I finally got around to screening the much-ballyhooed 300 this weekend, and it seems to me a bizarre piece. As an out-and-out battlefield pic, it's a mediocre effort, all style and shot, with the requisite homages to Peckinpah and Jackson. That it's ultimately uninvolving is almost beside the point. It's so gloriously superficial, one might be tempted to overlook the particular demand superficiality requires: Analysis. For all of its apparent anti-intellectualism, the movie is most interesting as an intellectual exercise; it's so temptingly allegorical, one has to think twice about leaping to the automatic implications and consider matters more closely. The people for whom Xerxes is an icon of Arab-Persian hostility have it all wrong, I think, every bit as much as those who think the film's Leonidas some symbol Western of courage and bulwarkism. The allegory breaks down; the equivalencies falter. The allegorical dimensions, though, are fortified if read slightly differently. And here's where I make a perhaps absurd suggestion: that 300 may well prove to be the Al-Qaeda training film par excellence.
Think about it. Leonidas is a leader fed up with the corrupt priests (the ephoi) being bought off by the decadent Persians aligned with Spartan forces bent on consolidating their own power. Against this, Leonidas rallies a small force of true soldiers of Sparta for whom slaughter is glory, and the conquered dead emblems of righteous rebellion. The enemy? A gargantuan but inexplicably fey Xerxes, in command of the world's grandest armies and the most exotic and ostensibly terrifying weapons. But Xerxes' greatest weapon is neither: it's his capacity to corrupt, to provide wealth and power to those who bend to his will. Leonidas' heroism is rooted in his refusal to submit, and his resistance by most determined violence that's justified as part of a great martyrdom to awaken an otherwise complacent Spartan society to stand against the Great Evil. Sound familiar?
Follow the quadrations and the suggestion becomes bizarre: Leonidas as Bin Laden, the ephoi the Saudi and other Arab governments in bed with the enemy, and Xerxes the ineffectual Bush in command of all the great weapons of the world. The three-hundred, then, are Al-Qaeda, experts of death, staving off the intrusion of a foreign force that's fundamentally perverse-- and against which any act is justifiable and necessary.
Don't get me wrong. I don't for a second think the filmmakers intend us to read the film this way, but I suspect that's how it will be read in some quarters, especially since the allegory, as they say, holds the reading; that is, it allows it, and even unintentionally encourages it. In this way, 300 may speak to a different part of the zeitgeist than anyone in the Western world may want. 300's Persia isn't really Persia, much less contemporary Iran: it's the great world power, it's the United States, with its tentacles everywhere. If 300 becomes a kind of message-picture, I suspect that around the world it won't say what its creators meant it to say. In a film devoid of irony, that of course would be become the great irony.
But 300 offers another kind of contemporary reflection. It's a film that casts violence in video-game terms, every death an artful spatter, every character a cipher. Its intonations are declarative, its characters entirely without nuance. If any film in recent years has rejected irony so firmly, it's this one, and it may (as Star Wars did in the late 70s) signal a shift away from the would-be realisms of doubt and complication. The movie essays a kind of Homeric heroism at which even Homer baulked, but which intensifies the vicariousness of the heroic tale in the same way a video game does: it welcomes you to the killing spree, and you participate without question.
In this way, it may indicate something that I think has been coming for some time, ironic-fatigue. Whether or not that's a good thing, I'm not sure. As Mr Wilde once warned, those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril; but as Mr Eliot has also noted, art of the surface can also be the art of great caricature. Maybe audiences really are yearning for spectacle without complication, as a moribund cultural fatuity inures itself. (Let's see how Grindhouse does.) And yet, the anti-ironic often becomes, with time, more ironic than the most duplicitous satire. (Right, Mr Cheney?) Consider it a reminder of the old lesson that one man's hero is another man's terrorist-- or should that be insurgent? Consider it a reminder too that art of the surface presents itself at its own peril, and just as often to its own detriment.
At right, the cats uncharacteristically dozing together on the futon, itself an unremarkable fact except that Trouble (left), the older and surlier one, never sits on the futon, much less sleeps on it. (Too bad I wasn’t fast enough to snap them cleaning each other.) Like Mutt and Jeff, these two. As I write this, Trouble’s back on the futon, fast asleep with his head in his paws, while Jenny (right) ogles squirrels from the back window. And while Jenny is always the darling, the ever-affectionate one, it’s Trouble who always surprises me: he’s acting more and more now like he did twelve years ago than six months ago. Why? Damned if I know. I just do what I’m told. As a friend likes to remind me, "Dogs have masters, cats have servants."
Your disturbing image of the day, courtesy 
In a few days, HBO will air the last episode of Rome, its two-season series about the rise and fall of Caesar (Season One) and Mark Antony (Season Two). Apparently the cost of producing the show became prohibitive, despite the raves and ratings it regularly gathered, so HBO's ending it outright, even though there are hundreds of years of possible stories to tell. Too bad, but this blog’s wondering if HBO will be tempted to end the show in a fashion familiar to viewers, rather than merely follow history, given the programme’s willingness to junk history for spectacle. (See, for example, Brutus’ death in battle rather than his historical suicide.) So, let’s consider some of the possibilities:
Contemporary critical theory is like a 
Hopefully I'll be able to post something of my own on this subject shortly (time permitting), but 
Oh yes, the 
![2w34wexnb2[1]](http://img181.imageshack.us/img181/8354/2w34wexnb2.png)
![00245941qz8[1]](http://img266.imageshack.us/img266/5518/00245941qz8.jpg)
Whitaker has some compelling forces working against him, though none of them are of his making. The most obvious issue is that the Academy has long overlooked O’Toole, and he shares with the late Richard Burton the record for most nominations, a jaw-dropping seven excluding this one, without a win. (How he lost for Lawrence of Arabia, to the saintlier-than-thou Gregory Peck in To Kill A Mockingbird, still mystifies.) This is an oversight the Academy will be sorely tempted to correct, and his performance in Venus affords just that sort of opportunity. It’s also probably the Academy’s last chance to do so. At 74, O’Toole’s health is failing, and he has already reached that stage of being consigned, like most British acting deans, to the supporting ranks. The situation is perfect for such a sentimental appeal: it can honour a legitimate Acting Great for what very well could be his swan-song as a leading man, and correct one of its greatest regrets at the same time. This is exactly what happened with John Wayne’s award for True Grit, Paul Newman’s for The Color of Money, and Henry Fonda’s for On Golden Pond. (So too, frankly, Sean Penn’s for Mystic River.) Such awards are for careers rather than performances, and they always have the whiff of compensation about them.
So I’ll start off at the opposite end of the spectrum,