Iran hates it...If 300, the new battle epic based on the graphic novel by Frank Miller and Lynne 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…
Here are just a few of the categories that are not-so-vaguely conflated with the “bad” (i.e., Persian) side in the movie: black people. Brown people. Disfigured people. Gay men (not gay in the buff, homoerotic Spartan fashion, but in the effeminate Persian style). Lesbians. Disfigured lesbians. Ten-foot-tall giants with filed teeth and lobster claws. Elephants and rhinos (filthy creatures both). The Persian commander, the god-king Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro) is a towering, bald club fag with facial piercings, kohl-rimmed eyes, and a disturbing predilection for making people kneel before him…
“This will not be over quickly,” the villain warns as he pins [Leonidas’s wife] against a temple pillar. “You will not enjoy this.” It might have been [director] Zack Snyder himself whispering in my ear, and he would have been right.
In a classic example of the epic understatement known as litotes, Variety’s reviewer observes that the picture’s vision of the West as a heroic contingent of sculpted badasses and the East as a cauldron perversion and iniquity “might be greeted with muted enthusiasm in the Middle East.” Replace the words “muted enthusiasm” with “a roadside bomb,” and you’ve got yourself a tagline for the Baghdad premiere.
Iran on Monday strongly condemned the US film company Warner Bros. over the allegedly “anti-Iranian” blockbuster film 300. Javad Shamqadri, art advisor to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told Fars news agency that the film was an insult to Persian culture and in line with the American “psychological war” against Iran…
Iran’s has called foul over what it calls “deviation of history” but also because the Persians in the film were shown as “ugly and violent creatures rather than human beings.”…
The news network Khabar organised a special programme in which the film was evaluated from several angles by film critics who argued that the film’s alleged efforts to expose Persians as violent was a US political plot implemented through Hollywood and the Warner Bros. company.
Source: Hot Air
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