Brick's Rambo pick moved this movie up a tick or two on my list. I am a believer in the fads you know.
300 - 2007
The best experience I've had going to a movie theatre. Bar none. I went to see this with a half dozen of my good friends on opening night at midnight. The seats were packed. What we all witnessed were some of the most intense action scenes brought to life in some of the most stylistic ways ever put to film. I remember being completely dumbfounded watching Leonidas tear Persian after Persian to shreds in the middle of a massive battle in one of the now-famous action scenes. Sure, the story is about 10% truth, 90% fiction, but it didn't matter at the time and it doesn't matter now.
Nothing is going to match watching that movie in the theatre with those people with everyone's gasps and the moments of silence and pure awe. Even still, I have to have this, even if I will have to watch it alone on an island on a much smaller screen.
I remember, after we all walked out of the theatre stunned, one of my friends talking to his girlfriend on the phone. She had asked how the movie was, he replied, "Its like what every man sees right before he closes his eyes to sleep every night." He couldn't be more right. To us, it was action in its purest form.
The bad? This movie spawned many one liners that are borderline cheesy in the movie, and definitely cheesy when said by any non Spartan (so, anyone). However, there were a few historically accurate (as in someone actually said them) quotes featured in this movie. I knew what they were going in, so it was especially fun hearing them. The best of which is when the Persian emmissary tells a Spartan warrior that the Persian army is so vast that their "arrows will blot out the Sun." To which the Spartan replies, as is historically confirmed, "Then we will fight in the shade."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae