Within striking distance...

There are just under 5300 words left in the project, so even if I didn't do any more work today, I could finish the job tomorrow (if, for some reason, I do no more work today).

Natalie has arrived. The next showtime for 300 is 12:30.

Cheers...

Μολών λαβέ...

Come and take them!

It's been a while since I'd been to a first-run movie, and apparently, in the meantime, or thereabouts, the concept of the matinee price has gone the way of the dodo. So Natalie plunked down $7 for each of us and we entered the theater, one of the 32 rooms up at the AMC complex near Highway 8 and I-45.

The while-you're-waiting ads seemed particularly insipid, which a heavy sprinkling of ads on behalf of web sites that tried real hard to stake out a piece of one's perception, but failed miserably, at least in my case.

The stated start time of 12:30 pm was delayed by a full quarter hour as the house did its level best to reduce the audience to a state of burbling catatonia with a seeminly endless stream of previews.

Finally, the movie started.

By the time the spectacle ended, nearly 2 hours later, I had been blown away. Here was a tale of good and evil, starkly rendered, some might even say: two-dimensional. And yet, in comparing the story to that in my previous hit from Frank Miller, in Sin City (or to that of the more recently viewed The Departed, directed by Scorsese) I find I can walk away without that itchy feeling conveyed by such latter stories that somehow, the universe is a cesspool and we are all merely scraps of organic matter that bubble up and down in it.

Violent? You betchum, and yet... given the circumstances... hand-to-hand combat... edged weapons... it didn't strike me as the kind of "violence for the sake of violence" that one sees in more modern narratives, with their outlandish arms and endless supplies of ammunition.

Most of the lore associated with the battle managed to get worked into the movie, including the elegy of Simonides of Ceos:

Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι

Go tell the Spartans, passer-by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

If it wasn't for the fact that I haven't translated a single word more since coming home (completely unlike me, which also thus puts me deep in the hole for tomorrow), I'd consider going to see the film again.

Cheers...