300: Gay Racist Fascist War-Porn for the Xbox Generation

I saw 300 the other night at the Senator Theater and, while I wish the Senator continued capacity crowds for this humongous money-maker (it raked in over $70 million on its opening weekend alone), I hated this film more than a cell-phone chatting, Starbucks-gulping neocon tooling around town in a Hummer with a Bush-Cheney sticker on its bumper. Like Sin City, it is impressive (albeit hollow) CGI-enhanced eye candy for people who see life's rich pageantry in stark black and white and think in the simplistic, empty-sloganeering language of bumper stickers. In other words, it's for Fox News watchers and potential U. S. Army recruits.

The film was based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller, but I say BFD. I've never been a Frank Miller fan (maybe because I've been told I look like him and the self-loathing thing comes into play); I'll take Alan Moore for thought-provoking graphic novels any day. But Moore, admittedly rather cantakerous when it comes to adaptions of his work, would never allow his work to be wooed by the Whore of Babylon, er, Hollywood, like Miller has (understandably so - V for Vendetta was the only decent adaptation of Moore's work to date). The Dark Knight Returns was OK, but the film of Sin City was a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars on something that had no lasting value, all bells and whistles for attention deficit syndrome cineplex viewers. And now this mind-numbing crime against narrative.

But my words pale next to those found at The Daily Gut (http://www.dailygut.com), whose reviews of 300 sum it up best (especially Josh Bell's!):

THE CRITICS AGREE: 300 IS GAY RACIST FASCIST WAR-PORN FOR THE XBOX GENERATION!!"
If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynn Varley, had been made in Germany in the mid-1930s, it would be studied today alongside The Eternal Jew as a textbook example of how race-baiting fantasy and nationalist myth can serve as an incitement to total war." -- Dana Stevens, Slate (very first sentence!)

"Keeping in mind Slate's Mickey Kaus' Hitler Rule - never compare anything to Hitler - it isn't a stretch to imagine Adolf's boys at a 300 screening, heil-fiving each other throughout and then lining up to see it again." -- Kyle Smith, NY Post

"It may be worth pointing out that unlike their mostly black and brown foes, the Spartans and their fellow Greeks are white." -- A.O. Scott, NY Times

"At least in the short run, 300 is something to see, but unless you love violence as much as a Spartan, Quentin Tarantino or a video-game-playing teenage boy, you will not be endlessly fascinated." -- Kenneth Turan, LA Times

"It really is like a gay fetish movie. There are so many pecs and chests and rips and tears and nipples..." -- David Poland, Movie City News (before pausing to wipe his brow)

"...so militaristic and single-minded that it's like a CGI-heavy blockbuster version of Triumph of the Will. It's brutal, it's painful, it's mind-numbing and, most disturbingly, it's a rallying cry for the testosterone-heavy that posits 'no mercy' as the most noble sentiment in the world. The U.S. Army needs to pick this up as a recruiting film, stat." -- Josh Bell, Las Vegas Weekly

"Five-word review of 300: I got that many boners!" -- Me