The Museum Of Modern Thinking

It’s great to see Gordon Brown’s raid on pensions ten years ago finally getting coverage in the press, thanks to The Times and a freedom of information request they lodged two years ago. The awful effects of the raid to the tune of £5 billion a year were not felt for a few years, but they are certainly being felt now, with many companies no longer offering a final salary scheme, but less effective money purchase schemes.

When Brown raided the pensions, I remember an older colleague ranting about it, not being best pleased. I was young and couldn’t see the connection, but over the last few years it’s become very apparent that the raid has had serious costs to the UK’s pensioners, and pensioners-to-be (i.e. you and me).

Gordon “pick us a winner” Brown is not the sort of man to be trusted with a fiver, let alone the running of the country – and don’t even get me started on the West Lothian angle – grrrr!

I watched Zack Snyder’s take on Frank Miller’s 300 when it first came out, due to my wife passing out at 8.30pm. She gets up quite early but gets tired easily, especially when you use chloroform (she doesn’t half struggle tho’). Anyway, back to the film. I headed into Nottingham as it was a late showing (11.10pm), loads of people around as usual and no bother, which is always good.

I had, of course, seen a few trailers of the film, some behind the scenes footage and read a bit about the green screen tech used to make the film (i.e. virtual studios and what-not). Being a failed computer graphics geek, I was looking forward to seeing the end result. To be honest, about half-way through the movie I had to remind myself that it was all shot on a virtual set Don’t get me wrong, it was not hyper-realistic (or even realistic), but the film was so good I forgot all about it. The style of the film itself is not as comic book as you would expect being adapted from a graphic novel, although the end credits rock.

Winding it back a bit, 300 tells the story of 300 Spartan warriors holding off Xerxes invading army of slaves, numbering anywhere between 100,000 and a million, according to historians who very vague. The battle was fought at Thermopylae, at the Hot Gates, basically a sodding great big cliff with a narrow path through it. The Spartans used this to their advantage after guiding the invading army to them via a large wall made of stone and other people As with most films based on true stories, this does not have a happy ending, but with most things it’s about the journey not the destination.

The cast of (relative) unknowns played well, especially King Leonidas and Queen Gorgo; I especially liked the dialog between the two. The film also contained a small bit of humour, which was unexpected and black in places. The look of the film is fantastic, but happily not like Sin City – and no, I don’t mean that it’s not just in black and white, there’s quite a few different looks to the film in various places, it’s all rather good visually. Without going into too much detail, the action scenes were very impressive, especially the first clash between Spartan and Persian, the director certainly has an eye for a good scene.

Summing up (Dead Rising is calling), it’s hell of a film, I’d easily give it 9 / 10, and will be buying it when it’s out on DVD, not just to watch it again but to watch the “making of” features.

Incidentally, the guy narrating the film had the right voice for it… There’s a lot more I could say (e.g., “I brought more warriors than you”), but I really think you should see it for yourself