300 (2007)

OUR REVIEW
by Dave White

Who's in It: Gerard Butler, Lena Headey, Dominic West, David Wenham, Vincent Regan, Rodrigo Santoro

The Basics: Spartans, after a long day at the gym blasting protein and Creatine shakes to make themselves hugely muscled and eight-packed to outer space and back, enjoy nothing more than waxing their chests and backs, oiling up their pecs, lats, triceps, biceps, quads and glutes, then stripping down to loincloths and capes and chopping off the heads of their enemies.

What's the Deal? Look, I'm just reporting the facts here. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with strutting around going "GRRR" and "ROAR" all day and continuously talking about what a real man you are. It just seems like a lot of compensation for something else that the movie will never specify.

Other Film I Couldn't Get Out of My Head While I Watched It: The amazing drag-ball-and-voguing documentary Paris Is Burning, especially the part where the contest is devoted to "Butch Queens, First Time in Drag at a Ball."

Setting Aside the Whole Alpha-Dog Masculinity as Performance Paradigm for Just a Second: You should also know that this movie is a total blast of cool fighting and superviolence. I'm a huge fan of wickedly graphic bloodshed in action/adventure movies like this, and it doesn't disappoint at all on that level. It's pretty much about nothing else, really, which makes it the most pure movie I've seen so far this year.

What Else Is Great: It looks amazing and comic-bookish because it was all done against a green screen. See it in IMAX unless you're one of those people (like me) who get terrible headaches in IMAX movies. I know, I know. If I were tough like a Spartan that wouldn't happen to me.