dark knight strikes again | the m0vie blog

Is 300 Racist? A Counter-Argument…

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Darren

I know that we’re officially about five years past this discussion, but I was thinking about it lately. 300, as imagined by Zack Snyder and Frank Miller, gets a lot of slack for its perceived Islamophobia and racism towards Persians (modern-day Iranians). There’s a rather excellent article here outlining one perspective, which makes the argument that it’s a fundamentally racist film. I sat down and I watched it, and I kept the ideas in mind, and I jotted down some thoughts. it should be noted that I’m just a layman, I’m an expert or a professor in film or literature, but it seemed to me that a lot of the critics were taking the film far too seriously at face value.

I'd want to make this argument on sure footing...

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 300, 300 (film), avatar: the last airbender, dark knight strikes again, film, frank miller, graphic novels, iran, is 300 racist, islamophobia, media, media studies, Movies, persia, propaganda, race relations, racism, social media, Sparta, Spartan army, Spartans, zack snyder | 65 Comments »

Absolute Batman: The Dark Knight (Returns) (Review/Retrospective)

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Darren

The Absolute Edition also collects The Dark Knight Strikes Again. Miller’s belated sequel is worthy of discussion on its own terms, and I plan to revisit it at some point. For the moment, however, here is the review of the original Dark Knight Returns.

It’s really quite difficult to discuss The Dark Knight Returns today. Part of the reason is because of the massive influence that Frank Miller’s Batman epilogue had on the medium, and part of it is because Miller himself has done a fairly efficient job at deconstructing his own definitive Batman work in stories like The Dark Knight Strikes Again and All-Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder. It’s impossible to approach Miller’s work here entirely divorced from either reality, and the result is a rather strange and dramatic legacy for one of the most iconic Batman stories ever told. It remains fairly essential reading for anybody even remotely interested in the Caped Crusader, the superhero genre or even the medium as a whole. It’s a classic, albeit one that is sometimes quite difficult to pin down.