| Warner Bros.' "300" is being greeted in Iran with about as much warmth as a U.N. weapons inspector. While U.S. auds see the film as a comicbook come to life -- replete with hyperstylized action and broadly drawn heroes and villains -- it has a deeper resonance in the Mideast, where it's seen as a distorted view of very real events. "Hollywood declares war on Iranians," exclaimed a headline in Iranian daily Ayandeh-No. Javad Shangari, a cultural adviser to Iranian prexy Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, attacked the film as being "part of a comprehensive U.S. psychological warfare aimed at Iranian culture." While the pic is unlikely to be released theatrically in Iran, pirated DVDs already are circulating on the black market. "Everyone is starting to react. The DVD is already very available, and people are quite angry," one Tehran-based producer said. An online petition addressed to Warner has tallied 35,000 signatures. The petition, set up by Canada-based archaeologist Hamed Vahdati Nasab, protests Warner's "irresponsible, unethical and unscientific actions ... while announcing our disgust at such a heresy, we demand an immediate historical review and quick apology from the responsible people." Director Zack Snyder and the film's producers have emphasized that the film is based on the Frank Miller graphic novel and was never intended to be an accurate historical representation. But that's done little to assuage concerns by those who see the film's archetypes as Western stereotypes. Nasab told Daily Variety, "What would people say if they made a film about Martin Luther King (Jr.), showed him as a monster, and tried to defend it as a fiction? You can't do that. It's unethical. This is a national matter for all Iranians." |
Actually you can do that, hell Iran hosted a holocaust denial conference and had a zionist cartoon competition. MLK as a monster? Knock yourselves out.
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