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Re: (TFT) 300 (the film) and TFT?
----- Original Message -----
From: "Craig W. Barber" <craigwbar@comcast.net>
To: <tft@brainiac.com>
Well, as a lawyer it warms my heart to discover a group even more hated:
film
critics! I was pretty sure going in that the pans of the film would be
due to
the content, not the actual film!
Well howdy, fellow legal person.
I liked it. It was stylized,
Nothing wrong with stylized, if the movie is good!
but fewer liberties were taken with known
historical fact than in typical Hollywood films (e.g., "Pearl Harbor").
When "Pearl" came out, I hated it and went and bought an old copy of "Tora
Tora Tora": highly recommend it, even forty years later "Tora" is a good
movie! (Pedantic by today's film conventions, but crammed with detail:
the
filmmakers seemed to have been trying to film a lecture.)
Yes, it also had the interesting aspect that the Japanese and American parts
were filmed by separate directors and film crews. I liked it, and the SFX
work was superb for the time and ages well even today. I consider it to be a
virtual documentary.
Mainly, however, TTT deserves credit for furnishing stock footage for most
WWII films and TV shows of the 1070s, including "Midway" and "Black Sheep
Squadron".
Leonidas' army of free men...
Did the film point out that the 300 were actually 300 free men plus 900
helots
who also fought and died?
The film did not address the fact that the Greeks were not as free as we
are -- but the critics have beaten this to death. The bottom line, however,
is that the Greeks were much *better* than the Persians. Not perfect, but
far better. And no Greek victory in that war, no Western civilization. That
would be very bad indeed, when one considers that things like Democracy,
individual rights, women's rights, free speech, etc., evolved in the West
and nowhere else. This fact makes many folks uncomfortable, but it's a fact
nontheless.
I do not recall the 900 Spartan helots, but it's been a long time since I
read Herodotus.
Quibbling. You *know* I'm going to see this flick
ASAP.
Nothing wrong with good natured quibbling. It is often the case that
civilizations are not as good as they imagine themselves to be. Ancient
Greece *did* have slavery. And property rights were limited to a
comparatively small group of landowners. The key distinction, though, is
that *far* more people enjoyed such rights than in any other significant
culture up to that point. Not perfect...just much better.
--Ty
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