It's Greek Week at Market Square Park, presented by Niko Niko's, and as part of the celebration the Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow has an outdoor screening Zack Snyder's 300 on Friday. The action flick is Snyder's adaptation of Frank Miller's acclaimed graphic novel based on the Battle of Thermopylae. In 480 BCE, 300 Spartan warriors with glistening abs stood alone against an enormous Persian horde at a narrow pass that denied the Persians entry into Greece, giving the city-states time to mount a defense to push back the god-king Xerses and decisively end the Persian invasion. (Okay, we're not completely sure about the glistening abs; as a matter of fact, they might have been blood drenched abs, but we digress.)
Snyder shot the film with a super-imposition chroma key technique that makes it feel like it leaped right from the pages of Miller's comic book. What was already a story of fearless warriors battling impossible odds is turned into a fantasy epic involving mystical oracles, demonic soldiers and all the slow-motion killing you could ever ask for. You may quibble with the historical accuracy of the film, but you cannot deny that watching King Leonidas lead Sparta's hero-warriors against mutants with bladed hands who charge the brave Greeks while Tyler Bates's music score crescendos is a bloody good rollercoaster ride.
The Alamo Drafthouse Rolling Roadshow screens300at 8 p.m. at Market Square Park, 300 Travis. For information, visit www.drafthouse.com or call 713-650-3022.
Get ready to discover 'daggering' on Saturday with Nicole Miller's docu-style short at the Core 2012 Exhibition at the Glassell School of Art. Her 34-minute film focuses on Caribbean-born style of dance that simulates extremely hardcore sex acts called daggering. Filmed during one long nightclub evening, the short is a continuous loop of graphic, silent scenes, including one where a half-blond, half-pink-haired girl contorts and convulses gymnastically -- and orgasmically -- on a dirty ballroom floor, lover implied, and loud snapshot scenes of a man in an "I ♥ Sookie" shirt takes a running leap into a woman's open legs.
Regular viewing hours for the School 2012 Core Exhibition, which also features work by several other artists-in-residence and Core critical studies scholars, are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays through Sundays. The exhibit is in place until April 30 at the Glassell School of Art, 5101 Montrose Boulevard. For information, visit www.mfah.org or call 713-639-7500.
Sunday is the last day to catch the Margaret Mead Traveling Film Festival. First is A Mountain Musical, Eva Eckert's documentary capturing the music and musicians from the almost-vanished Alpine culture, screening at 6 p.m. After that it's Because We Were Born, the story of two boys who navigate the brutal street life in Brazil, showing at 8 p.m.
The festival, which runs Friday through Sunday, also includes The Creators,a look at Mthetho, a self-taught musician working in post-Apartheid South Africa (6 p.m. on Friday), All for the Good of the World, which chronicles Hyundai's destruction of a Czech village when they built a mega-factory nearby (9 p.m. on Friday), andThere Once Was an Island, about the rising waters of the South Pacific, an effect of global warming, threatening to overrun a small island in Polynesia (7 p.m. on Saturday), among others.
The Margaret Mead Traveling Film Festival is at Rice Cinema on the Rice University campus, 6100 Main. For a full schedule of screenings, visit www.ricecinema.rice.edu or call 713-348-0000.
JEF WITH ONE F and Altamese Osborne contributed to this post.
