AUTHOR: linda TITLE: "300" times better on the big screen DATE: 9:16:00 AM ----- BODY:

The hyper-stylized film "300," based on Miller and Varley's historically-inspired comic book of the fierce Spartan-Persian Battle of Thermopylae, is truly best seen on IMAX.

Exaggeration of color, glorious and brutal battle scenes with blood bursting out in fans of rose petals as a graphic-novel does., tells this story out of history with the emotion of that time but with the distance of culture and the ages in perspective.

Attention to details of the bizarre warlike culture of ancient Sparta, such as the jutting beards, manner of dress and code of manhood, attempts to make such a distant story relevant to a modern audience. Vastly outnumbered by the invading Persian Empire army, the Greeks held back the Persians for three days in one of history's most famous last stands, inspiring the 1962 film "The 300 Spartans" and the 1978 film "Go Tell the Spartans."

The burial mound of the Spartans at Thermopylae is engraved with the Simonides epitaph:

Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here, by Spartan law, we lie

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