The Triangle

Issue date: 3/9/07 Section: Arts & Entertainment

Violence in movies is awesome. Denying this fact is un-American and has the potential to turn this country into a land of sissies who prance around all day talking about pointless topics in high voices. The people of ancient Sparta recognized this and took it to the extreme by throwing weak babies off cliffs and encouraging the surviving children to beat each other up to prove their strength. While I don't approve of child-on-child abuse (unless it's my own children fighting for my love), I can never disapprove of violence between consenting adults, and Frank Miller's 300 has more blood than you can shake a stick at. It may be 100 percent CGI, but it's still blood, and as someone who bleeds constantly, I can say that nothing sells tickets like an Asian guy getting speared by a Greek guy. All fans of action and battle will view this as their Citizen Kane, except not boring or in black and white.Unfortunately, that's all there is. I was sort of expecting this, but like the 300 Spartans who had to defend a piece of land against almost 1 million Persian soldiers led by the god-king Xerxes, I held out a shred of hope against all odds. I was hanging on to the idea that the movie would combine my bloodlust and non-clichéd-dialogue lust into a beautiful ice-cream swirl of greatness. Speaking of ice cream, there's a place on Front Street and Market that looks like something out of a time machine and is delicious, so go there if you're ever depressed or hungry after a movie at the Ritz Five. But alas, my perfect movie ice cream was not to be. The movie, while visually excellent, is somewhat hackneyed and unconvincing, even though the battle of Thermopylae is a fairly well-documented historical event and there's not too much historical inaccuracy that I could see, except for the part where all the Spartans used laser guns to wipe out all the opposition and then rode surfboards to a beach full of babes. Frank Miller had complete control, but he also has a tendency to have the occasional stroke now and then, so I forgive him for that lapse in judgment.

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