We're not ALL in lockstep!

Unlike your typical hardcore conservatives who unfailingly toe the company line, liberals are a diverse, free-thinking bunch, and all the better for it.

Behold, two fairly open-minded writers whose opinions I usually share, but they couldn't be more divided on the "agenda" of the motion picture 300.

Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times:

So a movie based on Frank Miller's comic novel, which was written in the late 1990s and inspired by a 1962 film and, of course, a battle from 480 B.C., is actually a pro-Bush piece of propaganda? Really?

So is Bush represented by Leonidas, the bloodthirsty king defending his country, or Xerxes, the warlord trying to conquer the world? If he's Leonidas, I think there's a bit of a difference between a warrior-king who's on the front line as he tries to save his country from a mass invasion and a non-warrior-president overseeing a controversial war in a foreign land. And if he's Xerxes -- well, then "300" would hardly be a pro-Bush film.

(As the New York Times noted, reporters at an international press junket for "300" disagreed about whether Bush was Leonidas or Xerxes. The article was titled, "That Film's Real Message: It Could Be: 'Buy a Ticket' " Amen.)

"300" has its political overtones, but at heart it's a big silly fun movie, with great battle scenes and near-campy dialogue.

Then you got Dan Savage, advice columnist of Savage Love...

With nothing but time on my hands this week, I slipped out of the office and went to the movies. Have you seen 300 yet? It's about a handful of lightly armed ancient Greeks—the Spartans—who take on the mighty and massive Persian army. Some feel the film is homophobic; some feel it's a conservative, pro-war piece of agitprop.

Homophobic? It's Ann Coulter on a meth binge.

The Persian army is an armed gay-pride parade, a threat to all things decent and, er, Greek. The king of the Spartans—among the most notorious boy-fuckers in all of ancient history—dismisses Athenian Greeks as weak-willed "philosophers and boy lovers." The Persian emperor? An eight-foot-tall black drag queen—mascara, painted-on eyebrows, pink lip gloss. Emperor RuPaul is positively obsessed with men kneeling in front of him. Why gay up the Persians? So that straight boys in the theater can identify with the Spartan king and his 300 soldiers—all of whom appear to have been recruited from and outfitted by the International Male catalog.

What isn't up for debate is the film's politics. The only times the Persian army doesn't look like a gay-pride parade in hell, it looks like a crowd of madly chanting Islamic militants. And if the Spartan king has to break the Spartan law to defend Spartan freedoms? Well, sometimes a king's gotta do what a king's gotta do. Because, as the queen of Sparta points out, freedom isn't free. And, yes, she uses exactly those words. George Bush is going to blow a load in his pants when he sees this movie.

Can't please everyone. :)

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