David Lynch, Inland Empire

Yesterday you went to see a movie. Today you will write about a movie. Tomorrow, you don't care about tomorrow. Tomorrow even your eggs will be hardboiled.

( Extensive spoilers, but that's not the point )

Did I mention there's about forty seconds of William H. Macy? If you choose to walk out, walk out there. Not at ninety minutes, two hours, or more, as people did. It's an endurance test, right? We have come through.

Zack Snyder, 300

It seems as if Ridley Didley was astute after all. In between Kingdom of Heaven insisting it wasn't Son of Gladiator, it managed to say stuff about Christianity and Islam and their connection and conflicts. It wasn't much, but compare that to 300

Okay, so the salespitch is 300 muscly blokes in skimpy leather shorts - what's not to love?

Well, much.


The Spartans have a strict quality control, so any baby who doesn't measure up is tossed out of the tribe. All the others face elite training, and contribute to the extinction of wolves in Europe.

Leonidas decides, against the judgement of the oracles, to resist the invasion of the Persians (you know, modern day Iran) by taking a force of 300 crack soldiers to defend a convenient strategic landscape. Well, actually, it's not just 300, because there are 700 Thespians - not RADA graduates, although, come to think of it, many of them probably are - but then 1000 isn't a snappy title.

There's a number of set pieces, your Battle of Agincourt arrows, your elephants and, my favorite, the killer rhino. The score seems to remain on the Spartan side, but they have rather more modern tactics at their disposal than the real life Spartans would have done, but sooner or later there is a final stand.

There's also the neat pinning down of cloaks by arrows, which can be escaped in a single bound, and blood seems to evaporate.

They are betrayed, of course. A less than perfect Spartan survived quality control and has grown up bitter and twisted. Think Gollum without the dental plan. A man so hideously deformed that wearing a boot on his head probably improves his looks. He doesn't get to play with the big boys, so he slopes off to hang with the Persians. Cue slaughter.

It's a literal battle of black vs. white. King Xerxes is weighed down with enough bling for 300 rappers, whilst the Spartans are the master race. It's only a surprise that the Spartans don't win.

It's another comic book adaptation, and you'd hope they'd run out by now, only it's Frank Miller who did Sin City and interesting stuff with Batman. Most of it was probably green screened in a studio in Quebec, and none of it looks quite real. And in the meantime it seems to be Gladiator 3.