3 days ago I watched the movie called 300. It was interesting! this is an article i found while browsing the itnernet?
TEHRAN
None of Iran's 250 cinemas is scheduled to show the film which, according to Iranians, offers an unflattering depiction of the Persian army
A BOX-OFFICE Hollywood hit based on the second Greco-Persian War has been condemned at the highest levels of the Iranian government and labelled a Western conspiracy aimed at preparing international opinion for a strike on Tehran.
Condemning what he called a "deviation of history", Javad Shamqadri, a cultural adviser to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, slammed the portrayal of Persians as "ugly and violent creatures rather than human beings", speaking to the official Fars news agency.
The Warner Bros adaptation of the comic book based on the 480BC battle of Thermopylai, in which, according to Greek historical accounts, a small Spartan contingent held off the Persian army long enough for Athens to be evacuated, took an estimated $70 million in its debut weekend according to figures released by the Los Angeles-based box-office track firm Media by Numbers.
Writing in the Beirut Daily Star, Iranian academic Ahmad Sadri argued that "300 drinks deeply at the cauldron of rage that is still boiling over in the United States six years after that bloody Tuesday (9/11)".
"Two invasions, a trillion dollars in smoke and three thousand dead Americans have not sated the Achillean anger in a remote part of the American psyche," adds Sadri, a professor of Islamic World Studies at Chicago's Lake Forest College. "The movie 300 unleashes that abiding desire to curse, brag and rave at endless Asian hordes."
Close to Tehran's central Haft-e Tir Square, customers cram into a shop three metres square selling bootlegged DVDs inside a dusty shopping arcade. 300 is in great demand despite not having arrived yet. The shop's owner, Siavash, is unwilling to give his full name because of the danger that his shop will be shut for selling films that did not pass the Islamic Republic's stringent morality laws.
"Hollywood must always have a good and bad guy - but why is it that in historical films like (Oliver Stone's) Alexander the Persians are the baddies and the Greeks the goodies?" Siavash asks rhetorically.
"All Hollywood likes to do is paint us in a bad light," said a middle-aged customer who came into the shop looking for 300. "They like to show Iranians in a racist way."
"We don't have a problem with history, with the fact that the Greeks beat us at Thermopylai, adds Siavash. "What we have a problem with is the ways in which the Americans like to show us. We don't have a problem with the Greeks, but with the American film industry."
None of Iran's 250 cinemas is scheduled to show the film. Few foreign films are distributed in local cinemas, most of which show an almost exclusive diet of light-hearted Iranian comedies and existential, romantic dramas. The limited number of Western films screened reflect the regime's anti-British, anti-US and anti-Israeli ideology and are heavily censored to remove intimate scenes.
Khabar television network organised a panel discussion for Iranian film-critics. Despite it remaining unclear whether they had viewed the film or not, they unanimously concluded that its alleged efforts to expose Persians as violent was a US political plot implemented through Hollywood and Warner Bros.
"Following the Islamic Revolution in Iran, Hollywood and cultural authorities in the US initiated studies to figure out how to attack Iranian culture," said Shamqadri, the Ahmadinejad adviser. "Certainly, the movie is a product of such studies."
Shamqadri, who is also a filmmaker and directed Ahmadinejad's election campaign movie that depicted the president as an honest and frugal man, accused 300 of being "part of a comprehensive US psychological war aimed at Iranian culture". He added that the movie's efforts would be fruitless because "values in Iranian culture and the Islamic Revolution are too strongly seated to be damaged by such plans".
The best response to 300, according to Shamqadri, is to stimulate the Iranian film industry to produce more historical films. Over 10,000 Iranians have already signed an Internet petition called "300, an unethical name" protesting the film's portrayal of the Persian army as "some monstrous savages" and demanding an apology.
It is not just in Iran and among expat Iranian communities that the film has raised howls of protest and derision. Writing in the venerable Washington Post, film critic Stephen Hunter noted that "the Persians represent effeminate decadence", with Xerxes looking "like Geoffrey Holdern in a photo by Helmut Newton".
The New York Times' AO Scott is similarly dismissive, describing how "the Persians, pioneers in the art of facial piercing, have vastly greater numbers - including Ninjas, dervishes, elephants, a charging rhino and an angry bald giant - but the Spartans clearly have superior health clubs and electrolysis facilities. They also hew to a warrior ethic of valour and freedom that makes them, despite their gleeful appetite for killing, the good guys in this tale."
The movie's release at a time of high tension between Iran and the West as Washington seeks to impose further sanctions on Iran for not desisting from its nuclear programme, which Tehran claims is for the peaceful production of energy. Those who have seen it, have not missed its racial stereotyping.
"Sounds like this movie is just as bad ... as the original 1962 colour extravaganza starring Richard Egan which some of us saw as kids, naturally driven, in part by the stereotyping, to side with the heroic Spartans against the arrogant and treacherous Persians," said Wayne White, a former Middle East State Department intelligence analyst. "Indeed, this movie, when I was 10 years old, was my first exposure to anything Iranian, and the impression it made was decidedly negative towards Persians."
Despite the fact that the Greeks resisted Xerxes, and Alexander the Great brought down the Persian Empire the following century, contemporary Iranians hold the Greeks in high esteem for their cultural and scientific achievements.
"Maybe it's because the Greeks invaded us longer ago than anyone else, maybe it's because they didn't impose a foreign religion such as Islam on us, maybe it's because they adjusted to our culture quicker than anyone else, but we don't see them as enemies," said Targol Taghizadeh, a 24-year old student at Tehran University.
