of thing - but in any year without Spider-Man 3 in it, 300 would undoubtedly emerge as my favourite. It’s a complete pornography of violence, the battle starts about 15 minutes in and more or less continues unabated, and it’s so well-directed that it doesn’t even feel as though that’s the case. I usually hate that kind of film, but it’s utterly gripping throughout. When it ended, I wished it had been longer, and I usually can’t stand long films. Even towards the end of Casino Royale I was starting to lose focus. 

There were some really odd stylistic choices which later make a bit more sense (the battle is depicted as narrated by one of the Spartans, and makes it pretty clear that there’s a bias on the Spartan side which would be worth pointing out to people criticising the film’s politics, and explains why the battle gets increasinly ridiculous until at one point in it, there’s a guy in the Persian army who has swords for arms.) Lack of Spartan armour aside, an extended bout of wiki-ing this morning reveals it to be surprisingly historically accurate, at least event-wise. It seems that their version of Spartan society is a bit more weighted towards the idea of democracy than it should be, but then, they were still shown as reasonably cruel, smacking around children, murdering babies and literally killing the messengers, so it’s not like they sugar-coated things too much. To be honest, the most surprising thing I learnt this morning was that Paolo from Lost was the guy who played Xerxes. You wouldn’t have seen it even if you’d known beforehand.

Anyway, for the next few days I’m going to be interested in learning about Ancient Greece and Wikipedia only gets you so far, so I’m going to go buy a proper book on it next week before my interest fades and I’m back to not caring.