comment #1

Noah says ...

Just stop...please stop, Jeff. We understand your feelings on 300. Let it go. Please.

comment #2

christian says ...

and we understand that the critics are wrong and 300 RAWKS because it's made a shitload of bank. thanks peter. back to work...

comment #3

James says ...

Noah:

Who is this "we"? Who do you speak for other than yourself? I am so SICK of this sanctimonious crap telling Jeff what he should and should not write about! It's HIS blog. You are not his editor. If you want to be someone's editor, start by editing your own posts with an eye toward actually commenting on what he's talking about. And if you're not interested in what he's talking about, move on! Most importantly, don't presume to talk for anyone other than your own self.

I (for one) read this blog because I enjoy Jeff's interests and obsessions and digressions and ramblings and riffs. Why the heck do you read it? And is anyone forcing you to read it? Get a freaking life!

comment #4

Mike Schaefer says ...

I agree that the dead-horse-beating here gets to be a bit much, but it's worth noting that the NY Post's Kyle Smith is fairly right-wing and even he found "300" borderline fascistic and just plain not-very-good.

comment #5

hiviper says ...

James,
Let me also second your thoughts regarding people who have nothing else to comment, other than "jeff just stop", or "jeff, give it up, yadda, yadda". It's getting so redundant and tiresome. If you dont like what Wells is blogging, either come up with something original, STFU, or get lost.

comment #6

jeffmcm says ...

I agree with Noah. The only Wells needs to know when he's being annoying. As dumb as it might be to post on his site when you think he's being an idiot. it's really much stupider to post in response to say 'just let him post whatever'.

comment #7

Terry McCarty says ...

I remember reading long ago in a Pauline Kael "state of the Industry" piece something about Frank Yablans advocating down-with-the-mass-audience critics. So this certainly isn't new.

And, judging from his reviews of 300 and JACKASS PART TWO, smirking hack Richard Roeper is certainly trying to bring out his "regular guy" oncamera.

comment #8

Terry McCarty says ...

Re the earlier comment: "At one with" ought to be substituted for "down with."

Younger readers should be aware that Yablans as producer was able to market cinematic dogfood like the legendary MONSIGNOR (Christopher Reeve as a Very Bad Priest)and have it open to decent grosses before word-of-mouth got out.

comment #9

EDouglas says ...

Once again, Variety is trying to keep up with the internet.... but it's probably just a coincidence that I wrote about the whole critics vs. audience thing in my column which went up nearly two days before Bart's piece:

http://www.comingsoon.net/weekendwarrior/2007/mar16.php

I'm not sure that the divide between audiences/critics is as big on 300 as it was on things like Norbit and Wild Hogs and even this weekend with Premonition. What's wild is that N and WH continued to make money after opening weekend and people seeing it. (Then again, I'm stranded in Vegas and "intermingling" with many of the people who found Wild Hogs so funny... my week here has added further fuel to the fire that Mike Judge's Idiocracy is really in danger of happening)

comment #10

Reedyb says ...

300.

That's the number of posts on this movie that Jeff will write.

comment #11

rocco says ...

delbomber to James and hiviper:

I haven't said a word about '300,' but please indulge me...

The pleading stems from nostalgia for the professionalism and entertainment value of "columns" past and a concern for the credibility of the site we love so much.

Jeff is ultimately free to do whatever he likes, but would you watch a friend descend into behavior that was self-destructive and threatened his livelihood without intervening?

comment #12

dobbsy says ...

earth to upsettees: bart refers to the movies scorned by the critics as "miscreants" and "inept" and gently suggests there be more than one type of critical voice at the major outlets, perhaps the highbrown and someone tuned in to pop culture.

wasn't that the point of kael and the critical revolution decades ago and the point of tarantino and manny farber and everyone who appreciates the values of "pulp" and "termite art," that point being not everything that resonates culturally works as high art?

on "300" the critics sound dangerously like old fogeys in the 50s yelling about that "darn rock and roll which is just noise" and not "real music."

by the way, in terms of taking credit for this thesis, bart has written it several times over the years and seems genuinely fascinated by the disconnect, if not above a little rabbit punching the critics.

given that kenny turan, one of the pompous camp bart critiqued, solemnly intoned that only "concentration camp commanders" could appreciate "apocalypto," ($110 million worldwide gross of concentration camp commanders, along with bafta, golden globe, bfca and oscar noms) i think a swift boot in the ass would be more appropriate to this kind of cultural mccarthyism in the guise of critical "wisdom."

comment #13

Noah says ...

Okay, James and hiviper:

I'm not Jeff's editor, nor would I want to be. But as someone who has read his column since it was at Mr. Showbiz, I feel like I know a little bit about what Jeff is good at writing at and I also know when he gets ranty and I feel like this forum is here for me to share my opinion with him as well as others. So, for YOU to tell ME to shut up with my opinion is pretty lame and silly.

I come to this site because Jeff is a talented writer, an original voice and a great reporter...when he wants to be. I have no problem with him posting on a subject several times, especially when it's about a movie he really digs. I think passion for a great movie or performance is understandable and I love it when Jeff champions on an indie film, even if it's a film that I don't like.

However, with the case of 300, he knows that a lot of people who frequent this site are big fans of the movie and what does he do? He rains on that parade endlessly. I expect this of Dave Poland, not Jeff Wells. He could write forever about Wild Hogs being a piece of shit, but 300 was a film that the majority of people really dug, so it seems like he's being a bit of a contrarian (witness: Peter Jackson and the Lord of the Rings, 40 Year Old Virgin, Dreamgirls - even though i agreed it was a piece of shit - and Eddie Murphy, Munich, there's countless others).

So, the bottom line is, I have the right to tell Jeff what I think he can do better. And if you don't like it, then don't read the comments assholes.

comment #14

Joe Leydon says ...

I loved the end of Peter Bart's piece: "And, by the way, if you've ever met a film critic, you"ll know they're not big on either the pectoral, deltoid or other muscle groups." Reminds me of how Charles Bronson once decribed a typical member of the critical fraternity: Pear-shaped.

Unfortunately, both descriptions are ,ore accurate than not...

comment #15

Joe Leydon says ...

Er, that SHOULD read: "Unfortunately, both descriptions are more accurate than ot..."

comment #16

Reedyb says ...

I think Neal Stephenson in the NY Times sums up why Jeff doesn't like this movie while others are quick to defend.

Here's the link.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/opinion/18stephenson.html?ex=1331870400&en=8868294e84af9bd9&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Here's the piece

It’s All Geek to Me

By NEAL STEPHENSON
Seattle

A WEEK ago Friday, moments before an opening-day showing of the movie “300” at Seattle’s Cinerama, a 20-something moviegoer rushed to the front of the theater, dropped his shoulders, curled his arms into a mock-Schwarzenegger pose and bellowed out a timeless remark of King Leonidas of Sparta that has in the last week become the catchphrase of the year: “Spartans! Tonight we dine in hell!”

Groans, roars, macho hooting noises and sardonic applause rained down on him. The audience had been standing in line for an hour. Only a few of them were dressed as Greek hoplites. They were much better balanced between men and women than I’d expected and, racially, looked like a fair cross section of Seattle’s populace. Over the next couple of hours, they enjoyed “300” with roughly the same level of energy and audience participation as one would expect in an N.C.A.A. Final Four game.

The film contains a lot of over-the-top material, reflecting its origin in a graphic novel. As often as not, when I found myself rolling my eyes at something particularly mortifying (the tactical corpse-pile avalanche, the Persian executioner with serrated fins for arms), the crowd reacted much as I did, some even hurling catcalls from the balcony or blurting their own lines of dialogue. It was all pretty festive for a movie about ancient history in which almost all of the characters end up dead.

This, apparently, was no anomaly. Though it opened on a relatively small number of screens, “300” made money far beyond the most optimistic projections of its producers, racking up the third-best opening weekend ever for an R-rated movie.

The critics, however, were mostly hostile, and frequently venomous. Many reviews made the same points:

• “300” is not sufficiently ironic. It takes its themes (duty, loyalty, sacrifice, the preservation of Western civilization against enormous odds) too seriously to, well, be taken seriously.

• “300” is campy — meaning that many things about it can be read as sexual double entendres — yet the filmmakers don’t show sufficient awareness of this.

• All of the good guys are white people and many of the bad guys are brown. (How this could have been avoided in a film about Spartans versus Persians is never explained; the distinctly non-Greek viewers at my showing seemed to have no trouble placing themselves in the sandals of ancient Spartans.)

But such criticisms aren’t really worth arguing with, because they are not serious in the first place — and that is their whole point. Many critics dislike “300” so intensely that they refused to do it the honor of criticizing it as if it were a real movie. Critics at a festival in Berlin walked out, and accused its director of being on the Bush payroll.

Thermopylae is a wedge issue!

Lefties can’t abide lionizing a bunch of militaristic slave-owners (even if they did happen to be long-haired supporters of women’s rights). So you might think that righties would love the film. But they’re nervous that Emperor Xerxes of Persia, not the freedom-loving Leonidas, might be George Bush.

Our so-called conservatives, who have cut all ties to their own intellectual moorings, now espouse policies and personalities that would get them laughed out of Periclean Athens. The few conservatives still able to hold up one end of a Socratic dialogue are those in the ostracized libertarian wing — interestingly enough, a group with a disproportionately high representation among fans of speculative fiction.

The less politicized majority, who perhaps would like to draw inspiration from this story without glossing over the crazy and defective aspects of Spartan society, have turned, in droves, to a film from the alternative cultural universe of fantasy and science fiction. Styled and informed by pulp novels, comic books, video games and Asian martial arts flicks, science fiction eats this kind of material up, and expresses it in ways that look impossibly weird to people who aren’t used to it.

Lack of critical respect means nothing to sci-fi’s creators and fans. They made peace with their own dorkiness long ago. Oh, there was momentary discomfort around the time of William Shatner’s 1987 “Saturday Night Live” sketch, in which he exhorted Trekkies to “get a life.” But this had been fully resolved by 2000, when sci-fi fans voted to give the Hugo Award for best movie to “Galaxy Quest,” a film that revolves around making fun of sci-fi fans.

The growing popularity of science fiction, the rise of graphic novels, anime and video games, and the fact that geeks can make lots of money now, have given creators and fans of this kind of art a confidence, even a swagger, that — hard as it is for some of us to believe — is kind of cool now.

Video games have turned everyone under the age of 20 into experts on military history and tactics; 12-year-olds on school buses argue about the right way to deploy onagers and cataphracts while outflanking a Roman triplex acies formation. The near exhaustion of Asian martial arts themes has led a small but growing number to begin reconstructing, or imagining, the forgotten martial arts of the West. And science fiction, by its nature, has had to equip itself with a full toolkit for dealing with alien cultures, mindsets and landscapes.

Which is exactly how the creators of “300” approach the Spartans and the Persians. The only people in the film who don’t seem as if they came from another planet are the Arcadians (non-Spartan Greeks), who turn tail once the battle becomes hopeless.

Classics-based sci-fi is nothing new. To name the most recent of many examples, the novelist Dan Simmons published “Ilium” and “Olympos,” science-fictional takes on Homer. When science fiction tackles classical themes, the results may look a bit odd to some, but the audience — which is increasingly the mainstream audience — is sufficiently hungry for this kind of material (and, perhaps, suspicious of anything that’s overly polished) that it is willing to overlook the occasional mistake, or make up for it by shouting hilarious things from the balcony. These people don’t need irony or campiness self-consciously pointed out to them, any more than they need a laugh track to enjoy “The Simpsons.”

The Spartan phalanx presents itself to foes as a wall of shields, bristling with spears, its members squatting behind their defenses, anonymous and unknowable, until they break formation and stand out alone, practically naked, soft, exposed and recognizable as individuals.

The audience members watching them play the same game: media-weary, hunkered down behind thick irony, flinging verbal jabs at the screen — until they see something that moves them. Then they’ll come out and feel. But at the first hint of politics, they’ll jump back behind their shield-wall, just like the Spartans when millions of Persian arrows blot out the sun, and wait until the noise stops.

Neal Stephenson is the author, most recently, of “The System of the World,” the last book of “The Baroque Cycle” trilogy.

comment #17

Joe Leydon says ...

OK, one last time: "Unfortunately, both descriptions are more accurate than not..."

comment #18

BNick says ...

Both sides are wrong.

On the one hand, bemoaning the fact that "300" did monster B.O. business as some sort of sign of the coming of the cinematic apocalypse is silly. The movie was brilliantly marketed (that trailer from last year was the best trailer since...ever, maybe). It looked really cool. That's why people went to see it. Jeff and some others seem to think that people go to see movies they know are going to be bad, and I don't think this is the case.

On the other hand, those tapping their fingers together in Monty Burns-esque evil glee that the critics wishes have been thwarted are probably misunderstanding the purpose of critics. Were it not for critics, I might not have gone to see Zodiac, The Lives of Others, or Children of Men, to name a few. And those were excellent movies. So to the extent that critics do not represent the moviegoing public, it's probably a good thing.

For the record, I liked 300 a lot.

comment #19

James says ...

Noah and delbomber and Jeffmcm:

Look, I don't know from "Mr. Showbiz," but I've been reading him daily for four years or so. And I think he's gotten better and better and (I'll say it again) I (again, I'm just one guy) like what he's doing here. That's why I come back again and again. And my sense is that his popularity has grown and is growing. Isn't it ironic: on this thread, in which he's getting (maybe rightly) critiqued (by those actually commenting on the issue he's addressing) for being a bit of a fuddy-duddy about "what the kids are going to see these days," you guys get all fuddy-duddy-ish about him being too much of a blogger and not enough of a "serious journalist" or whatever he apparently was "back in the Mr. Showbiz days." Get freaking over it!

If you want to let him know that you're not interested in something he's interested in, obviously, that's your right. It's a free blogosphere. But please don't speak for his readers in general or act like his popularity and livelihood are in danger because YOU don't like what he's doing as much you did in those bygone days of yore.

comment #20

wholovesya says ...

Hey, at least he's not writing about Eddie Murphy or "Zodiac" anymore...

...at least not this week...

comment #21

rocco says ...

James...more so than missing the finely crafted, thoughtful articles Jeff used to produce that have now been replaced by his stream of consciousness (which has a certain appeal, otherwise I wouldn't frequent this site as often as I do...), these obsessive rants damage his image in the industry, making it harder to get inside information, into early screenings, procure advertising, etc, etc, the latter of which directly affects the financial viability and sustainability of H-e...if you can't connect those dots, well...

...let me just end there...perhaps I have no idea what I'm talking about, but Jeff's need to BEG sony to run FREE ads implies there is a certain stigma that is becoming attached to H-e with which studios wish to avoid association...

...again, I'm just speculating (read: speaking out of my ass) and I'm assuming a lot...Jeff is probably reading this and saying "asshole"...that's just my take...

comment #22

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