300: "We Are, Marshall Sparta!" Considering the big movies in the past month have either involved William H. Macy wanting to tell black jokes or Eddie Murphy being a black joke, you have to figure any movie with even the whiff of a blockbuster is going to get people's butts in the seats. Sure enough, 300 earned $70 million dollars on its opening weekend. Judging by the trailer I assumed it was going to be violent (correct!), visually stunning (correct!), and fun (oooh, sorry, back of the adjective line for you). Here's a quick spoilery rundown of the movie and where the hits and misses were: We start out at the bottom of a cliff with skulls all about, looking up to see a man holding a baby. The voiceover explains that when a Spartan baby is born it's inspected for any defects. Too small or deformed and it experiences a rate of acceleration of about 9.8 meters per second-squared for a few hundred feet. Considering these guys are the ones we're supposed to root for the director probably wants to put the "fan" back in "infanticide". The scene then cuts to a boy about 7 being dragged away from his screaming mother. He is to be trained in the ways of Spartan warriors. A few moments later we're introduced to two film techniques that will be used liberally throughout the film. One is the multidirectional splattering of blood in thousands of droplets. The other is the off-and-on-and-off-and-on slow motion of any and all melee. The former is fine; it's what you would expect in a big live-action comic book movie. The latter is wholeheartedly irritating to watch after the first dozen times you see it. Punch, super-slow-mo on contact, speed up, another punch, super-slow-mo. There are only so many times you can watch a decapitating head twirling gently to the ground.