Monday, March 12, 2007

300 Spartans, 1 Million Persians & The Altering of History



So I saw 300 last week. Driven by action, the movie had enough blood and battle to dazzle the senses and up testosterone levels. As cinematography it was a visual CGI masterpiece—though one might ask when and where reliance on computer generated imagery enhances or devalues a movie. The acting was tolerable—not like Ghostrider where I wanted to gnaw off my left leg rather than sit through the excruciating dialogue. As plots go, it was mediocre— not bad but not exactly filled with complex intrigue. Syriana or Babel this movie was not. Noble Greeks fight scary Persians to Alamo type finish. Freedom. Honor. Glory. The End. But my anticipation of 300 was only partly based on my expectations of it as a film.

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Sunday, March 11, 2007

The G-Word: The Dark Side of Humanity



I was recently talking about Darfur with a group of people, mostly activists who have been fighting (and rightly so) to bring attention to the trauma inflicting the people of Western Sudan, where the government in Khartoum has been trying to brutally repress a rebellion through ethnic cleansing and all the atrocities that usually entails. There was dispute and confusion about what was going on, namely over complex Sudanese notions of ethnicity as the self-described "Arab" Janjaweed militias, who carry out some of the most heinous acts, look little different to Western eyes from the "black Africans" that are their victims. The "G"-Word--genocide--was wielded strongly, and put to use to show moral outrage. And no wonder. Since the horrors carried out by the Third Reich, genocide has been drummed into us as possibly the most extreme expression of man's inhumanity to man. Say the "G"-Word and our minds conjure up images of emaciated bodies at Buchenwald and mass graves at Sobibor. In the long list of human atrocities, genocide ranks foremost in our collective abhorrence.

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