I thought the guy was Michael Dorn (aka Worf)
What is it that Leonidas said to Ephialtes again? I saw it, I just can’t remember.
Roughly, “May you live forever.”
I thought he was the young prince from The Temple of Doom, all grown up. I was sure of it until I got home and looked on IMDb.
Oh please, talk about poisoning the well. :rolleyes:
I can’t stop thinking about this movie. I’ve done nothing at work today except read Wikipedia entires on Sparta. I want to be a Spartan (except for the fact that it would really suck in real life).
I wanna marry a Spartan woman so that way my son will be part Spartan.
I wish I were kidding.
That’s weird, there was no reaction to him in my theater and yeah, I really did like his voice, whatever they did to it.
Xerxes did kinda remind me of the Goa’uld guy in the original Stargate movie though, and I can understand why people think he was sort of… I dunno you can’t really say drag queenish. At least I don’t think he was. Sort of effeminate maybe, but I saw it as a pompous, royal god-king kinda attitude.
I read on Wikipedia that not much is known about Xerxes later years, but he spent them mostly involved with his harems and eunuchs before getting murdered by his vizier, for whatever that’s worth.
Michael Dorn has a real voice that sounds big. There was some odd tonal quality to Xerxes’s faux “big voice” that reminded me of Jaye Davidson’s pitch-shifted voice as Anubis in Stargate.
Rodrigo Santoro is almost 6’3" in real-life (Gerald Butler is 6’2"). If they’d made Xerxes 7’2" - 7’5" (closer to Yao Ming), he would have been an imposing and exotic conqueror. He looked about 10 feet tall and freakish to the point of silly.
I loved most of the movie, even the Cenobite executioner, but Xerxes just made me laugh and not in a good way.
I wonder if there was something amiss with the sound system when we saw it then. The audience didn’t seem to mind how he looked, but every time he opened his mouth, there was serious chortling and guffaws.
I had no idea the ancient Greeks used so much Brazilian body wax.
[chanelling Darth Vader]
I find your lack of faith disturbing.
[/chanelling Darth Vader]
Yeah. I wanna see this thing too.
Cartooniverse
I thought Xerxes was awesome! Voice, 10 ft tall . . . no complaints. The only things that bothered me were certain disgusting creatures that I had to hide my eyes from.
Or that they airbrushed their abs.
When the original comic books were coming out, somebody commented on a letters page about calling the Athenians “boy-lovers.” Frank Miller replied, saying that the Spartans were certainly not above hypocrisy.
Wow, what a disingenuous answer that was (Miller’s). At any rate, the context for the average theatergoer was prideful homophobia; only the educated viewer knew it was hypocritical.
I thought it played like a conservative wet dream: all the muscley white dudes in man panties, fighting a horde of every different size and shape–and ethnicity–of creature. Diversity as nightmare. It was like the Spartan version of Falling Down, or Edmond: white “straight” male paranoia of being overrun by people who are not like him. Mostly, though, it reminded me of Small Soldiers, where the “good” guys are all white and square jawed, and the “bad” guys are exotic and foreign, if not downright primitive. The difference being that in Small Soldiers, the “good” guys were the aggressors, and the “bad” guys were pacificists, making it a more obvoius satire of American militarism. *300 *reads more like a celebration of it: painting the strong-jawed white guy with the shield and cape as wholly justified in his militarism. It might read like Bush-war apologism, except it was just so dang over the top and *silly *that I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t making fun of such apologism. The man panties make me wonder.
I have never been a fan of comics, but I am thoroughly enjoying the manifestations of comics/graphics to film in recent years. I don’t think one has to be a longtime fan of the 300 comic to enjoy the film. Interpreting comics to film is a whole other artform, imho.
And this film was awesomely good at it. I found the makup in Sin City just didn’t sit well with me when scenes of those characters were on-screen, but I totally dug the merging of the live-action and blue screen in the scenes where the actors are not wearing prosthetics. That’s not to say that there aren’t obvious special effects and cgi, but I feel that they enhance the raw footage, again in an artform that I am enjoying seeing such advances in thought from.
My girlfriend is a composer, and the soundtrack opportunites for comic/graphic film scores are really something she could be quite good at.
I think though that there were several items that don’t quite fit. For example, there was one line where the narrator said (paraphrasing) “that the Persians showed desperation when they suddenly resorted to use and waste their best and most elite forces so early”. That sounded to me like a jab directed to what the US did in Iraq.
Not to mention that the larger force that is invading are the bad guys and the followers of Leonidas (that have also a justification to fight because they are defending their people) are fanatics.
And there is also the bit showing lots of [del]dollars[/del] gold Persian coins being thrown around to “persuade” powerful locals to follow the Persians.
Regarding the actor who portrayed Xerxes: His name’s Rodrigo Santoro and his voice was remixed. If you want to see the actor as he really is, go borrow or rent a copy of Love Actually (which I think people should see on its own merits anyway) and look for the scenes with Laura Linney’s character Sarah. Karl, Santoro’s character, is her love match in that movie.
I popped it in to show my fiance and her first reaction was, “I thought that guy was way taller in 300.”
:smack:
That was her “blonde moment” for the week.
I didn’t say it was an allegory. I only meant that the attitudes and concepts seemed to be the kind that might be more comfortably appreciated by a more conservative audience member, due to this or that parallel with a conservative viewpoint. I’m not even really sure I believe that was the filmmakers’ intention; Rorschach tests reveal much, though they started out as random inkblots.
I meant to add:
As for whether or not 300 is a critique of the war in Iraq… I dunno. According to Herodotus, Xerxes did throw his elite guard at the Spartans in his second wave of assault. Besides, the movie is very faithful to the graphic novel which was written a good three years before the WTC attacks and five years before we invaded Iraq. Obviously the timing of the movie’s release may be significant, but I’d say it’s more because comic books are finally spawning (mostly) decent and profitable films.