300 the movie?

[Narukami]

The 300 Toys are on their way...

NECA has the toy license for the film 300 and has images of them on their web site.

http://www.necaonline.com/licenses/detail/128

They seem faithful to the movie/comic book, which is to say, from an historic stand point, they are very "imaginative." Due for release next month but no word yet on price point or where they will be sold.

Narukami

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Dave Reinke said..........

"Marshal,

Some years ago, in a used book store, I found a pre-publication copy of Gates Of Fire with an intro page indicating that film rights to the book had already been optioned by George Clooney. Now this was before Clooney had become known for his directing & producing so perhaps he was looking at this as an acting vehicle for himself. Or perhaps he was already thinking as a producer.

Nothing has come of this -- yet, and we do not know if Clooney renewed his option or if someone else has picked up the rights. "

as i have alluded to several times on here :wink: From the web links,
Cloony picked up on the rights after John? Mann, but it turned into a handbag match from what I can figure out! Who is going to play who, etc!

This book was what inspired me to start looking into my Greek heritage again, after a long hiatus. Was visually impressive enough for me to dream that it would be made into a movie, but now, after 7 years of false hope, seems to be binned, as in trash-canned! :evil: :x shock:

Hollywood probably would not have lived up to my expectations with this movie anyway, as you were saying Marshal!

Maybe one day!

[Narukami]

Greetings.

For those who might be interested, and have $10 to throw away, the Best Buy in Burbank (and one would presume at all Best Buys) has a display up for the new Ultra-Edition of Alexander. On that display is a special pre-view DVD on The 300 with trailers, making-of docs, green screen test shots, costume work etc. all for the amazingly low low price of $9.99 hock:

That's right, Hollywood is now charging us to watch their publicity reels. :? evil:

Perhaps it is not 300 - March To Glory but rather 300 - March To The Bank.

I know, I know, this is show business, but charging us for their PR disc seems a bit much.

Still, for those who are interested there it is...

:wink:

Narukami

[Narukami]

This article appeared in the Sunday LA Times.

There are some interesting, or amusing, comments by the film makers about what they were "going for" as well as a case of mistaken identity. (The cinematographer believes Leonardo painted the Sistine Chapel. I'm not sure if he means DiVinci or the Mutant Ninja Turtle, though I'm guessing the latter...)

It seems that the Studio too is concerned about the political/cultural conflict and asked if the Persians might be called the Zoroastrians instead.:? roll:

Ah Hollywood....


Giving '300' movie a comic-book grandeur
Director Zack Snyder mixes tricks to create a comic-book grandeur for '300' on the screen.
By Sheigh Crabtree, Special to The Times
March 4, 2007

A pack of tourists and a museum docent fanned out in front of "Leonidas at Thermopylae" in the Louvre a few months ago. Spotting Jacques-Louis David's 1814 oil painting of a buff, naked warrior king preparing to lead 300 Spartan troops into battle, a cheerful young American said: "Awesome. I just made a movie of this."

"Really?" said the docent. "… what does it look like?"

The young man shrugged and smiled. "It basically looks like this."

"Well, those men are all naked," the docent said after a long pause.

"Yeah," the man replied. "That's kind of what the Spartans were all about."

Zack Snyder is something of an expert after spending years creating his own audaciously loud, fast-paced cinematic painting of the Spartans' tale, "300," a $60-million live-action adaptation of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley's 1999 graphic novel.

Snyder has visualized thousands of permutations of the overmatched Greek force that held off hoards of advancing Persians in 480 BC, fighting to the death for their freedom and inspiring the resistance of their countrymen. And for "300," he's developed an inventive visual vocabulary, shooting on film and using a bevy of fancy camera, lighting and sonic tricks drawn from his work in commercials to bring his actors, filmed against neutral bluescreen, to bold life in a moody CGI world.

In his second at-bat directing a big studio picture, Snyder, 40, could have tossed off a clanking sword-and-sandals epic, its comic book heroes encased in an impenetrable wall of visual effects. At worst, as far as the studio was concerned, Snyder, whose first film was "Dawn of the Dead," might have pulled off a passable hybrid of "Troy" and "Sin City," which both performed solidly at the box office.

But "300," which opens Friday in regular theaters and in Imax, seems to defy the conventions of stiff and airless bluescreen movies in which muted performances belie pretend environments. The rule on Snyder's sets was that anything the actors touched had to be real — the stone paths they walked on, the elaborate litter that carries Xerxes, the Persian king. Instead of playing strictly to imaginary foils, they had more tangible environments to ground their performances. Battles were staged with swords and shields.

Snyder samples from high and low culture — everything from the masterworks of Greek antiquity to Super Bowl beer ads. But it was Miller's bold silhouetted frames and Varley's firelit colors in the pages of "300" that Snyder and his cast and crew seem to have tattooed on the backs of their eyelids. In the more than three months of prep, 60 days of shooting on bluescreen sets in Montreal and year-and-a-half in postproduction, it was broad visual references, as opposed to words, that informed the creative intent of the movie.

Much of the action unfolds in bold tableaux under the stormy skies of battle and aftermath — the dust of an attack, smoke of a burning village. The reds of capes and blood are the only colors that cut through in silhouetted backgrounds. Austere rocks and an angry Aegean Sea below offset the brutal violence and almost inhuman discipline of the outnumbered Spartans in battle.

Gerard Butler, who stars as King Leonidas, signed on after watching a four-minute Snyder test shot. During production Butler spent hours in the art department studying artistic renderings and referring back to the graphic novel, he said. "I knew I would never again come across a hero quite as masculine, powerful or uncompromising," Butler said. "When you read the graphic novel you see every pose the king has is such a position of strength and power…. I pushed for this stylized movement from the novel when you see us all walking together, leaning forward and marching like a machine."

Miller, who co-directed "Sin City," has spoken effusively about Snyder's "300" adaptation ever since a teaser debuted at Comic-Con last summer — it was played three times in succession for rapturous comics fans in the crowd. Miller has said it's not that Snyder faithfully copied every last detail in his novel, it's that he tapped into a similar mythic scope. Snyder nailed the visual ideal of an oral history told over hundreds of years by firelight.

"Very accurate, detailed figures walking around in battle is boring," Miller said. "The most important thing was to strip them down to helmets and red capes…. Spartans move like lightning. Reality be damned."

But reality did intrude slightly as the studio and filmmakers considered the contemporary resonance of the film. "There was a huge sensitivity about East versus West with the studio," Snyder said. "They said, 'Is there any way we could not call [the bad guys] Persians? Would that be cool if we called them Zoroastrians?' "

In the seven years he worked on the film, he said, "the politics caught up with us. I've had people ask me if Xerxes or Leonidas is George W. Bush. I say, 'Great. Awesome. If it inspires you to think about the current geopolitical situation, cool.' "

Achieving the vision

IT may be easiest to talk about Snyder's visuals in "300" in broad strokes, said Larry Fong, the director's classmate at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and his longtime cinematographer. For those involved in the production, especially Snyder, the three most common adjectives used to describe "300" are "cool," "awesome" and "amazing" — which don't go a long way in conveying specifics.

In that regard, Fong said he had yet to read a description that conveyed his sense of the look and tone of the movie. "The other day someone on the Internet said it looks 'antique.' That's pretty good. Actually, we were going for something so unique and original and amazing that nobody has invented words for it," he joked. "I'm sure when Leonardo was laying around on his back working on the Sistine Chapel his patrons weren't like, 'We're paying you a lot of money here, pal. What do you mean 'heavenly and angelic'?"

Truth be told, Fong explained, everyone from studio heads to production assistants was slightly boggled by Snyder's vision. "It's not that we didn't have faith, it's just sort of alchemical what he pulled off. I don't think any one person knew, but each person had a piece of the puzzle. It's Zack who saw the puzzle the whole time from a distance." :? roll:

[Narukami]

Time Magazine has an interesting pre-view/review of 300.

To my mind they have summed up this new film perfectly:

It is a film of a graphic novel of a film of a historical event.


*** Spoiler Warning ***

Not about the plot (we all know how this story ends) but about how they made it, particularly about filming the Oracle -- very interesting.


[size=150:1501jjwh]The Art of War[/size]
Friday, Mar. 02, 2007 By LEV GROSSMAN

Something very real did happen 25 centuries ago in a narrow pass on Greece's northern coast called Thermopylae--the name means "the hot gates." In August of 480 B.C., a force of about 7,000 Greek soldiers assembled there, including 300 Spartans under the leadership of their king, Leonidas. The Spartans were sick, scary fighters, brutally trained from childhood, the ancient equivalent of special forces. They were there to meet an army of more than 250,000 Persians under the command of King Xerxes.
The odds were ludicrously bad, the outcome a foregone conclusion. Most of the Greeks retreated, but the 300 Spartans, the hard core of the Greek army, chose to fight on, using the natural strategic advantage of the pass. They lasted three days--beyond all hope, beyond what should have been militarily possible--and then they died. Their refusal to surrender their freedom to the Persians inspired the rest of the Greeks, who ultimately rose up as a nation and beat back the invaders.
That was then. On March 9, a movie about the Battle of Thermopylae, called 300, will hit theaters. It was made by a young director, stars nobody in particular, and it looks like nothing you've ever seen. Very little in 300 is real except the actors. Sets, locations, armies, blood--they're all computer generated. It's beautiful, and it might well be the future of filmmaking. But should it be?
In 1962 a boy named Frank Miller went to the movies with his parents. The movie was Rudolph Maté's The 300 Spartans. Miller was 5. "It had a deep, deep effect on me," Miller says. "I actually snuck across the theater in order to confer with my dad and make sure the heroes really were dying. I stopped thinking of heroes as being the people who got medals at the end or the key to the city and started thinking of them more as the people who did the right thing and damn the consequences." When Miller grew up, he created a comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae called simply 300. Miller's account of the battle--now doubly refracted through two media--was read by a movie director named Zack Snyder.
Snyder, 40, cut his teeth on high-concept, effects-heavy TV commercials. He made his feature debut in 2004 with a feather-light, razor-sharp remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead. (Rent it just for the opening credits, where zombies rip various cities to pieces as Johnny Cash sings When the Man Comes Around.) Snyder is something of a dork. Only a dork--the finest, most discriminating of dorks--would have read 300 in the first place. When Maté made The 300 Spartans, he packed up his cameras and his actors and his caterers and went to Greece. When Snyder made 300, he did what dorks do: he locked himself in a room with a bunch of fancy computers.
Snyder is one of a small, hypertechnical fringe of directors who are exploring a new way to make movies by discarding props, sets, extras and real-life locations and replacing them with their computer-generated equivalents. Cinema has always had a tenuous connection to reality; they're severing it almost completely. It's a technique loosely known as "digital back lot." George Lucas was a pioneer, as was Kerry Conran, the lonely genius responsible for the much praised, little-seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. In Robert Rodriguez's cult hit Sin City (also based on a Miller graphic novel), practically nothing is real but the people. It's not so much cinema as synema. And it's creeping into more mainstream movies: in Blood Diamond, a tear was digitally added to Jennifer Connelly's flawless cheek, after the fact, to put the exclamation point on a crucial scene.
For Snyder it was simply the only way to get the look of Miller's 300 off the page and onto the big screen. "One of the early versions of the movie I wanted to do was a Lemony Snicket kind of method," he says, "where you build a giant environment in a giant hangar, and it's an actual 3-D world, but it's just done with painted backgrounds. But it's incredibly expensive, and you need the space. When I saw Sin City I said, 'You know what? I could do that.'" He could and did. Snyder shot 300 almost entirely in a warehouse in Montreal. He filmed exactly one scene outside, and that was just because it's hard to do galloping horses in a warehouse.
Strange things happened in that warehouse. The digital--back lot approach places an immense burden on the director. "Zack would go, 'Come and see this stage!'" says Lena Headey, who plays Leonidas' wife. "And we'd go, and there'd be, like, a rock. And we'd be like, 'Has he taken acid this morning? Or what's he looking at?'" Snyder had to make his actors see what he saw, and he saw things that weren't there yet. "Every now and then I'd stop and go, 'This is crazy!'" he says. "'What are we doing?' And then we'd shake that off and get back to work."
Ironically, acting on the digital back lot is a lot like plain old nondigital stage acting. It's just lights and bare floorboards. "You don't have any boundaries," Headey says. "You don't have any emotional props. You can't do this thing of, 'Oooh, I'm going to sit on this chair because I feel sad now,' or 'I'm going to hit this!' You don't have any of that." With so much computer-generated make-believe going on, the actors' physicality is the movie's only link to the real world. To turn Hollywood pretty boys into Spartans took eight weeks of intense dieting, exercise and martial-arts training. Onscreen their ripped abs look as if they're trying to bulge their way out of their stomachs. (The buff, largely unclad Spartans are also the producers' main hope of getting anyone other than straight men to see 300.)
Shooting took a brisk 60 days; post-production took a full year and 10 special-effects companies. Every frame was manipulated and color-shifted to create an intense, thunderstorm palette. Creatures and landscapes and entire armies were created from scratch. With the kind of computing power directors have at their disposal, editing becomes more like painting than moviemaking. Time speeds up for dramatic effect, then slows down to capture a balletic spear thrust. Computer-generated elephants rear up and plummet off computer-generated cliffs. The Persian King Xerxes becomes 9 ft. tall. In one scene a nubile oracle dances in a trance, her hair and her flowy, filmy wrap swirling surreally around her otherwise nude body (300 earns every inch of its R rating). There's something odd about the image that you can't put your finger on, until Snyder explains that the dancer was actually performing in a tank of water and was then digitally placed in the scene: "She looks like she's in pain, but she's really just holding her breath. Which works for the scene."
The result is a gorgeous, dreamlike movie that's almost too perfect. Every frame is neat and composed, like an oil painting, not a hair or a grain of sand out of place. All noise and dissonance have been digitally eliminated. It's beautiful, but it's more beautiful than it is real. Movies are invigorated by the tension between the director and reality, the struggle of the artist to tame the reluctant, intractable world, and that tension is missing from 300. If you've ever seen Hearts of Darkness, the documentary of the disastrous campaign to make a very different war movie, Apocalypse Now, you've heard Francis Ford Coppola say: "My movie is not about Vietnam. My movie is Vietnam." Coppola's protracted, Pyrrhic struggle against the jungle stokes the movie's crazy energy. In 300 there's not really much of a struggle. If 300 is the Battle of Thermopylae, then Snyder is the digital god-king Xerxes, and not the Spartans.
In Snyder's defense, 300 isn't really a movie about a battle at all. It's a movie about a graphic novel about a movie about a battle. "It's not trying to be reality," Snyder says. "The blood is treated like paint, like paint on a canvas. It's not Saving Private Ryan. It's something else." Maybe that's the only way to make a war movie right now, or at least, the only way to make a war movie that's not an antiwar movie. 300 turns the ugliest human spectacle imaginable into something beautiful, and it's to the movie's credit that it doesn't confuse what it's doing with anything real. Onscreen, death actually has meaning that it often lacks in life. Conflict isn't complicated. Motivation is clear. "With 300, the why is obvious," Snyder says, "and that's a thing that maybe doesn't even exist in real life. Maybe when it happened it wasn't even that clear. That's why it's a piece of mythology. It's what we would hope for." 300 is a vision of war as ennobling and morally unambiguous and spectacularly good-looking. That's one hell of a special effect.

:wink:

Narukami

[Comerus Gallus]

...

[Arthes]

I definitely want Leonidas....!
Toys for the ladies too :wink: .....but they don't have Dienekes/Stelios as yet...
I also know of a store that has this incredible model in the window of Theseus fighting the Minotaur, the idea is taken from one of the games...!

[stilicho]

From the commercials i have seen ,it looks like something from the

director's dreams. The Persian Immortals' masks look like Japanese Kabuki

masks.








Stilicho AKA Jason.N

[Comerus Gallus]

...

[Gaivs Antonivs Satvrninvs]

I saw a preview of the battle scene of Leonidas and Persians on a cable channel recently It looked exactly like a video game. There were no humans in it. All CGI fighting. I wonder why the actors needed to be in shape other than their close-ups. A little disappointed with this aspect.

[Comerus Gallus]

...

[Gaivs Antonivs Satvrninvs]

It's just that nobody looks real, not even the Greeks. At least in Troy, you could tell it was Brad Pitt and not a computer simulation. This doesn't look like the actors, more like playing Mortal Kombat, and you know how real that looked.
Not to say I don't want to see it, but I'll wait till it comes out on DVD.

[Comerus Gallus]

...

[Gaivs Antonivs Satvrninvs]

The Good.....

[Gaivs Antonivs Satvrninvs]

The Bad...