It's my first day back at school and the printers won't print, I had to climb under yellow CAUTION tape to get to the seventh floor Beit Midrash and my teachers decided to give us major extensions for both of the papers I was worried about. So at least that last is a pleasant development.
On that note, my English teacher continues to be fabulously entertaining. In class today:
"You have all these mad words flying around your head and then you use them inappropriately in conversation and alienate people. Or at least I do that."
And then:
"This isn't like the Persian court in the movie 300 where they are all walking around naked and smoking hookah. Xerxes is fabulous in that movie; he's this incredibly gay guy with piercings who walks around naked half the time. There's this exoticism to the movie...yes, and then there are the half-naked women kissing each other.
[pause]
Oh, is this okay? Is it okay to mention hookah, naked people or lesbians in class? Did I say something (he winks) naughty?
[pause]
It's really kind of a hateful, frightening movie- so much ideology in it- it's almost fascist."
I'm so seeing 300.
4 comments:
I actually thought that much of the ideology in the movie was something many of us could use today... It's definitely worth seeing, whatever your opinion is!
I saw 300 on the plane on the way back to israel (well most of it, except for the parts that i had issues watching.. so i don't know exactly what went on in the persian court -- whatever it was isn't a tenth of what it probably should have been.)
what struck me was mainly what struck me in Gladiator, that hollywood doesn't get avodah zarah--they make it seem as cold and dead as american christianity. As much as they worked in 300 to give it a little more flavor, (from what i did see, it's more like a NiN/Marilyn Manson/[insert other current equivalent] video) which is most likely thanks to frank miller and nothing to do w/ hollywood, they're concept of religion is a dead and lifeless one.
otherwise the messages were barely veiled political commentary + americana (the highly fictionalized watered-down highschool sort -- kinda disney/singapore in it's detachment from reality)
[sorry if i'm hating on american culture so much. i still haven't worked out all its influences on me.]
Yitz:
It's ok. I saw the same things as you politically. The war between the Greco-Roman West and the Persian East is still going on today. I found it very applicable to a view of modern society.
I found it interesting that the movie came out just as things started heating up more with Iran. I was somewhat afraid it was going to be a propaganda piece, in that it was somewhat fascist and is a very popular movie.
I get a little worried when I hear people say how awesome it was, without any reservations on their part.
Oh...another point I failed to mention.
View the west as the Greeks for a while. Then view the west as the Persians for a while. It's an interesting comparison.
Just which side is which?
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