Comments on: 300 not a documentary?!?!?! Oh, the Horror!

By: bbum

bbum — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 04:05:26 +0000

Frog. Gee, I’m horribly confused. Here I thought I was writing a weblog largely for (a) the hell of it and (b) to take notes on random crap so I can easily find it later via Google (or search engine du jour). Yet, somehow, apparently, I’m supposed to be writing something meaningful to change the world?

Actually, I’m not confused. I know I’m complaining about something meaningless.

You might be surprised at how deep and vehemently I hold certain opinions about our government, the religious right, the religious left, and the jackassery pervasive throughout the world. I choose not to write about that here because I just don’t have energy and, frankly, I’m trying to keep this weblog at least somewhat family friendly.

However, keep an eye on the rat gonads… maybe I will start my other weblog.

By: Frog

Frog — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 03:37:38 +0000

I’m with Diogenes. I would add: you’re complaining about something absurdly meaningless. How about paying as much attention to what the “Christian” right and their ilk are doing to our own modern-day government?

Bread and circuses.

By: bbum

bbum — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 21:04:09 +0000

Heh– I was wondering if someone would call me out on that. Kind of hoping so.

There is a key difference: Both attempt to sensationalize something — technology or history — to create a better, more gripping or thrilling, story.

The key difference is that Miller is taking some piece of reality (or, in this case, what we can figure out from historical records) and augmenting it into this awesome story.

In Digital Fortress, Brown doesn’t augment or distort reality to make a better story. He dumbs it down to the point of being just plain ludicrous. As I pointed out in my “review”, my mother — a very non-technical person — found the story to be just plain stupid because of the glaring flaws in Brown’s attempt at painting an alternative reality.

One could argue that Miller’s portrayal of events is a dumbing down. It kind of has to be to cram that much stuff into something as short as a movie. But that just leads back to the writing thing — the fictional bits (most of it) of Miller’s telling is really good. Brown’s fiction sucks monkey elbows.

By: greay

greay — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:41:47 +0000

I’m going to see the movie, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to think it’s awesome. But I think your complaints are misplaced. Lytle’s review of the movie isn’t really all that different from yours of Digital Fortress. True, Dan Brown’s errors may be particularly egregious and he’s just a terrible writer, so it’s harder to look past them.

I can’t say anything about the groups that are taking issue with the film, because I don’t know anything about that. But I can entirely understand an expert in Hellenistic history having a hard time enjoying the movie because of the things they get “wrong”.

By: John C. Randolph

John C. Randolph — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:06:15 +0000

Say there “BrownPeople”,

Did you have some kind of point you were trying to make? Do you imagine that the movements of people and cultures thousands of years ago entitles you to something individually?

-jcr

By: BrownPeople

BrownPeople — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 05:23:09 +0000

As one of the brown people, White man has been denigrating other peoples history for a long time. Now that we object, you throw a hissy fit.
So you have no problem stealing Aryan (which is a sanskrit word). Swastika (which is a sanskrit word). Aryan people are defined as Indian-Iranian. Abraham is a sanskrit word. The word Father and Mother comes from Persian.
Aryan Invasion Theory was invented to denigrate the brown people. There is no such thing as Indo-European Languages but lie continues. Should I go on.
So now that we are actually challenging the White Man’s Burden you don’t like it. how quaint. Any history that contradicts Judeo-Christian timelines is disregarded and ridiculed. There is more archeological evidence for Aryan empire in Israel than all the Jewish and Christian combined. Do you know that.

By: Dorkpants

Dorkpants — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:37:18 +0000

One day Hollywood will make a fictional movie in which Americans are portrayed as bad guys and the Right will go and watch it and say “it’s just a movie…a great movie” instead of crying “What can you expect from those liberal lefties who run Hollywood? we’re gonna boycott this movie, praise Jesus.”

By: rogre

rogre — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:17:34 +0000

I am just happy to come to a web site (this one) were anyone cares or knows differences between literary fictions and the stories we use for histories. The web is usually as dumb the general population.

By: Diogenes

Diogenes — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:54:11 +0000

What is really eating at the soul of America is that a bunch of unscrupulous cockroaches have taken over the government and turned it into a kleptocracy, making a time in which US funded death squads in Central America or inaction during a genocide in East Africa were the main things to get outraged about seem nostalgically quaint by comparison. But I digress…

Ephraim Lytle’s beef with the movie is not that it fictionalizes historical events, but the things he choses to take liberties with and the ways in which he takes those liberties. For example, if I write a fictional book that takes place in Turkey during 1915 and make the Armenians look like a bunch of people that were just begging to get slaughtered… yes it is a piece of fiction, but it is prefectly valid to criticize the socio-political liberties I take with the Armenian genocide as being historically inaccurate, and I don’t think it is unreasonable for the Armenians to be miffed.

By: bbum (waiting for panic'd machine to reboot)

bbum (waiting for panic'd machine to reboot) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:18:43 +0000

But, yeah, ultimately I’m really not that upset about any of this… it is just a symptom of a bigger stupidity that is slowly eating at the soul of America.