Just About To Lose My Mind

I saw 300 Saturday night. To parrot W: a fun movie, weak dialouge, not great but good.

*SPOLIER ALERT*
I really liked the part where the Spartans are killing the wounded Persians and Leonidas is fucking walking around, eating an apple, and chuckling. And I liked the fact that Xerxes had dude with axes for arms for an executioner. I know that if I were a general for a god-king, I'd definitely be more motivated if I knew axe-arms guy was just waiting for me to screw up.
*END SPOILERS*

pwned

And in the end they all die. Ha! Gotcha, suckers!

Really, the most notable thing about this movie experience was not the movie. It was the evil new pre-show advertisments. No longer do we get the crazy employee music over charming still slide ads like "Ask A Lawyer" with Stephen D. Lastovich, or Rafferty's telling us to redeem our ticket stubs for some product of some sort, or ENABL telling us to "leave scoring to the sports teams!" Gone too are the long-since-memorized trivia and name that movie slides (Early Julia Roberts movie? Mystic Pizza. Dude sitting in a tiny bathtub? Little Big Man.).

In their place the corporate plutocrats have plugged in horrifying, screeching, moving-picture advertisements for Coke and diamonds and the fuckin Gumdrop Tree, interspersed with advertisements for current, shitty films, disguised as trivia (In this hilarious comedy Eddie Murphy plays both a skinny loser and his overbearing girlfriend!).

This was all pretty unbearable, but the worst part came when a cartoon frog came on screen, and, backed up by his frog pit-band, broke into a song about turning off your cell phone and buying concessions, sung to the tune of Heard It Through The Grapevine. As if that weren't bad enough, the frogs are apparently characters in some terrible new CGI kids movie.

I realize that this experience was probably worse than average; we did sit in the theatre for about 20 minutes before the show started, after all. Still, I plan to lodge a futile complaint with the managment.