Word: persianism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...original, Leonidas (Phantom of the Opera's Gerald Butler) goes to the swinish holy men, the Ephors, for permission to wage a defense against the million-man army of the Persian monarch Xerxes (Rodrigo Santoro, from Lost). The oracle waffles, but Leonidas, saying he's just going out for a stroll with his private guards, leaves his wife Gorgo (The Brothers Grimm's Lena Headey) and leads his loyal band to their desperate and storied destiny. He might have triumphed, if the homunculus Ephialtes (Andrew Tiernan, from British TV) had not betrayed the Greeks and told Xerxes their strategy...
...famous lines are here: "Go tell the Spartans"; "Come and get us"; and the Spartan soldier's deflection of the Persian threat, "Our arrows will blot out the sun" - he says, "Then we will fight in the shade." Herodotus: damned fine screenwriter...
...movie no one in Iran has seen but everyone seems to know about since it became a major box office surprise in the U.S. As I stood in line for a full hour to buy ajeel, a mixture of dried fruits and nuts traditional to the start of Persian new year festivities, I felt the entire queue, composed of housewives with pet dogs, teenagers, and clerks from a nearby ministry, shake with fury. I hadn't even heard of the film until that morning when a screed about it came on the radio, so I was able to nod darkly...
...home to discover my family in a similar state of pique. My sister-in-law sat behind her laptop, sending off an e-mail petition against the film to half of Tehran, while my husband leafed through a book on the Achaemenid Empire, noting that Herodotus had estimated the Persian army at 120,000 men, not one million as the film claimed. The morning newspaper lay on the table with the headline "300 AGAINST 70 MILLION!" (the population of the country). It was echoed by the evening news: "Hollywood has opened a new front in the war against Iran...
...timing of the computer-generated film, which depicts the ancient confrontation of Sparta and the Persian empire at the Battle of Thermopylae, is certainly inauspicious. It falls on the eve of Norouz, Persian new year, a time when Iranians typically gather in proud celebration, observing rites that date back over 3,000 years, way before Islam, to the age of Zoroastrianism, when their ancient land produced the world's first monotheistic religion. It is not a particularly welcome season to be portrayed as pillaging, deranged savages. Since the entire country will be on two weeks of official holiday, there will...