“The 300″ Heroic Battle or Twisted Propaganda
by Jeff Davis
“The 300″ has garnered 70 million dollars in its opening weekend, which is unprecedented for an epic historical movie that heavily uses blue screen technology. Apparently it’s a well done action movie, but is there anything subliminal or fishy about it? What would make it acceptable to the Hollywood elite who determine which movies appear in theaters and which don’t? Hollywood usually doesn’t glorify great moments in European history so something funny is going on.
According to the Toronto Star, Hellenic scholar Ephraim Lytle sees a lot of disturbing inaccuracies that may go beyond the usual Hollywood “dramatic license” of the kind that had the courtiers of Louis XV disco-dancing at Versailles in the atrocious film Marie Antoinette. In an interview with the Star, Lytle says that “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.” Uh, wait a minute. That is the first problem I would have with the flick, assuming that what I saw in the trailers is confirmed. In the first place, Greece gets pretty damned cold in the winter. Spandex thongs may be a slight exaggeration, the garments looked more like Ghandi-style “diapers” for lack of a better word. The movie trailers show the Spartans wearing helmets, shields, “diapers” and capes —that leaves a lot of vulnerable skin for arrows to strike. (more…)