Three hundred

This is going to be short and sweet because I am so late to the party with it. I have wanted to post on it for a while, ever since seeing it and then reading Jason and Ed’s posts on it, but other things got in the way. I think I’ll be ahead of the curve for the DVD release though, yeah?

I found the premise of writing a graphic novel about this event in history to be quite novel. I mean, how exactly did Frank Miller get about doing this as a project? This is a guy better known to the masses for Sin City, Robocop, Batman (comics) and Tank Girl (heh… well, the original work was better than the flick. Oh where have you gone Lori Petty?). I’m sure I could do some research on the web for this, but I’m a lazy blogger today and like I said, short and sweet.

And, again, being lazy (and potentially dumb to do so), I’m going to go off what I remember as the gist of what either Ed and Jason (or both) were saying about the film. I’m not going to argue that acting in a giant green sound stage is just as easy as one filled with set pieces and extras, never mind in the wild. I will argue that using this method is fairly new to a lot of actors and they’ll get better with it. I’ll also argue that for this type of movie, it still works well, but for Star Wars, not so much.

To me, it seemed like Zack Snyder wanted to do the same thing that Robert Rodriguez did with Miller’s Sin City, bring it to life on the screen as if it was the comic come to life. As I watched both films, I had the feeling I was watching a comic come to life and it wasn’t trying to be anything other than that. The same can be said for Ang Lee’s Hulk, which may have been a little too hybrid for its own good, but clearly had comic elements, things like transitions and multiple panels, that were pretty innovative. I even felt like the Hulk himself was never meant to look ultra realistic. I mean, look no further than his Daddy’s engineered pooches. Unlike a lot of other people, I enjoyed the Hulk even though Lee might not have been able to pull off quite what he wanted. Enough Hulk tangent…

I felt like the slow, stop, speed-up, slow, stop, etc. camera effects in this film enhanced that comic book experience. It was almost as if each slowdown were its own panel. I think V for Vendetta was a little similar in this respect, but maybe not since it is linked with the Matrix dudes. I also liked the way many of the scenes had a blue or sepia tone/filter to them. It also enhanced that feel that it was a comic panel. Finally, I’d say that the stark “sets” were another comic book side-effect which didn’t bother me a bit.

Comic based films like 300 and Sin City stand in contrast to others like the Spider-Man trilogy, Batman Begins and V for Vendetta that go for a more based in reality approach instead of comic book. This works for these films and I count them all as some of my all-time faves (not so much Spidey 3, but that’s on my coming soon list). All of these films make use of green screen work, but were not entirely digitally produced like 300 and Sin City, so by that very fact, they’ll seem more real.

I think I am doing a good job of not making a point, but that has more to do with just busting this out in 20-minute-Ed-style than anything else. The bottom line is I enjoyed this flick for the eye candy it provided. It also ed-u-ma-cated me a little more about an event I had long forgotten… and, actually, it lent some insight into why they named the Spartans in Halo (of which the Master Chief is one), the Spartans!

Next-to-bottom-line? At least this one made up for having recently (at the time) seen Borat and all its dudity, although I could have done without the Persian freakshow, but at least I barely remembered that part to put in here. 😯

Snyder’s next project is Alan Moore’s Watchmen. I can’t wait to see what he does with it.