Film Review: 300

Zack Snyder (2006)
I like a variety of films. I like film adaptations of comics and graphic novels. This film, though…

And I don’t really know where to start with it, either, as everything that could be wrong with this film is wrong with it. Perhaps I should take a look at 300 in the many different ways it can be viewed, beginning with the least relevant and ending with the most offensive crimes against art, entertainment and taste.

300 fails as a historical document. This almost goes without saying, but I would hate for any of the millions of this films viewers to take it particularly seriously. I mean this in terms of the Spartans allegedly fighting for freedom and truth, against the ‘barbarians’ of the east. This essay deals with the historical inaccuracy of the film quite nicely: ‘Orientalism (and Fascist Aesthetics) for Beginners’. Anyway, the gist of it is that the Spartans were a pretty fascist bunch; little to do with the democratic Athenians, and to pretend such an empire as Persia’s could have existed based entirely around slaves and barbarism is insane.

300 fails as a graphic novel translation. This is quite an odd indictment because, for the most part, it is in complete thrall to the graphic novel it is named for. The script features many lines lifted directly from speech bubbles, and some of the camera angles are semi-live action takes on art panels. Interestingly, where the film deviates from the book, it fails so spectacularly as to hurl itself down that bottomless pit they have in Sparta.

First and foremost in the ill-advised cinema-only moves is the reduction of Queen Gorgo (Lena Headey) to a piece of Hollywood stereotype tat. In the comic, she is as hard-nosed as Leonidas (Gerard Butler); early in the film, she is the one who gives the nod to drop the Persian messengers into the pit. Somewhere along the line, though, she softens up. She gives Leonidas a keep-sake in a moment of out-of-character sentimentality. Most worryingly, she is very willing to submit to the sexual desires of some scheming politician (Dominic West) who was shoved into the story.

Gorgo gets her ‘revenge’ in the form of outing Scheming Politician as a traitor in the most ridiculous added scene in the film. Deciding the screenplay was lacking in filibusters, Gorgo addressed some old Spartans in a painfully contrived bit of fluff. Shortly after essentially being raped by Scheming Politician, she is able to smirk through a rousing speech that seemed to serve no purpose at all. Most amusing is the death of Scheming Politician in this scene; his wallet releases golden coins as his corpse hits the floor. And those coins bear the head of Persian king-god-emperor Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro)! Seems he should have done a bit more scheming, like perhaps leaving money at home if it had Xerxes heads on it.

Missing was the detail of deformed Spartan turncoat Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan) attempting suicide when it became apparent he wasn’t suitable for the phalanx. Admittedly, his survival after apparently dropping off a cliff was rather surprising, but that’s nothing on what was allowed into the film (more on that later).

(Not all changes were negative. Thankfully, a rather embarrassing sequence in the book, wherein mighty leader King Leonidas starts punning on names of his soldiers (‘Stumblios’ – hilarious) is stricken from the record. It was pointed out to me that the stanza in the comic served to show, as he beat up a few of his own soldiers, that Leonidas values Sparta over individuals. Sure, but the very fact that he is willing to lead three hundred of his best soldiers into certain death is sufficient evidence of that.)

I should probably point out at this stage that I wasn’t all that enamoured with the book in the first place. It won Miller an Eisner award, but that tells me either that the book came out in a poor year, or the award was more of an ‘it’s Frank Miller’ kind of thing. Perhaps Dick Hyacinth can fill me in. The book was fair enough, but very basic. The art was the most impressive thing about it, and the propaganda worked because it was blatantly just that.

In the medium of the graphic novel, it is clearer that what the reader encounters is simply the retelling of the story, as ordered by Leonidas and embellished to a degree one would expect of something that was created to glorify Sparta. However, a piece of work that just successfully walks the tightrope in its original form plunges to its doom when placed in another medium for which it was not originally intended.

When the action is in motion, and cameras place the audience in the heat of the battle, the emphasis moves from ‘tale being told’ to ‘document of what happened’, over the top narration or no. People wonder why certain graphic novels should never make the jump to film, and this evinces that feeling nicely. Sin City worked because the source material was so film-inspired, had such kinetic artwork and actually documented the events of the piece.

So we’ve established that the film is historically fraudulent, and that it is a poor translation of a book that wouldn’t have worked as a film in pretty much the best case scenario. Anyway, benefit of the doubt and all that. Perhaps it works as an over the top film on its own merit. Unfortunately, and most heinously…

300 fails as an overblown piece of Hollywood schlock. Yes, the worst crime perpetrated by this explosion of Miller and Snyder’s psychological semen onto the formerly silver screen.

The two real problems with this film, in and of itself, are somewhat intertwined. The first is the lack of peril. Anybody who knows anything knows that the art of telling a good story is in the peril facing the protagonists. And also conflict, but that usually manifests as peril anyway. When trying to suggest the fascist kiddy-fiddling Spartans are fighting for the last vestiges of truth and honour in an otherwise chaotic world (awesome, Al Qaeda say the same thing), it might be pertinent to get the viewer to invest emotionally in their struggle.

Painting the Spartans as a bunch of muscle-bound, sarcastic pricks with bizarrely quick minds for dry one liners (the latter a fault of Miller’s) is not the way to do that. Most of the film is spent telling us that the Spartans cannot lose. Leonidas can speak all he wants about their impending doom being a lesson for Greece, but if we don’t see anything to back that up, it’s just hot air.

So when battle commences, the Spartan phalanx tears through the initial grunts, and that is to be expected. However, one would have thought an armoured rhinoceros (not part of the Persian army then or now) might cause them some damage. Apparently not, as a finely aimed spear throw causes it to die, ineffectually, and its carcass stops skidding through the dust a few centimetres away from the Spartan shields.

The biggest crime against drama is when the Immortals head into action. They get bigged up as the proper wrecking crew of the empire’s army (‘one hundred countries’, let’s not forget). They wear excellently dehumanising silver masks and they really look the part; like Satan’s own band of ninjas. They start ‘fighting’ and just drop without much of a struggle. I don’t buy the ‘well, they should have waited til we were more injured’ excuse. It’s just a massive anticlimax and lack of danger for the duration of the film. And the fighting, while adequate, is largely disappointing: Leonidas’s run of solo fighting is somewhere below that of Optimus Prime in Transformers: the Movie on the list of one-man heroic rampages.

Most bizarre, apart from the complete lack of threat facing the Spartans, is the collection of mutants and monsters in the army, as though Asians are somehow sub-human. That the Immortals wear masks at all is a mystery when, as one loses his face-wear, they seem to have grey reptilian faces anyway. Then we have film-only confections like that strange mutant giant who duels with Leonidas for a minute (and why are 99% of deaths in the film picture-perfect decapitations?) and the even more bizarre – like, ripped straight from the ROM of the Doom video game. Seriously, there is a gigantic monster with blades instead of hands whose only job seems to be to assassinate generals who disappoint Xerxes. Word of advice to king-gods everywhere: send these blokes into battle. He’d have killed three hundred Spartans on his own.

All of which brings us to the king-god in question: Xerxes. Was it necessary to turn him into a shaven-headed RuPaul? He minces around most of the time like he’s misplaced his Maybelline, and seems to just fancy Leonidas. I have nothing at all against camp dudes, but that would be low on my list of necessary attributes if I was to create a threatening, barbaric king-god who was taking over the world. And Leonidas can accuse him of ‘hubris’ all he wants, but if I was nine feet tall with a voice several octaves lower than Phil Anselmo, I’d probably think I was at least a demi-god.

That said, the film isn’t all bad. There are times when the visual aspect reaches the lofty expectations promised by the trailer (has there ever been a trailer so much better than the film? It had Nine Inch Nails on its own mini-soundtrack, too), like when the storm of the gods is wreaking havoc on the Persian navy. That was pretty damn awesome. The Spartans themselves were in pretty good shape too, even if one or two of them reminded me of pro wrestler Triple H (again, there is no sense of peril if all Spartans tower over 99.9% of their enemy). Headey is properly beautiful, even if I spent a lot of the film trying to remember from where I know her name.

And I say all this as a fan of comic films in general. I loved Batman Begins, X-Men 2 and Akira. I have no issue with senseless violence or campfests; I have watched enough UFC and fake-fighting in my time, as well as spending enough time in gyms, that this negativity is not borne out of any Guardian-esque, pencil-necked embarrassment at seeing burly men in their pants. No, this film is just complete rubbish.

All in all, this was a pretty dismal failure on all fronts. What is most frightening is that this debacle occurred with Frank Miller on board as Executive Producer (I don’t know how hands-on he was, but he must have at least given it the nod). Director Zack Snyder’s next project is a translation of graphic novel classic Watchmen, which is an infinitely more complex book, and one whose success is even more tied to its original medium. And that’s going to be without its creator Alan Moore on board in any fashion. As bad as this was, I live in dread of that one.


The Rise of Nemo
or: Why I Like My Chemical Romance
That’s right, I like My Chemical Romance. I am not a teenager, though I sometimes like to pretend I am. I was going to say I don’t like emo, but I do; here’s why. See, ’emo’ is an abbreviation of a term that was itself an abbreviation: ’emo-core’. It was short for ’emotional hardcore’ (‘hardcore’ being the musical movement from about 1980 onwards that took the punk rock template and filled it even more generously with angst, as opposed to anything more ‘gutter’ that you were considering). I never really understood this term, as I thought all hardcore was supposed to be emotional. That’s why it was hardcore, for Rollins’s sake.

Anyway, the term was taken to refer to hardcore that had more of a sensitive side (an oxymoron?): first Rites Of Spring/Fugazi (arguably), and then more prominently the next gen of Quicksand/Sense Field/Far/Farside/everyone on Jade Tree etc.

What is funny is that, while ’emo’ as an entity not only still exists, but is performing commercially way beyond what we might have thought it could a decade ago, it’s not really emo at all.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not a nostalgia fetishist who decries any change as wrong. Quite the opposite: The Bronx are as punk rock as NOFX are as punk rock as The Ramones. But there is something very integral to neo-emo (or, as I like to call it, ‘nemo’) that is just plain at odds with the emo of the past.

Older emo was, ironically, more stoical; more blue-collar. The players were often short-haired, unglamorous men who were just a tad more sensitive than, say, Agnostic Front. Of course, the scene is now about how glossy and glammy a band can be, while performing as earnestly as possible. Modern emo, with the emotional content ramped up to melodramatic, actually epic, levels is more reminiscent of eighties Hollywood rock (often pejoratively referred to as ‘hair metal’. But that is a stupid term as most metal bands have hair. Especially in the eighties: don’t make me bring out the massive hair pics of Pantera, Slayer or Megadeth). Both nemo and Hollywood rock are maligned, and I would suggest unfairly so.

I will say this about nemo – there is no equivalent of the incredibly brilliant eighties Guns n’ Roses. I suppose this is when I arrive at My Chemical Romance (MCR). It took me a long time to come round to this band, as I had written off mainstream hard rock/metal a long time ago as irrelevant. And let’s face it: most of it was and is. Pantera were the greatest major label metal band of the nineties. Damageplan consisted of Pantera’s guitarist and drummer, and they were woefully mediocre. Before this fact, I would have thought that the Abbott brothers could play anything and have me hurling myself at the walls in excitement.

Anyway, the day came about two years ago when someone on a message board recommended a couple of MCR songs that were not singles. Ever open minded, I looked into this and found ‘I Never Told You What I Do for a Living’. It was brilliant, and anyone into four minute rock songs should hear it. Because of this song, my resistance eroded, and I decided I liked their singles. A fan of the band?

Not quite yet. Late 2006 saw the release of their most recent album, The Black Parade. The first single from that, ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’, was a bit poor, to be honest. As I intimated in my soon-to-be-officially-unveiled Singles Premiership, it started well, ended well and kinda vanished in the middle. The bloke from the Guardian Guide had it pretty bang on when he said the intro made it sound like the greatest song in the world was about to kick in, and it ended up sounding like a McFly b-side. I wouldn’t say exactly that, as the thin guitars and snotty vocal style reminded me more of Avril Lavigne, but either isn’t amazing.

It was almost an epic by numbers: the intro chronicled grand declarations made on deathbeds and ‘seeing marching bands’. It really set the stage for something that sounded truly immense. Instead, we got the aforementioned anodyne pop punk schlock and a bowlful of disappointment. If they wanted to make this movement sound massive and still keep it chart-friendly, they should quite honestly have ripped directly off ‘Long Live the Party’ by Andrew W.K. That song was brilliant; a shining light on an otherwise disappointing record, The Wolf.

Back to ‘Welcome to the Black Parade’: while the majority of the song was an under-blown disappointment, the conclusion raised the quality level to the promise of the introduction. Still very hammy (as it bloody well should be), the closing sequence was an explosion of ramped-up jubilance. It put in my mind images of the youthful dispossessed (the titular ‘black parade’, I assume) all around the world, rising to their feet like myriad excited meerkats in the kind of union that can only be created by MCR. Or Wyld Stallyns, perhaps. It’d be like some glossy live action equivalent of the Thundercats deal where the whole team sees the Eye of Thundera in the sky and rushes into action. Sadly, what little of the promo video I have seen seemed to be nowhere near as cool as my idea.

Thankfully, the next single was ‘Famous Last Words’ and is brilliant. More of what the world was used to from the old album, but well performed and back to the angst that brought them to the dance. That’s written up in the Premiership. New single ‘I Don’t Love You’ is a power ballad of the likes not seen since the heady days of Bon Jovi (with the long hair) and Heart. And, to be quite honest, I am glad. It’s miles preferable to the anodyne cod-cool of Maximo Park, Calvin Harris or Bloc Party.


The Twang: What’s the Deal?

Seriously, I ask all… two of you that read this. That song of theirs isn’t bad at all. Not great, but not bad. But why is everybody going so bananas about them?

Some fucking cretin writing in The Guide this week wibbled on about how ‘this sounds like it could have been released fifteen years ago because it’s already a classic!’, but really it sounds like it could have been released fifteen years ago because it’s nostalgic indie at its most brazen. The kind of thing particularly cloth-eared football hooligans might like; all echoey guitars and terrace chant choruses. It’s like a bad U2 covering The Farm songs.

So I ended up suffering through the Zane Lowe show last evening. Well, I had to listen to something in the bath. And his pants were exploding about them! Granted, every band in the world is something we all need in our lives and the best thing ever according to him, but come on. At least pretend you have standards. No, instead of their single being perfectly listenable cod-indie, it was the song of the year.

The song of the year. Forgetting, for a moment, that we are still in the very first quarter of this year, there have been loads of better singles this early in the annum. Just look at my Singles Premiership for evidence of that. ‘Wide Awake’ rocks nowhere near as much as ‘Saturday Superhouse’. Nowhere. They played a couple of other songs. One sounded like a Midlands The Hold Steady song. Because that’s what it was. They are pretty tight musicians though, I’ll give them that. And when he’s not fellating The Edge, their guitarist is pretty handy.

That’s the thing though. I was watching a Bill Bailey video years ago (not of my own doing). For those blissfully unaware of this gimmick comic, he bases jokes around his aptitude at playing musical instruments, like a particularly annoying high school music teacher who’s trying to appear ‘hip’ in front of the kids. And who uses words like ‘hip’ in the first place. Anyway, he had a joke about how easy it was to write a U2 song. So he played some arpeggios with tons of delay, and everybody laughed. Now, The Twang seem not to have realised this was a comedy routine, and taken it as career guidance. Sad. What’s sadder is that it is just about to make them rather wealthy.

Anyway, they are officially the best thing ever (or at least since the Arctic Monkeys), and shame on any of us who does not like them. Such as me. And they really do sound like a set of complete bozos when interviewed. I am loathe to suffer a decade of their drawling inanity, Liam Gallagher style. LOATHE.

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. Mulholland Dr. review on its way.

Twenty-six


Opeth – Ghost Reveries (Roadrunner)

I don’t really know where to start with this album. So perhaps I should start at the beginning, as they say. As you may or may not be aware (or care), I originally formulated the skeleton of my 2005 list in the halcyon days of, well, 2005. There is a message board to which I semi-regularly post, they have end of year festivities, so I usually tend to round my list out to a fifty by listening once or twice to albums in an mp3 format.

This is terrible form, both as an audiophile (well, as far as finances will allow) and a music fan. To be quite honest, I feel that evaluating a work of music solely through mp3 is almost akin to appreciating a Renaissance painting by asking a toddling-age relative to finger paint his impression of Bacchus and Ariadne and judging Titian on that. But sometimes needs must et cetera.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I listened to this album on mp3. Probably. If not, consider the last two paragraphs catharsis. I know that I listened to it once on the Death Deck, and made placement of it on this here list from that, so I am still bad. What is really weird is that I was very impressed with it, but also found no urge to listen to it again. Which is why this instalment of 2005 was so long in coming.

I think one of the reasons why the thought of listening to it was so unappealing was because every one of the songs hereon seemed to be an epic (in reality, ‘only’ half of the songs break ten minutes). I usually tend to like things like that (I mean come on, removing the brief sample-scapes, the average track length on my favourite album ever is ten minutes), but this can sometimes be slightly intimidating when it comes to first getting into the album. The other reason is that I’m not the biggest fan of Euro-metal.

I really like that strain of Gothenburg melodic death metal (i.e. the successor of Liverpool’s Carcass, at least in latter days, and the progenitor of pretty much every major American metal band of today). I also have some fondness for Norwegian black metal (as well as the bizarrely avant-garde bands that sprung from the country: Arcturus, In The Woods et al). I just can’t get into European metally metal (touches of the eighties, hints of goth). Like Moonspell. I never liked them.

Still, this Opeth album was to 2005 what Mastodon’s Blood Mountain was last year, i.e. the straight-up metal album that was supposed to be so good that it transcended our little ghetto and became that album non-metal fans could listen to. I never really understood that notion, as a metal album is a metal album, and you might as well listen to a bunch of the albums, rather than a ‘look at me, I can listen to metal’ coffee table gesture. Anyway, I liked it a lot, thought it had a lot of potential and decided I might as well give it another listen, seeing as it was pretty high on my own list.

One observation I had from that initial listen, possibly tying in with the sense of the epic, was that it seemed to be a European (in metal terms, read: ‘less cool’) take on Tool’s excellent Lateralus (2001). In hindsight, that comparison doesn’t really play out, but opening song ‘Ghost of Perdition’ reminded me of the L.A. quartets ‘The Grudge’ in its length (and resulting level of statement in having such a song open an album), dynamic shifts that are less swings than drops off precipices, and the clarity in production. Still, both are great and powerful songs, so there’s nothing wrong with the similarity.

The only real issue with that opening song is a dislike of the album as a whole: the vocals here are too binary, almost to the extent of sounding like an ill-fitting collaboration. The singing is either cleanly-sung poppy melodies or gruff death metal vocalising. The latter is poor, at best. I have nothing against death metal vocals at all (and I would like to take this opportunity to mention how I loathe that lazy term ‘cookie monster vocals’), in fact I tend to like them.

Slowly We Rot, by Obituary, has excellent DM vocals, as does most early period Morbid Angel. In fact, there is a DM passage on Mr. Bungle’s ‘Merry Go Bye Bye’ that is phenomenal, and by that I mean pretty much the best death metal I have heard. Plus, the vocals from Brutal Truth, Coalesce and Soilent Green were all very DM-influenced. This, though, is weak. There is no sense of brutality to the vocals, none of that real guttural nastiness. It’s clean death metal singing, and that really does not work.

It also sits very at odds with the rest of the sounds on the album, which is overall very melodic. Track two, ‘The Baying of The Hounds’, really evinces this melodic sophistication as it breaks down quite beautifully into a very mellow passage. When the ‘rocking’ returns, it does so while maintaining the beauty; a deluge of shimmering guitar notes, picked as though by angels. This is the Opeth that really justifies the plaudits that have been bestowed. The song ends rather suddenly, but this is otherwise another awesome epic, in both senses of that word.

For every step forward, though, there is an equal and opposite move from the band. There is also a sense of diminishing returns as the album progresses. ‘Beneath The Mire’ is an eight minute song that seems neither here nor there, partly due once more to the irrelevant yin-yang of the singing, and partly due to what emerges as the real sticking point of the album: it’s just too polite.

I mentioned earlier how well-produced this record is, and that is very much the case; the problem is it’s too well-produced, in a way. Maybe that’s why the aggressive vocals sound so neutered, and it is certainly the reason why, even on the complex, dynamic ‘The Grand Conjuration’, the fast and jagged riffing sections fail to energise me. As someone who loves the sound of testosterone (and is completely unapologetic about it; maybe my perspective will change when I hit thirty, and my own levels drop), this kind of flaw is inexcusable.

The album is really summed up by the closing ‘Isolation Years’. A perfectly fine romantic rock song, though very clearly below the kind of thing Peter Steele’s Type O Negative were doing on their Bloody Kisses and October Rust opuses, it definitely benefits from the omission of what seems elsewhere to be an obligation to rock.

With the success of the melodic rock frames, as well as the undeniable superiority of their clean vocals over the ‘gruff’ ones, this seems to be less a classic Opeth album than it is a self portrait of a band at a crossroads. Not knowing which way to turn, they split their forces, resulting in an album that sounds unconvinced in itself. Perhaps it is time to put to rest the ghost of nineties death metal that haunts Europe still. Amorphis seem better at that kind of duality anyway. Ghost Reveries is an album for which sheer sophistication, professional sound and scope of vision end up being its albatross. Opeth are excellent artisans, but what this album really needs is artistry.