Things I learned from 300

Coming late to this party, but I finally watched Zack Snyder's/Frank Miller's 300 on the weekend, and boy, did it stink.

Not to rain on the parade of thousands of fanboys who claim to enjoy it ironically, but that was one of the worst movies I've seen in years. And I watched The Rocker the same weekend. It also makes the achievement of Watchmen even more amazing; Watchmen isn't great but it's far from bad, and where it modifies the original story it usually does so carefully and in a not-moronic way.

Not 300. I felt like every addition to the Frank Miller comic went in the wrong direction. You have a comic that's already ludicrously stylized? Let's make the film adaptation even more stylized! There's basically no female roles in the comic? We'll put one in the move, so she can be raped! Some of the dialogue sounded cheesy and lame the first time around? A big spoonful of that please!

Seriously, 300 is one of those milestones in Frank Miller's career, the kind labeled "25 miles to Suckville." The guy's been going slowly insane for decades, and 300 was written at the point where he was just starting to move away from his Daredevil and Dark Knight Returns projects and beginning to walk the road that would take him to "I'm the goddamn Batman!" So it sort of works, but it's also loaded with the kind of stuff that would mark Miller for the rest of his career: enough testosterone to make a rhino explode, a style that is so extreme it constantly calls attention to itself, loads of blood, the valorization of violence, a lack of good characterization, and a big ol' Girls Not Allowed sign on the front door.

Politically, the movie was painful. I think calling it fascist is a little unfair. Even fascism, as a political philosophy, is more nuanced than 300. The movie was more a blend of unthinking nationalism wrapped up in some default American values. (Freedom be good!) Of course, those values are left undefined and unexamined, so we never question why the people fighting for freedom have a king, for example. Who orders them to cheerfully murder wounded soldiers while he eats an apple. Ha ha! It's funny because in any other movie that's how you'd be able to tell who the bad guy was!

Now, things I learned from watching 300:

• The ancient Persians were mostly African-American or east Asian in origin.

• "Phalanx" means everybody runs around slicing up people in slow-mo.

• Athenians were gay. Not the Spartans.

• The Persian army included the Uruk Hai and Sloth from The Goonies.

• In a related note, you can put ninjas in anything!

• Ancient Greek oracles were really just nude interpretative dancers.

• When going on a long mission, all you need to carry as a Spartan warrior are you weapons, shield, and red cloak. Food is not necessary, probably because you'll just murder and eat anyone you run across.

• Physically disabled people are inherently evil.

• Breastplates are for sissies.

• But not shaving your chest. A smooth, hairless torso, much like a Ken doll's, is super-manly.

• Gerard Butler has huge fucking teeth!

• Peasants don't really exist. Probably because if they ever showed up, the movie might have had to talk about how the Spartans ritually declared war on their peasants yearly, and murdered the troublesome ones as an initiation ritual for young men.

Why I hate Chapters

I went to Canada's big box bookstore chain on Wednesday, in search of The Caryatids, Bruce Sterling's first new novel in years, and arguably his first proper SF novel in more than a decade.

Couldn't find it. Not on the shelf. Not on the ludicrously misnamed New and Hot in Science Fiction table. Not in non-genre fiction. 

I ask a clerk. Bruce Sterling? Never heard of him (of course). We look it up on the computer. 

Ah, they do have it in store. Three whole copies. Have I looked on the shelf? Yes. Have I looked on the New and Hot in Science Fiction table? Yes. 

Two clerks later, we determine it is actually still in the back of the store. Judging by the lack of a big fat hole on the S shelf of the SF section, it has never actually been shelved. Because Bruce Sterling is not on the A list.

Sterling is one of the fathers of cyberpunk. He has been producing genre defining, award winning, best selling and well reviewed SF since the late 1970s. None of this matters to non-SF fans, and I don't expect it to. Sterling isn't in the public consciousness the way William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, or even Philip K. Dick are. For mass market purposes, he's a B lister. One of the top of the B listers, one with a devoted fan base all his own, stoked by his work as a futurist, WIRED blogger and general weirdo. But none of this matters to a big box book store. If he's not going to shift an entire crate of product in his first week, if he's not Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling or Stephenson, who cares? The books will get on the shelf when they get there. I imagine fans of any genre author, or even some good non-genre authors, have had similar frustrations trying to get a new book in their hands.

This is why Chapters will die. The only thing they can do better than Amazon is get books out there as physical objects, where you can see them and grab them up on impulse. And they can't even do that right.

Chapters, and its American big box bookstore cousins, are based on volume. I remember when I first went to a big box bookstore as a teenager. Not just a few shelves of SF books, but shelf after shelf after shelf. Books I'd only ever heard of on Prisoners of Gravity. It was nerdvana. (And who were they competing with? It was not, in my neck of the woods, with small mom and pop bookstores, or even with specialty stores, because the wastelands of suburbia contain neither of these things. It was with chains of shopping mall bookstores. Like Black Bond. So one chain out competes another. Who cares, if we get more book selection?)

Chapters has been beaten at its own game by Amazon. Everyone knows this already, of course, but the "where's my Bruce Sterling book" incident shows why. Obviously, Amazon has more books, and it's almost never out of stock of anything. This is not because Amazon is more virtuous or has a deeper respect for books or authors or readers than Chapters. Amazon does not care about my desires, any more than Chapters does. It's just set up to fulfil my desires anyway. It might not have one person on staff who gives a crap about SF either, but it's happy little filing system will let me locate the book, read the reviews, give me recommendations for other books, and even ship it to me for free if I buy a large enough volume of stuff. 

The Chapters in my home town was still plenty busy around Christmas and during the Boxing Day sales. But it's basically dead walking. I wonder what we'll do with all the parking lots and the giant shells of bookstores when the last person without an internet connection dies?