After giving it a little more thought, however, I realized that the way the Academy defines “good acting” offered a better explanation.

To be clear, Margot Robbie is great in the movie. Barbie is an inhuman character who is the abstract embodiment of girls struggling to find their role in the world (or something like that), yet Robbie finds a way to make her relatable and charming. Given that she’s in almost every scene in the movie, she did an incredible amount of work.

But it’s just not the kind of role that wins Oscars. Robbie was playing a literal child’s doll. In the movie, she describes herself as “Stereotypical Barbie.” This is a character that doesn’t look, behave, or think like a normal human. The Academy wants characters who feel strong emotions, characters who suffer tragedy and feel pain.

If Robbie wanted an Oscar nomination, Barbie would need a rewrite. The Academy has no room for Barbie-with-thoughts. But there could be a nomination for Barbie-with-cancer. Or Barbie as a single mom. Barbie with a heroin addiction. Unemployed Barbie. Disabled Barbie. Rape Victim Barbie. The Academy loves suffering.

I mean, just take a look at the characters played by this year’s Best Actress nominees (spoilers ahead):

• Annet Benning in Nyad, where her character overcomes a history of child sexual abuse to complete a grueling swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage at the age of 64.
• Lily Gladstone, in Killers of the Flower Moon, where she plays an Osage women whose husband tries to murder her entire family in order to gain control of the oil rights under Osage tribal land.
• Sandra Hüller in Anatomy of a Fall, where she plays a German bisexual novelist with a blind son who is accused of murdering her husband.
• Carey Mulligan in Maestro, where her character is married to philandering bisexual substance abusing musician until she dies of breast cancer.
• Emma Stone in Poor Things, where she commits suicide and is resurrected by a mad scientist after which she runs off and ends up in a brothel before returning to an abusive ex-husband.

Margo Robbie’s Barbie can’t lay a hand on that level of misery and torment.

You can see the same principle at work in the Oscar history of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I think it’s fair to say that the character of Barbie is written at about the same level of realism as many of the superhero and supervillain characters in the MCU, many of whom are played by people just as talented as Margo Robbie. Yet despite their box office success and cultural influence, the thirty-three films of the MCU have given us only a single acting nomination, which went to Angela Bassett in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. You may remember that she played T’Challa’s mother, Ramonda. In other words, she played a widowed mother who was mourning her dead son.

I think the Academy’s notion of quality acting is at least as good an explanation for Robbie’s Oscar snub as sexism.

Or so I thought…until I found out the Academy gave Ryan Gosling a Best Supporting Actor nomination for his role in Barbie. He played Ken. You know, Barbie’s boyfriend, who has no life of his own. He’s basically the character equivalent of a lukewarm glass of tap water.

Never mind. I got nothing.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Why Margo Robbie Wasn’t Nominated

As should be clear from the trailers, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is not a traditional sequel to the original Ghostbusters movie. It’s not the same kind of story told the same way. If Ghostbusters was the first Star Wars movie, then Afterlife is Rogue One. It’s a different story in the same world.

This story begins with a mother and her two kids inheriting an old farmhouse just outside the small town of Summerville. Exploring the farm, the kids and their friends stumble across a bunch of mysterious objects left behind by the previous owner. Those of us who were fans of the original movie (i.e. pretty much everyone who sees this movie) will recognize these mysterious objects as tools of the ghostbusting trade. Discovering how and why these ghostbusting tools got to be there is the subject of the rest of the movie.

That’s not an easy task for the protagonists. It’s been more than three decades since the setting of the original Ghostbusters movie, and the ghostly events in Manhattan are just distant history as far as the film’s youthful cast is concerned, so they have to get clues by talking to their school science teacher and watching YouTube clips of the news coverage — taken straight from the original Ghostbusters movie. (Wisely, the filmmakers seem to have excised Ghostbusters II from history.)

With its small-town setting, young protagonists, and easy-going pace, the best parts of Ghostbusters: Afterlife play like an extended bonus episode of Stranger Things set against the Ghostbusters mythos, and who wouldn’t want to see that? (It doesn’t hurt that Finn Wolfhard from ST plays one of the kids.)

And there’s something really great about seeing all that ghostbusting equipment again. The props have been gently re-imagined, and watching the kids discover them…the way they’re filmed…they all feel so real. Even a wacky prop like the P.K.E. meter, with it’s silly pop-out antennas, somehow feels like a functioning piece of technology. The proton packs look like heavily-used but lovingly-maintained industrial tools, and they still make that same great sound.

The movie includes a fair amount of fan service, so it should come as no surprise that several original Ghostbusters cast members make brief appearances. Unfortunately, they bring along some of the irreverent spirit of the first movie, which kind of clashes with the more heart-felt tone of this one. Afterlife is by no means a “gritty reboot,” but it does take the characters and their emotions seriously enough that you would care if something bad happened to one of them. It feels like they’re in danger, and you never felt that way about Bill Murray in the first movie.

The ending also feels rushed. The early parts of the movie meandered past some interesting ideas and introduced a few subplots, but when the main conflict is resolved, the movie just ends, with little in the way of epilogue to show us how anything else turned out.

Nevertheless, the story was pretty coherent, the effects have all been updated without being unrecognizable, and it was fun to watch.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ghostbusters: Afterlife — Review

I still don’t care about House Atreides and House Harkonnen. I’m tired of hearing about the Bene Gesserit and the Kwisatz Haderach, the Padishah Emperor and his Imperial Sardaukar troops, and Paul’s mysterious connection to the Fremen (He knows how to wear a stillsuit correctly, oh my!). The whole wheels-within-wheels, schemes-within-schemes, secret-societies-within-secret-societies thing just doesn’t intrigue me as much as Frank Herbert wants it to.

In fact, the whole Dune universe just doesn’t work for me. It’s set something like 20,000 years in the future and has giant spaceships, but it’s filled with a superstitious medieval culture that fights with knives. I realize there are in-universe explanations for why things are the way they are, such as how shields make knives more effective than guns, but that doesn’t make it stop feeling silly.

And the whole Arrakis plot doesn’t make sense. If you’re prepared to invade a planet to destroy House Atreide, why don’t the Harkonnens and the Emperor just combine forces and attack them on Caladan? Instead, the Emperor gets the Harkonnens to abandon Arrakis, which they already control, only to return and try to take it back by force with help from the Emperor. That seems like an awful lot of trouble.

(Although actually, the initial invasion is super-easy, barely an inconvenience. Somehow the Harkonnens are able to enter the solar system, land ships on Arrakis, and get troops all the way to the door of the palace before anyone notices. And they are helped with this because the Atreides’ personal doctor, who holds no military command, is somehow able to disable the shields and let them in.)

I’ve now seen both movies (and the miniseries) and tried to read the book several times, but it just doesn’t draw me in. I realize that some of the things that bother me have explanations in the book, but that doesn’t help me enjoy it any more.

Dune is widely regarded as one of the greatest science fiction stories of all time, but for whatever reason, I can’t get into it. I find much of it unlikeable.

Having said all that, if you’re still interested in my review…

This is certainly my favorite version of the story. It’s beautiful to watch, some of the characters are amusing, and the story (as much of it as we get in this first half) is told with some clarity. Also, one of Dune‘s silliest ideas — ornithopters — actually works visually, as these ornithopters traverse the desert like ferocious insects, angry and powerful.

I hope this Dune does well enough to get its sequel, because fans of the story deserve something this beautiful.

But I won’t get very excited about it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Dune – Review

https://twitter.com/evanrachelwood/status/1147213677247860737

(Because I don’t trust Twitter embeds, she wrote: “You should never date a guy like the cop from #strangerthings Extreme jealousy and violent rages are not flattering or sexy like TV would have you believe. That is all.”)

Some of her critics have been tediously pointing out that Sheriff Jim Hopper is a fictional character, as if we don’t discuss the ethics of of fictional characters all the time. (Also, as I’ll explain in a minute, part of Wood’s point is that real people aren’t like Hopper.)

Many other critics make a somewhat better point, which is that Hopper never hits Joyce Byers or any of the kids. He may be filled with rage, but he doesn’t actually hurt anyone — except the show’s bad guys, of course. That’s not a completely satisfying response, however, because angry men don’t have to actually hit women to scare the crap out of them, and scaring the crap out of someone is certainly abusive.

All of which brings me to the point that I think Wood was trying to make with her tweet: Fictional people like Hopper and real people like Hopper are not the same thing.

Fictional Sheriff Hopper is a guy with issues. He gets angry a lot. However, no matter how pissed-off he gets, Hopper would never actually hit Joyce or any of the children. We know this, because we recognize him as a well-known fictional archetype: The Violent Male Who Only Hurts Bad People.

That guy is everywhere in our fiction, from James Bond to Dominic Toretto to John Wick. Many comic superheros fit the mold — Batman, Wolverine, Deadpool, the Punisher, the Hulk, Hellboy — as do many of the love interests in romance novels. Actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Dwayne Johnson have spent half their careers playing some variation of that character. When we see this guy, we all know him, and we all know he’s not going to hurt the innocent people in his life.

The objection that abusive men don’t have to hit women to abuse them doesn’t really apply either because, by the rules of the genre, the fictional women and fictional children in his fictional life are quite aware that he won’t hurt them. In Stranger Things, Joyce Byers is startled and confused by Hopper’s rage at times, but she never reacts like she’s really afraid of him.

(I didn’t re-watch the entire show, but I can’t remember any real fear of him. If I got that wrong, I’ll have to walk this back.)

Another example of this is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s character in Kindergarden Cop. He’s a tough police detective who goes undercover as a school teacher. Much of the humor in the movie comes from the fact that no one is afraid of him — not the women teachers, not the lady principle, and not any of the children.

In the real world, violent people don’t follow genre rules. People with impulse control problems aren’t always able to draw the lines so carefully. They don’t just get violent with criminals and terrorists. They hurt people who are close to them, either because they can’t tell the difference, or because they just don’t care. In real life, guys who act like Hopper can be dangerous to have in your life.

We put up with a lot in fictional characters that we shouldn’t in real life. Fictional TV cops like Walt Longmire or Steve McGarrett beat the crap out of suspects, and we’re more or less okay with it, because Cop Who Breaks All The Rules For Justice is another well-known archetype. This cop may break the rules, but he always only does it to keep really bad people from getting away. This is unlike real-life rule-breaking cops, who are more likely to beat the crap out of 15-year-old turnstile jumpers who mouth off.

Another example is the character of Leroy Jethro Gibbs on NCIS. As a fictional character, he comes across as a stern teacher and charmingly gruff boss. But a real-life boss who bullies his employees, sometimes even hitting them, is an HR nightmare who drags down everyone on his team. 

Or, getting back to Stranger Things, let’s think about the character of Eleven for a minute. This is a child who was isolated and emotionally abused all her life, and who was subjected to unethical science experiments. And at every moment she is carrying a weapon — her dangerous psychic ability — with which she has already killed at least a dozen people. Knowing all this about her, would you really let her anywhere near your children?

It’s the nature of our relationship to fiction that we empathize with the protagonists of a story, even when they are objectively bad people. The movie Bonnie and Clyde from 1967 is a notorious example that made a couple of murderous bank robbers into romantic protagonists. More recently, the writers on Breaking Bad used this effect with Walter White, intentionally making him into a self-absorbed violent jerk…who we still wanted to see win.

The effect doesn’t always work, however, because sometimes viewers have trouble getting past real life. I liked the Major Crimes police procedural stories, but every now and then I found myself yelling at the screen because they did something I had read about in one of Radley Balko’s gut-punching stories of police misconduct. I also had trouble enjoying the 1991 comedy Nothing But Trouble, about a bunch of big-city travelers who get in trouble in a small town ruled by a sadistic judge who likes to use a special machine called “Mr. Bonestripper” to execute people without a proper trial. It’s supposed to be a dark comedy, but I couldn’t get it out of my head that there are real places in the world where sadistic rulers find amusing ways to kill people who anger them.

For Evan Rachel Wood watching Stranger Things, it was Hopper’s out-of-control anger that was too close to reality. She knows a thing or two about sexual assault and domestic violence, and Hopper set off some warnings. He’s an entertaining character, but she wouldn’t want the real-world version of him in her life.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Is Chief Hopper a Perpetrator of Domestic Violence?

I managed to catch one of the sneak preview showings of Shazam! last week, and I thought it lived up to the promise of the trailer. Without a lot the sturm and drang that has afflicted so many DC-Comics-based movies lately, it was just two hours of enjoyable comic escapism.

I grew up reading these comics, and back in the 1970s when young Billy Batson said the magic word “Shazam!” he turned into a superhero named “Captain Marvel.” That name would be confusing to modern audiences — and it would probably anger the lawyers at Marvel, which has a completely different Captain Marvel in theaters right now — so nowadays the character is known simply as “Shazam.” Nevertheless, although I have nothing against the fine work of Carol Danvers, Billy Batson’s alter ego who will always be the true Captain Marvel to me.

(The original Captain Marvel stories published by Fawcett in the early 1940s were incredibly popular, outselling even rival National’s Superman comics, on which the Captain Marvel character was loosely based. The sad story of the comic’s subsequent downfall involves rather a lot of intellectual property lawyers.)

The new Shazam! movie is clearly based on the 2012 incarnation of the character from the New 52 reboot by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank. The biggest change from the comics I read is that Silver Age Captain Marvel was an adult superhero with an adult personality completely separate from Billy’s, but in this incarnation, the big guy with super-powers is still young Billy Batson on the inside. He’s a 15-year-old with superpowers, and that makes for some hilarious moments. And no, you haven’t already seen all of them in the trailer.

Although Billy’s exploration of his new superpowers makes up a substantial portion of the movie, as it does in the trailers, the main plot of the movie involves a confrontation with one of Captain Marvel’s traditional foes, Dr. Thaddeus Sivana, played with steely menace by Mark Strong. Sivana has come into his own magical superpowers through darker means than Billy, and he wishes to use them for darker ends.

But this is not a dark movie. Shazam! never loses touch with its origins in a superhero comic series that had a lot of zany fun. Perhaps more importantly, Shazam! avoids the recent DC misstep of having the bad guys kill tens of thousands of people and then trying to call whatever happens next a happy ending. The bad guy in Shazam! is certainly bad, but without all that unnecessary tragedy porn.

Speaking of those other movies, although Superman and Batman are name-dropped as actually existing in the world of Shazam!, this movie does not appear to take place in the same DC Extended Universe as movies like like Justice League. That’s probably a good thing.

Finally, at the risk of a small spoiler, I’d like to head off some disappointment for fans who may have heard enticing rumors: Sorry, but Tawny does not appear as a character in this film. And in case you’re wondering, there are two closing credits scenes. The first is foreshadowing of a future villain, and the second is just a bit of fun.

Shazam! opens widely in theaters on Friday.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Shazam! – Review

At the end, they flash a couple of corporate logos. I naturally had to step through them. The first one is a new logo for Weyland-Yutani, which is the name of the fictional corporation (usually referred to as “The Corporation”) that has been running through all the films. The second logo, however, says “Intelligence powered by AMD.”

AMD is a real-world semiconductor manufacturer, and I gotta say, as product placements go, that’s pretty cool. (Not Mattel-hoverboard-in-Back-to-the-Future cool, but still pretty cool.)

It says something about my life that I immediately turned to my wife and commented on the absence of Hyperdyne Systems. Then we shared a brief moment of confusion between Hyperdyne Systems and Cyberdyne Systems — one is from the Alien series, the other from Terminator — before reassuring ourselves that, yes, Hyperdyne was the maker of the synthetics in the Alien series.

This is why we’re married.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at An Alien Product Placement

In case you’re wondering, no, I didn’t dress up. There wasn’t any single character I wanted to be. My personality was pretty much Brad, but my body type ran more to Eddie. And when you come right down to it, I kind of admired Riff Raff — he was a faithful handyman, and throughout it all he kept his cool and stayed on mission. (Unlike many of my friends, I actually knew the film had a plot.) In the face of that indecision, making a costume just seemed like too much work.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking for a while that somebody should do a remake, if only to give it some modern production values. I know it’s supposed to be cheesy, but dear God those special effects are awful. I was pretty interested when I heard that Fox was planning a new made-for-TV version of Rocky Horror, but I stayed away from reading much about it because I knew it would be controversial among the fans, and I just don’t want to read endless complaints and bickering about every choice from casting to choreography. So maybe it will be fun, or maybe it will suck, or (worst of all) maybe it will just be mediocre, but I’m still looking forward to seeing it when it airs this Thursday night.

I did however stumble across a preview clip of the title sequence from the new version, and they’ve brought back Trixie from the play. She’s a movie theater usherette who sings the opening number, “Science Fiction/Double Feature,” to set up the frame that the rest of the play is supposed to be imagined as a cheesy low-budget B-movie. Richard O’Brien wanted to keep Trixie in the film, but it would have been too expensive, and since Rocky Horror was an actual low-budget B-grade movie, the frame wasn’t as important, so they saved a lot of money by just filming the now-iconic floating lips. Although this version of Rocky Horror is based on the film, not the play, I guess they decided to put Trixie back in because that’s how it was originally intended to be.

(Also, it’s rumored that much of the cost of the original opening was obtaining the rights to images from all the films that it references, and nowadays, even though they’re all science fiction classics, Rocky Horror is probably more famous than most of them.)

And it’s a good thing Trixie’s back, because Ivy Levan’s performance is stunning:

https://youtu.be/RiNEYHP9TWI

[Updated with new Fox-approved version of the video.]

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Late Night Double Feature Picture Show

How Is It Possible For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White?

Let’s do the math.

When looking at racial statistics in the United States, it’s important to remember that black people really are a minority. I’ve seen complaints of the form “It’s outrageous that only 10% of <whatever> are black!”, but that’s actually not too bad. According to recent census estimates, approximately 12.6% of Americans are black, so 10% isn’t too far off. Depending what we’re talking about, the 2.6% difference could easily be explained by benign cultural and environmental differences.

Given that 12.6% of Americans are black, and assuming for purposes of the calculation that academy award voters are not racially biased in any way, what are the chances that not a single acting nominee is black? Could it just be random chance?

If there was only one nominee, then there would be a 12.6% chance of picking a black actor, which is the same as saying that there would be a 100% – 12.6% = 87.4% chance of picking a non-black actor. Expand the selection to two nominees, and there’s an 87.4% chance that the first one will be non-black, and then another 87.4% chance that the second one will also be non-black. So the chance of both of them being non-black is 87.4% * 87.4% = 76.4%. More generally, every time we add another person to the sample, that’s another 87.4% chance to keep the non-black streak going. So if we choose a group of N people at random, the chance of all of them being non-black is given by

[latex](0.874)^N[/latex]

From this, we can get the odds of all five nominees for Best Actor being non-black,

[latex](0.874)^5 = 0.510[/latex]

So we’d expect the Best Actor category to shut out black actors about half the time, even if the nomination process is completely colorblind. Add in Best Actress — raising the size of the sample to 10 nominees — and that works out to about 1-in-4 chance of a black shut-out:

[latex](0.874)^{10} = 0.260[/latex]

Two years in a row makes it 20 people, and the odds get worse:

[latex](0.874)^{20} = 0.068[/latex]

In other words, pure random chance will deliver an a slate of Best Actor and Best Actress nominees with no black nominees about 7% of the time.

I was just about to conclude that it’s not unreasonable that completely colorblind Academy could give black actors a two-year shutout entirely by chance, but then I noticed that Spike Lee says “For The 2nd Consecutive Year All 20 Contenders Under The Actor Category Are White.” At first I thought Lee made a mistake — I counted 20 Best Actor and Best Actress nominees over both years, i.e. two consecutive years of 10 nominees, not 20 — but then I realized Lee is also including the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories, which also haven’t had any black people for two years. That’s a 40-person-long streak of non-black nominees. The odds of that are pretty low:

[latex](0.874)^{40} = 0.00458[/latex]

That’s less than a 1-in-200 chance that this could have happened entirely by random selection. That’s not impossible, but it’s pretty unlikely. By comparison, in the social sciences, any result that has a less than 1-in-20 chance of arising under random chance is considered significant enough to publish. The lack of black acting nominees is very unlikely to be random chance. Something is going on here.

These simple statistics alone, however, cannot tell us what that something is. All we’re doing is comparing the racial composition of the population of acting nominees to the racial composition of the entire population of the United States. There’s a lot of room between those two populations to explain the differences, which could be caused by a number of factors other than racist voters in the Academy. For example, just making stuff up off the top of my head,

• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less likely to think of acting as a legitimate career choice, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools makes it 10% less likely that blacks will get in, and
• Perhaps racial bias in acting schools cause blacks to receive 10% less effective educations in acting, and
• Perhaps cultural and environmental conditions make black Americans 10% less able to devote time and energy to their acting careers (e.g. because of a greater need for a paying day job), and
• Perhaps racially biased casting directors are 10% less likely to cast black actors in the bit parts that will give them experience and exposure, and
• Perhaps racially biased screen writers are 10% less likely to write major parts for black characters, and
• Perhaps racially biased studio heads devote 10% less promotional effort to movies with black leads (possibly in response to racially biased audiences spending less on those movies), and finally
• Perhaps racially biased Acedemy voters are 10% less likely to vote for black actors and actresses.

Combine all of those elements, and the calculation looks something like this:

[latex]\left(1-\text{0.126} (1-0.10)^8\right)^{40} = 0.108[/latex]

So if there’s a 10% drag on blacks at eight different places along the way, then the odds of a two-year shutout for the acting categories is about 1 in 9. That means this explanation is statistically plausible.

I should emphasize, however, that I totally made up those explanations and the numbers to go with them, merely as an illustration of the kinds of things that might influence the acting nominations. These are the kinds of things we might want to look for if we are serious about figuring out what’s happening. It could turn out that all of the bias is indeed at the Academy voting stage, in which case a boycott might be a sensible response. Or it could just be that there is just an accumulated drag on black actors which builds up enough over their careers to keep them out of the nominations. I have no idea.

But I can do the math. And at 1-in-200 odds…something is going on.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Little Oscar Math

Besides, they’ve got the wrong person playing the Terminator. It’s true that Arnold Schwarzenegger created the role, but he doesn’t own it. In my mind, the role belongs to the one person who’s played a Terminator for much more screen time than Arnold ever did:

Summer Glau played Cameron the Terminator for 33 episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which took place after the events of the second movie and which did more intelligent things with the world of John Connor and Skynet than than either of the last two movies. Or probably the next one.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Wrong Terminator

I’m not alone in facing this decision. The big-budget movie is based on the much beloved science fiction book of the same name, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards. However, a lot of people are reluctant to see it because its author, Orson Scott Card, has in later years turned out to be something of a deranged anti-gay bigot. There’s even an organized boycott of the movie, to which Card has responded with a somewhat tone-deaf call for “tolerance.”

Personally, though, Card’s despicable politics aren’t the problem for me. I don’t pay much attention to the politics of the artists whose work I enjoy because it seems like a silly place to draw the line. I mean, I give business to my dry cleaner without a clue about how she feels about gay marriage, and I couldn’t begin to guess how my auto mechanic feels about immigration. And that waitress I tipped a few days ago — for all I know, she donated the money to Stormfront. As a libertarian, I’m sure most of the people I pay money to every day are supporters of political ideas I oppose, but I see no point in obsessing over it or allocating my spending according to any criteria other than what I want to buy. And I see no reason why I should start making an exception for art.

Other people feel differently, of course, and many of them face a real dilemma: They loved the book, and they expect the movie to be equally amazing and wonderful, but they don’t want to support an anti-gay bigot like Card, not even symbolically.

My reluctance to see the movie is due to something completely different. You see, I have a confession to make: Unlike all those loved-the-book-but-hate-the-author folks, I didn’t like the book. I didn’t hate it either. I barely even remember it. Something about a child who is raised to be a commander in a war against some aliens, right? And “the enemy’s gate is down” is supposed to mean something…?

Whatever.

I generally like science fiction, and I might enjoy the story more as a movie than a book. So I might go see it. Or my wife and I might just spend the weekend reading some good books.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Ender’s Game…Meh

Almost nobody mentions that. Everybody talks about the controversial issues raised by Catherine Bigelow’s new movie about the hunt for Osama bin Laden — the use of torture, the slam at criminal defense lawyers — but if you can set aside your differences with the politics of the characters (and by extension, the filmmakers) Zero Dark Thirty is thoroughly enjoyable as a modern espionage thriller about an intelligence agency’s attempts to break open a terrorist network and trace it to its heart. The plot may not be as intricate as George Smiley’s battle with Karla, but the movie is filled with crunchy details of tradecraft, and the characters are just as morally dubious.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Zero Dark Thirty – Short Review

So my wife and I went to see Resident Evil: Retribution last weekend. We decided to splurge a bit on the tickets, because if we’re going to watch some trashy hot-chick violence porn, we really should watch it in IMAX 3D.

This movie hits all the key points of the Resident Evil franchise: Zombies, soldiers, zombie soldiers, a giant slimy boss creature, Milla Jovovich face-kicking zombies, Milla Jovovich gunning down zombies with a pair of shiny pistols, Milla Jovovich waking up on the floor half naked… It was exactly what I expected.

I think this film has secured Jovovich’s position as the top name in ass-kicking ladies (although there is much to be said for Kate Beckinsale in Underworld: Awakening — I’d pay money to see a slow-motion 3D catfight between Alice and Selene). But just in case Milla’s not enough, she’s brought a few friends. Sienna Guillory returns as Jill Valentine, although for most of the movie she is acting under the influence of evil forces. Li Bingbing also makes a good impression as Ada Wong, but she doesn’t get a lot of screen time.

The real stand-out guest ass-kicking hot chick, however, is Michele Rodriguez, returning in full bad-girl mode. You may remember that her character, Rain Ocampo, died in the first movie, but as you might also remember, the Umbrella Corporation has can clone full-grown adults. This allows Rodriguez to come back as a badass evil twin of Rain. But it also allows her to come back as another clone of herself that’s been imprinted with a standard-issue suburban soccer mom personality. After seeing Rodriguez playing so many tough chicks with her patented Sleepy-Eyelid Stare of Contempt, I honestly didn’t know she could play anything else. It was kind of fun to discover her versatility.

The plot is the usual Resident Evil goofiness, involving a giant underground Umbrella Corporation testing facility where the aformentioned cloning takes place. It’s mostly just a plot device to allow the filmmakers to bring back some popular characters. In fact, between the regular returning characters, the cloned characters, and the characters who have switched sides, I’ve pretty much lost track of who’s who. They could swap them all around in the next movie, and I’d never notice the discontinuity.

One thing that surprised me about Resident Evil: Retribution was that parts of it were strikingly beautiful. The opening credits begin with Alice floating underwater and then move backwards in slow motion to show how she got there after the ship she was on is attacked. It’s a violent and stunning visual.

Through some more plot goofiness I can’t get into without spoilers, other beautifully-filmed action scenes are set in Tokyo, Moscow, New York, and a submarine pen in the Kamchatka peninsula. There’s also a visually arresting sequence set on the surface of a frozen sea filled with trapped ships.

What more can I say? Do lots of people die? Are lots of zombies shot in the head? Does Alice get away? Does she discover in the end that there is still more fighting to be done in the next movie? I think you can guess.

Still, if you want to see another Resident Evil movie, well, this one is as good as any of them.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Resident Evil: Retribution – Review

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at God Bless Bobcat Goldthwait’s America

It was well-written too, which is a bit of a surprise since there are six credited writers, which is usually a very bad sign. Instead, the movie gives us a pretty good origin story for the X-Men as an organization.

Most superhero stories are escapist fun at a very basic level, and First Class delivers, but as with many of the best superhero comics, there’s a strong moral element. Some people complain that comic characters are too simple, but that misses the point. The characters in a story like this are simplified to make their moral choices clearer.

Charles Xavier is a mutant raised in a good home. He’s smart, wealthy, and in possession of a telepathic power with few downsides. He looks completely like a normal human and wants to get along with them.

Hank McCoy’s beastly mutation has its advantages, but he’s also noticeably deformed. He can hide it with the right clothes, but it makes him feel like an outcast. Charles’s adopted sister Raven, later to become Mystique, also feels like an outcast. Her power of disguise allows her to hide herself perfectly, but she resents the need to use it.

Then there’s Erik Lehnsherr, a.k.a. Magneto, who looks like a normal human. However, as a Jewish child in the heart of Nazi germany, he saw the cruelty that humans could inflict on those who were different. He hides now, but he thinks that a Nazi-like genocide of mutants is inevitable, unless the mutants destroy humanity first.

Please don’t let me give you the idea that First Class is yet another show about teen angst over “being different.” (I mean, Claire from Heroes was indestructible, and she whined about it. Sheesh.) There’s more to the story than just a morality play, including lots of fun with the various mutant powers. And the whole story eventually winds up at the Cuban missile crisis, which turns out to be instigated by a Bond-esque supervillain millionaire named Sebastian Shaw.

The film is visually impressive and at times beautiful. The special effects are impressive, yet they’re clear and clean, and about as realistic as you could expect from a superhero movie. They support the story rather than overwhelming our ability to understand it. In one of the key scenes that illustrates their relationship, Charles helps Erik learn to maximize his magnetic powers, which he tests by trying to move an enormous object in the distance. Rather than yet another special effects set piece, the distant motion is quiet and understated. It’s not what the scene is about.

All in all, X-Men: First Class is familiar fare, but it’s a decent story, well-told, filled with interesting characters and impressive sights.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at X-Men: First Class – Review

I should have known better. The distributor has been advertising it like crazy, but as the release date approached, they didn’t preview it for movie critics. That usually means they’re trying to hide how much their movie sucks. And with a Metacritic score of 28 and 10% on the Tomatometer, the signs were not promising. Still, there was something about it…I wanted to see for myself. That turned out to be a mistake.

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

If you’ve seen any of the trailers for Skyline, then you know that some people are sleeping in a nice apartment in a highrise tower, and they wake up to bright lights shining in the window. It turns out that aliens have arrived in massive spaceships. Some of the aliens fly, some of them stomp around, and some of the crawl around in a mass of writhing tentacles. They’re taking people up into the sky amid glowing blue light. And now you know everything.

Oh, if you see the movie, you’ll learn a little more about the characters and their relationships–not that you’ll care, because they’re shallow and stupid–and you’ll see a lot more special effects–not that you’ll care because they’re the same as the effects in the trailers. The trailers also give away all the key plot points and most of the surprises. To be blunt: Beyond what’s revealed in the trailers, there are no significant plot developments.

Skyline also continues the major recent trend in science fiction disaster movies–from Spielberg’s War Of the Worlds remake to Cloverfield to The Mist to 2012–of following people who aren’t involved in the big fight. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it pays to tell a small story of survival set against a big backdrop.

It usually works better, however, when the backdrop is well-known reality, because then the audience doesn’t feel cheated if you don’t solve the big plot problem. In James Cameron’s Titanic, nobody expects Jack and Rose to stop the ship from sinking. But when the problem is an alien invasion, you kind of want to see how we beat them. So this bunch of people trapped in a high-rise apartment building…they’re just a subplot.

Skyline exacerbates the problem with an extra twist that makes you care even less: Stupidity. The main characters are ineffective at almost everything they do. They make a couple of half-assed attempts to escape, but they get nowhere. They argue about what to do, but they never settle on a plan. And it never occurs to them to save up water in case the city pumps fail, or to raid the other apartments in the building for weapons or medical gear, or to look for other survivors,

When the U.S. Air Force shows up, they’re not much better. For one thing, they’re flying F117 stealth fighters in daylight, which kind of defeats the purpose of a radar-invisible plane that’s painted black. Then again, these planes are just digital special effects, dodging and weaving past the enemy flying machines like small insects rather than multi-ton aircraft, so none of it matters.

(At one point, a stealth fighter launches a nuclear-tipped missile at one of the big alien motherships, it launches from far too close, and is presumably destroyed in the blast. Here’s a hint for filmmakers: The real U.S. Air Force knows how to attack an enemy with nuclear weapons from far enough away to avoid killing themselves in the process. They think of stuff like that.)

The aliens aren’t a whole lot smarter. Their plan to round-up all the humans seems to be to wander the city at random, peeking in windows. I guess with their advanced technology they don’t need an efficient battle plan–it’s kind of a walkover–but wouldn’t they want to save some time? And I’ve got to wonder how they managed to develop all that technology since, like a human infant, they seem to lack a sense of object permanence: Once the humans run into a building and hide for a few minutes, the aliens forget they’re there.

The whole movie is like that. The special effects look great, and the rest of the cinematography is passable, but when it’s over, all you’ve really seen is a bunch of stupid people dying.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Skyline – Review

I do have one nit to pick, however, with the movie montage they showed as part of their salute to horror movies. Less than halfway through it, I noticed that they were showing a lot of scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. And then I noticed that they kept coming back to Psycho and The Exorcist and the Elm Street series and I started wondering… Was the Academy’s horror montage put together by people who didn’t really know much about horror films?

I think so. I’m hardly a scholar of horror films, and I haven’t gone over the montage in slow motion, so maybe a missed a few, but it seems like the anonymous editors of this montage certainly left out a lot of the horror genre.

To start with, the only zombies I saw were from maybe a one-second clip of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. There’s a huge sub-genre of zombie films that they completely missed. They didn’t even include Dawn of the Dead, or Return of the Living Dead or Re-Animator, let alone modern takes like 28 Days Later or Shaun of the Dead.

It’s a little shocking. I mean, I can understand how they might leave out horror specialist films like Videodrome or  C.H.U.D., but where were Scanners and Invasion of the Body Snatchers? How about The Thing? The Howling? The Dead Zone? Altered States? Any version of The Fly?

Where were Fright Night and Arachnophobia, and the Twilight Zone movie? What about Creepshow and Pumpkinhead and Near Dark? Where were Seven, and Final Destination, and The Lost Boys? Why didn’t we see any piece of the incredible Phantasm series?

It’s a truism that Hollywood has always slighted horror films, but last night they managed the amazing feat of slighting horror films in the middle of a montage honoring horror films…

And for fuck’s sake, how the hell do you leave out Evil Dead?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The Horrors of Oscar Night

As with James Cameron’s earlier film Titanic, the star of this film is the magnificent setting and the way it is presented. The lush world of Pandora is beautiful, the CGI that creates the aliens is every bit as good as everyone else says, and the 3D unobtrusively helps you understand the the complex action in the forest scenery.

The characters and the plot are simple and relatively straightforward. For some reason, this bothers some people. They point to the thin characterization and simple plot as if it were some kind of terrible failing, and they’re proud of themselves for having seen past the special effects, which is a silly attitude. Seeing past the special effects in Avatar is like seeing past the songs in Rent.

Another thing that bothers some people about Avatar is the politics of it all. For example, here’s Peter Suderman at Reason’s Hit & Run blog:

And the Na’vi, the movie’s marble-skinned alien natives, are easily the most convincing humanoids ever to leap forth from a Hollywood effects house’s CGI server-farm — that is, at least in terms of the way they look and move. The realism stops, however, every time they open their mouths and reveal themselves to be crude, one-dimensional native stereotypes: instinctive and animalistic purveyors of cheap mysticism and nature worship. 

So despite its genuinely impressive technical innovations, Avatar isn’t much a movie: Instead, Cameron’s cooked up a derivative, overlong pastiche of anti-corporate clichés and quasi-mystical eco-nonsense. It’s not that the film’s politics make it bad, it’s that even if you agree, the nearly three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing leaves no room for interesting twists or ambiguity in the story or characters: corporations are bad, scientists are good, natives are pure, harmony with nature is the ultimate ideal…

Good grief. A “three-hour onslaught of simplistic moralizing”? There’s maybe three minutes of political content scattered throughout the whole movie. Admittedly, some of it is pretty clunky—references to pre-emptive strikes, shock and awe, and fighting terror with terror—but it all goes by in a few seconds. Maybe James Cameron was trying to send me a message, but so what? I was busy enjoying the rest of the movie.

I think Suderman must have gone into this movie with an attitude, because he sure missed a lot. For one thing, the native people’s connection to nature isn’t just some kind of “cheap mysticism” or “quasi-mystical eco-nonsense.” The Na’vi are connected to nature for a reason. Anybody who’s familiar with science fiction literature will see it coming, but it’s also spelled out quite clearly in the movie.

Also, Suderman and other right-wing critics seem to miss the rather important fact that the bad guys are stealing from the natives and destroying the places where they live, just like any corporation using eminent domain to take someone’s land. A libertarian shouldn’t have any problem with the natives trying to prevent that.

On the other hand, Roger Ebert says it has an anti-war message, apparently missing the fact that the Na’vi good guys have plenty of weapons and don’t mind fighting back.

I’m not saying Avatar is pro-war and pro-property rights, but neither is it about anti-corporate mystical eco-nonsense. It’s about these people on this planet, and some of them are human and some of them are alien, and…really, it’s a big special effects movie. Just go see it and have fun.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Avatar – A Review, or Maybe a Metareview

Since a taping incident doesn’t hurt a theater directly very much, I wondered if the message was just a requirement passed along from the distributor. Or were they really serious?

At the Muvico theater in Rosemont, Illinois, they’re apparently serious about it. Viciously and stupidly serious, as 22-year old Samantha Tumpach found out last weekend:

Taping three minutes of “Twilight: New Moon” during a visit to a Rosemont movie theater landed Samantha Tumpach in a jail cell for two nights.

Now, the 22-year-old Chicago woman faces up to three years in prison after being charged with a rarely invoked felony designed to prevent movie patrons from recording hot new movies and selling bootleg copies.

But Tumpach insisted Wednesday that’s not what she was doing — she was actually taping parts of her sister’s surprise birthday party celebrated at the Muvico Theater in Rosemont.

…

Managers contacted police, who examined the small digital camera, which also records video segments, Cmdr. Frank Siciliano said. Officers found that Tumpach had taped “two very short segments” of the movie — no more than four minutes total, he said.

Tumpach was arrested after theater managers insisted on pressing charges, he said.

I understand the need to protect intellectual property, but this is ridiculous. Copyright is usually a matter of civil law, so taking it to the level of felony criminal charges should only be necessary to punish blatant piracy of intellectual property such as a DVD forgery operation.

It’s also pretty asinine of the theater management to press charges in a case like this. I’m guessing that Ms Tumpach and her friends won’t spending any more money at Muvico in Rosemont. Neither will lots of other people If this story gets around.

FYI, here’s the Muvico contact page.

(Hat tip: Consumerist via Balko)

Update: Here’s my email to Muvico:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I’ve always been disturbed by the now-common warnings against using a recording device in theaters. I understand why recording is wrong, but I don’t appreciate spending good money in your establishment for tickets and snacks, and then being treated like a potential criminal.

Now I read in the Chicago Sun-Times that the Muvico I go to in Rosemont is pressing charges against a young lady for recording  a few minutes of the latest Twilight movie while playing around with a cheap little camera. That’s just crazy. Your theater manager has no sense of proportion—What’s next? Prosecuting customers for littering if they don’t throw away their empty popcorn buckets?

I guess he (or she) also has no sense of the value of customers to the theater business. There are lots of other theater choices in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I don’t have to go to Muvico, and I don’t think I will.

— Mark Draughn

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Muvico Must Hate Its Customers

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Megan Fox Fans Rejoice

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Fanboys

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Save the Goth Chick, Save the World

“It’s a deeply personal matter,” Bale told The Associated Press at a news conference at a luxury hotel in Barcelona. “I would ask you to respect my privacy in the matter.”

Yeah, good luck with that.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Christian Bale Wants Privacy

I’m not a super-fan of the comic, but I can understand why some people are. In its day, it must have been the most amazing thing ever. Some of the freshness has worn off now that we’ve seen its techniques used by more recent graphic novels. Kind of like how the ending of Hamlet—big fight, everybody dies—seems like something we’ve seen before.

I’m wondering how they’ll condense the story to fit a couple of hours. Anybody know if the pirates are still in it?

Check out the trailer at Empire Online.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at “The superman exists and he’s American.”

How cool is that?

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at “Klaatu Barada Nikto”

There are several movies I’ll probably see, or feel obligated to see.

And there are a few movies I shouldn’t see, but I’m tempted anyway.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Quick Spring 2008 Movie Preview

When your body moves, your brain coordinates the images from your eyes with balance information from your inner ear to give you a consistent picture of the world. This works fine in the natural world, but our modern world presents your brain with situations it’s not ready for. On an airplane, your eyes see a perfectly still cabin, but your inner ear can feel the plane pitching and rolling in turbulent air. You experience these conflicting inputs as dizzyness.

If the inputs are severe enough and persistent enough, some low-level function in your brain reaches an unfortunate conclusion. In the natural world, the most likely cause of dizziness is poison, probably from something you ate. The obvious solution is to empty your stomach as quickly as possible. This is why you get airsick.

The same thing can happen in reverse. If you’re sitting still on a firm object—say, a seat in a movie theater—but the picture on the screen is moving and jerking around a lot, your brain might conclude that you need to vomit.

Which brings me to the New York monster movie Cloverfield. Like The Blair Witch Project, the whole movie is shot with a handheld camera. However, the characters shooting Blair Witch were supposed to have filmmaking skills. This movie appears to be shot on home video by an amateur named Hud who is documenting his friend Rob’s going-away party.

I knew that going in, but I expected that after a few shaky minutes to establish the premise, the film would start to cheat and steady the camera a bit. That never happened. After an hour and a half of what Roger Ebert is calling “Queasy-Cam,” I felt a little ill. Would it have ruined the story if Hud had been Rob’s professional videographer friend?

Obviously, I had a lot of trouble getting past the camera work. I think the filmmakers wanted to put us in the action and make it real. Instead, the shaky camera work kept breaking me out of the story. It left me detached from the characters.

As others have pointed out, the movie’s visual style intentionally evokes a lot of news footage of disasters, especially the events of 9/11. I don’t really think it’s exploitive. It’s just that we’ve all learned what a major disaster looks like, so that’s what our disaster movies have to look like.

In many ways, this movie reminded me of the problem I had with Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds. Both movies follow the personal struggle of a small group of characters faced with a threat far beyond their ability to handle. So we spend the whole movie watching them run away, while in the background the U.S. Army tries to do something about the problem.

I suppose this is realistic. People caught up in disasters have no sense of the big picture. For most people in the World Trade Center on 9/11, their whole day was about a loud crash followed by an hour of walking down the stairs and away from the building. Terrifying for them, but you wouldn’t want to see a movie about it.

That’s the biggest problem with Cloverfield. The main conflict is this incredible battle between the monster and military. Someone somewhere is commanding the increasingly desperate attacks against the creature while simultaneously coordinating the evacuation of the city.

Meanwhile, we’re stuck watching a very long subplot.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Cloverfield – Review

I was not a fan of the Transformers TV series (or comic book, or toy line), so I can’t tell you if the movie is faithful to the franchise. From what I understand, the mythos is pretty confused and has changed many times, so the movie probably isn’t far off from whatever Transformers fans are expecting.

In the first few minutes of the Transformers movie (I’m not revealing anything that’s not in the trailer) an evil Decepticon attacks an American airbase in Qatar. It shows up looking like a helicopter, but then it does that crazy transforming thing and becomes a giant robot, which immediately starts blowing stuff up.

Handled poorly, a scene like that could have been pretty dumb, but the movie treats it perfectly. The transformer is big and fast and loud, a dangerously advanced war machine dealing out overwhelming violence in order to accomplish its mission.

In a way, the filmmakers faced the same challenges as the makers of the 1998 American version of Godzilla: Take a silly but familiar concept and make it real. Godzilla accomplished that for the first 20 minutes and then squandered its credibility with ridiculous action scenes and unnecessary subplots.

Transformers never falters that way. The robots could have been too brightly colored and toy-like, or they could have been too gritty and violent, but the filmmakers managed a fine balancing act. The Autobots may have quirky personalities and disguise themselves as General Motors products, but they are filmed so magnificently and their battles are so incredible that they’ve earned the right to be a little ridiculous. When Optimus Prime talks about “the right of all sentient life to be free,” my first reaction was not to think it was corny, but to be thankful his personal philosophy kept him on our side.

I was pleasantly surprised that this movie was made with a good grasp of modern warfare. I’m sure the details are wrong, but the concepts seem right. In Godzilla the good guys tried to kill the giant monster by shooting Sidewinder anti-aircraft missiles at it. Nobody makes a mistake like that in this movie.

For an even worse example of bad military sci-fi, there’s 1997’s Starship Troopers. Its soldiers postured endlessly about being brave and tough and facing death, no doubt because they had to—they’d been sent on a mission to attack their insectoid enemy without weapons powerful enough to kill a bug, armor tough enough to stop a bug, or any vehicles for escaping from the bugs. Also, they had to defend a bunker that looked like an old frontier fortress, with no firing slits and no roof to prevent the enemy from climbing in. They were supposed to be science fiction soldiers of the future, but any modern army could have swept them from the battlefield with little effort…or just ignored them.

The soldiers in Transformers, on the other hand, are fighting according to something resembling modern combined arms doctrine. They may be desperate and caught up in a battle that they weren’t prepared for, but when they encounter a superior enemy force, they do the right thing and call for air support.

Most of the characters feel like part of the larger mythos of the series, but the movie thankfully doesn’t waste much time filling in the details. You find out everything about the characters that you need to know, and the rest is story.

Acting in a big-budget action flick is often a thankless task, but there are a few notable performances. John Turturro and Jon Voight turn in great performances as Agent Simmons and Defense Secretary John Keller, but that’s no surprise. Josh Duhamel plays Sergeant Lennox with a captivating cool intensity—he may be this generation’s Michael Biehn.

Shia LaBeouf resists playing Sam Witwicky, the teenage boy at the heart of it all, as an outrageous mega-nerd and settles for a more rounded portrayal of a teenager who is often uncool but sometimes also brave. Kevin Dunn and Julie White are hilarious as his parents.

The leader of the Autobots, Optimus Prime, is voiced by Peter Cullen, who has been the voice of Optimus Prime since the 1980’s. He’s also the voice of Eeyore in all the recent Pooh movies and he’s been in about 100 other things. He was the voice of K.A.R.R. (if you don’t know, I’m not explaining), and I think he did the voice of the alien in the original Predator.

This is an exhilarating movie about a fun idea. I’ll be seeing it again real soon.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Transformers – Review

This.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Guess Who’s Back?

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind violence in films—heck, I love a good action movie—but there has to be more to the film than blood and gore. If the movie is not otherwise enjoyable, the addition of a few dozen quality kills will not make it any better. Pointlessly brutal cinematic violence just makes a movie more tiring.

Fortunately, 300 was not like that at all. It was exciting and beautiful and awe-inspiring and at times even funny. It was the the best kind of movie experience: I enjoyed it when I watched it, and I kept thinking about it afterwards.

300 is based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, so it has more than a few fantastic elements. The Persians did not have monsters fighting for their side, for example, and many of the meetings between characters were probably made up. Also, Spartan hoplites probably wore armor instead of fighting bare-chested.

I’ve since read a little about the battle at Thermopylae, however, and I think the movie got most of the important parts right, especially the advantages that accrue to well-trained soldiers fighting on well-chosen ground.

Probably the biggest deviation from history is that the Spartans in the movie are fighting all alone. (Other Greek soldiers are shown, and more are alluded to, but they rarely appear.) Throughout most of the real battle, the Spartans were accompanied by thousands of other soldiers, and the Thebans and Thespians stayed to the end. Nevertheless, the 300 Spartans were the point of the spear.

Some reviewers have felt the need to discuss the political meaning of the film, especially its West-v.s.-East conflict, the depiction of the Persians, and how it all relates to the war in Iraq. That strike me as a waste of time. The events in the film took place long before the founding of Christianity or Islam, between civilizations that have all but vanished, leaving behind only some important ideas and some great stories. Do yourself a favor and don’t worry about it.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 300 – Review

You’ve never seen anything like this.

(Hat tip: Sour N Sweet)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Uhhh…O-Kaaaay…