Medicinal leeches? The thought just creeps me out.

A good friend went to see The Legion and was so disgusted he almost threw up. Guess we can throw The Legion in the pile of stinkers.

As to 300 and Apocalypto, these are not stinkers. Historical inaccuracies in movies simply do not bother me. That's because movies aren't teaching tools. We all know that 300 was the film adaptation of comic book artist-writer, Frank Miller. His graphic novel was an interpretation of the ancient battle of Thermopylae. Key word: Interpretation.

After 300 opened in theaters some people expressed distaste with the historical liberties the filmmakers took, like our friend Marius here. Some Iranians expressed - to the entire world - disgust with the film's negative portrayal of Persians, the Iranians' ancestors. Okay, everyone is entitled to their opinion and here is mine. Movies cannot teach history and they aren't meant to. I don't see how you can cram a complete portrayal of a past culture into a single movie, or even portray a single, isolated past event in the correct context. Such a movie would last a week, and would be full of very boring parts. Moviegoers don't typically like long or boring movies - we like exciting ones!

I wonder how many people actually watched Gladiator for the history lesson? Or Braveheart or 300? I don't dare touch The Da Vinci Code, but there's another example.

I didn't watch Apocalypto to learn about the Mayans. I watched it to see some action set in a time period I am interested in and really like. And yes, I heard about the blood and violence, but that sort of attracted me too. I was happy to see that really cool jungle chase scene with the climatic panther-mauling. That was worth the ticket price alone. Some groups got angry over liberties Gibson took with Mayan history. People argued that a person who saw Apocalypto might have gotten the wrong impression of the Mayans. Who cares? If someone is going to seek historical information from a movie, that is pretty sad. I am not saying movies are supposed to be stupid, or even cater to stupid people. I've seen many films that have entered the realm of art, and many more have been informative on some level or another. But it's not a filmmaker's job to educate us.

One could argue that a lot of people get impressions of past cultures from movies made about them. My answer to that? These people usually have only superficial interests in the subject matter to begin with so, again, who cares.

If people really want to learn about the Mayans or the Spartans, then hopefully they will read a history book and not sit like zombies staring at a screen for two hours. And, as with any information, no one single source should ever be fully trusted, so read more than one book about a subject. Even if a movie does strive for complete historical accuracy (and I have never known one to have purported to do so), there's bound to be something incorrect in there somewhere. History is subjective.