Madness? This is Sparta!

The kids made stuff today. This was another of the things Quinn is suppose to do based on the recommendation of his food therapist. This task is suppose to increase his textile acceptability I believe. I think the end goal of the concoction was suppose to be some play dough type deal, but all they seemed to do was make a huge mess.


I went and saw 300 tonight with Ben. Let's get the obvious out the way first, this is a guy movie. Sure there are half naked men in the fighting scenes, but trust me, it's a guy movie. The movie suffers a bit from the fact that it's a 'historical' movie, and that is to say if you know the history surrounding the story behind the movie, then you know the ultimate outcome. But as I've said before, watching a movie isn't always about knowing how it ends, but rather how it gets there. This movie mostly delivers, but ends up meandering a bit at times. Don't get me wrong, I found the movie entertaining, but not fantastic. This movie is based off the graphic novel story by Frank Miller. You may know the name Frank Miller from "The Dark Knight Returns" and "Sin City" (based off how much money this film made over the weekend, my guess is you'll be seeing more of Frank's Stuff up on the big screen in the future). And much like the Sin City movie adaptation, I've hear this is fairly true to the original work (that would be the graphical novel, since I seriously doubt it's faithful to actual history). Also like Sin City, this film was shot mostly in blue screen (although I think Sin City was actually green screened) with special effects filling in backgrounds. Unlike Sin City though, this movie isn't in Black and White. The movie is violent, I mean really violent. It's to the point where you get desensitized to it by the end of the film. There's a separate subplot that seems to be there simply to not have constant fighting scenes, but that subplot seems to have no real consequence and you wonder why it's even there. There was also some stuff at the beginning concerning oracles that was sort of out there and seemed to have little overall bearing on the movie other than to show some partial nudity.

Despite all that I'm going to go out on a limb here and say if you like the movie Gladiator, then you'll probably like this. I'm not sure I think it's as good as Gladiator, but the two films are in the same vein and I think have the same basic feel to them. That's not to say they're exactly the same. Gladiator I feel was somewhat realistic. Stuff in 300 just seems over the top at times, especially the guys they fight. There are some strange aspects of the guys they're fighting. The leader of the Persians is just plain odd, as are some his lackeys. And they seem to keep one upping the oddness factor of the Persians as the movie progresses (which I'm sure will work a lot better in the inevitable video game than I think they do in the movie). All in all, I found it an entertaining movie, but not one that I would line up to go see again, nor do I think I would want to own it in my home collection.