Three Hundred

Ok, I saw this the first weekend it came out..I just knew it was going to be eye-candy galore, a bloodfest, and probably not a great movie. And..in fact it is a movie that’ll give your eyes boners, make your balls scream and make you poop DVD copies of The Transporter. It’s called 300. I don’t know what the title has to do with the movie, but they could’ve called it Kittens Making Candles and it’d still rule.

It’s about these 300 Greek soldiers who stomp the sugar-coated shit out of like a million other Persians and assorted armies.
I have a feeling that a lot of high school sports coaches are going to show this film to their teams before they play. Also, gay men and divorced women are going to use screen captures for computer wallpaper.

The movie takes place about a million years ago, and it’s sort of like a prequel to Sin City. Except way less guns and cars but twice as much skull splitting. If you watch this movie and go into a Taco Bell afterward, say to the cashier, "I need some extra sauce packets". Guess what? You’re getting twenty sauce packets...because your face will punch him in the brain. Its that crazy!

I can’t spoil the plot because THANK GOD THERE ISN’T ONE. Just ass kicking that kicks ass that, while said ass is getting kicked, is kicking yet more ass that’s hitting someone’s balls with a hammer made of ice but the ice is frozen whiskey.

TWO COOL THINGS ABOUT THE MOVIE AND ONE THING I DIDN’T LIKE:

COOL THING ONE:
HEAVY METAL DURING BATTLE SCENES

Who gives a crap if the music isn’t historically correct? LORD OF THE RINGS could’ve used some Journey. This movie has that chu-CHUNG kind of metal that you hear in your head when your shift supervisor at Wetzel’s Pretzel is telling you that you’ll have to stay for clean up and you wish you had a sock filled with quarters in your hand. * Note, I am not a metalhead..uit just WORKS with this movie.

COOL THING TWO:
FOES, MINI-BOSSES AND A BIG BOSS

Basically, the Greek dudes are fighting these Persian dudes, but the director, who must have a dick made of three machine guns, does it all like a video game. The Greeks fight every death metal video from the last ten years. There’s wave after wave of giants, freaks, ninjas, mutants, wizards, and a hunchback who looks like he’s got Rosie O’Donnell on his back.

Would I have been happy if Dom DeLouise from History of the World, Part I had shown up? Maybe, but this movie more than makes up for that glaring oversight.

NOT SO GOOD THING:
DUDE NUDITY (“DUDE-ITY”)

These are Greek times, when there were a lot of naked women around. And there are some naked women in this film, but almost every naked woman scene has a muscular dude giving the screen an ass picnic. Dude-ity is something directors put in their movies so people will think they’re serious, I guess, and not just throwing in naked hotties.

Any directors reading this – IT’S OKAY TO JUST THROW IN NAKED HOTTIES. I always try to make a joke when I see a preview with my wife and it says "Strong Sexual Content. Nudity"..I always use my Homer Simpson voice and say "Woo-hoo! Nudity!"..in a joking manner. Little does she know that I am dead serious.

Can’t someone make a movie about naked Amazons and call it PAUSE BUTTON?

My final analysis is 300 the most ass-ruling movie I’ve seen this year for a film having no plot, and will probably be the King of 2007 unless someone makes a movie where a pair of sentient boobs fights a werewolf.

Underlying Issues of the Pet Food Recall

By now, I'm sure that everyone has heard about the pet food recall. It's a sad thing that some folks lost their pets from the very food that was supposed to nourish them.

I think that this recall highlights an increasing problem with the food supply, not just for pets, but for us as well. That problem is the large-scale centralized processing of the food that we all eat.

As few as 20 years ago, much of the food an individual might eat was raised/grown and processed within a few miles of where he or she lived. Today, as evidenced by large-scale farming and meat processing corporations, our food is produced and processed in fewer and more centralized places. Look at the number of brands that Menu Foods, the company involved with today's recall, produces: dog food products and cat food products.

This is not just a threat to our health because of accidental contamination, but makes it that much easier for an intentional attack on our food supply to affect a larger number of people. Accidental contamination has proven to be a bad enough issue. Remember the bad spinach and the bad peanut butter? That's just this year.

What happens when someone or some group decides to intentionally infect all the apples with anthrax? Or else lace all the milk with botulism? They merely have to visit one or two dairies or slaughterhouses and their nefarious (love that word) intent could affect tens of millions. With the smaller scales of yesteryear, they might have only reached a small regional group of people with a similar attack.

Another detriment from this large-scale factory farming comes the effect it has on the small, family farms which used to be the backbone of this country. Simply put, it is now impossible for those small farmers to compete on price or scale. They have been pushed out of the market. In addition, communities are hurt in an intangible way because they have lost contact with the source of their food. Kids these days don't even realize that ground beef comes from a cow. A chicken is the skinless, boneless, grilled piece of teriyaki-flavored meat on their plate, not the living breathing clucking pecking bird.

What's the solution? I don't know. We seem to have reached an intractable situation where we obviously can't go back to "the way it was" but the way forward is even cloudier. There's the price pressure from the consumer. There's the government subsidies which are in collusion with the pressure from foreign farmers and food suppliers.

Some indication of how to make progress may be found in the European system of small markets that specialize in only one or two products. There are the benefits of the growth of small business while at the same time having less capacity for cross-contamination. This is just a guess, though.

The only absolute truth here is that our food system is dangerously fragile.

PS - Yes, I did just finish "Fast Food Nation" a few weeks ago, and also just rented the movie. I'd heartily recommend the book, and really believe the film is worthwhile to see as well, but it truly makes more of a good companion to the book.