It was the day before we were to leave for South America, and I [Cliff] was in a sour mood. Albert Stevenson had thrown a party the previous night, and I hadn’t been invited. I don’t consider Albert to be one of my closest friends by any means, but he’s one of my oldest, and sometimes that’s enough. More than enough to be invited to a party, anyway. Olive assured me that it must have just been an oversight on Albert’s part, but I wasn’t so sure.

When I’m really upset, nothing calms me down like a long cruise down the East River Drive, beginning on 125th street going all the way down to the Battery, so we called down to the garage to bring up the Jag. Olive came along, of course. She doesn’t drive herself, but she enjoys the ride just the same as I do, sometimes more. My favorite section is the view of Roosevelt Island, and the stretch past East River Park by the Williamsburg Bridge. But the snub was still bothering me on our way back uptown, so Olive suggested that we see a movie, something mindless. We ended up settling on 300. Read our reviews after the jump.

Cliff: While highly enjoyable, this was quite possibly the dumbest movie I have ever seen. I heard it described by one reviewer as a “fascist tone poem,” which I think is fairly accurate, but here’s my opinion: If you took a 15-year-old boy and put him in a cabin in the woods with nothing but pornography, Fox News and a signed letter from all of his teachers and classmates saying that they hated him, and you told this boy to write a screenplay, 300 would be it.

Olive: I’m a simple woman with little in the way of formal education, and am therefore hard-pressed to find fault with a movie so full of glistening, rippling pectorals and abdominals and other kinds of -als whose names and geographies are alien to a woman of my intellect. Perhaps a lady with loftier convictions would quibble about the films historical inaccuracies; while the Spartans allegedly did push Persian diplomats down a well, Leonidas’ army was famously composed of middle aged men with heirs, rather than gorgeously lubricated young colts who could shame the sun with their luminous musculature. Yes, I have nothing but praise for 300 – Cliff is the clever one.