Dr. Johnson was asked his opinion of a performance of Shakespeare's Cymbeline, and he said, "It is impossible to criticize unresisting imbecility." For years I misinterpreted that remark, and may still be doing so. But it was fetched up in my memory last night watching Meet the Spartans.

This movie satirizes itself in a postmodern way as being a cheap rip-off of 300, and I've never been that much of a fan of those movies of the Airport type, but then in the 80s I was a very serious young man about what I considered to be art. Now I figure that it's entertainment, and not art, and that it's in the eye of the beholder, this beholder. This gives me the added benefit of instantly turning off music that is labeled "challenging" but is really only ugly even if someone supposedly knowledgeable about music is listening.

MTS is a movie of, well, unresisting imbecility. The gags are sophomoric with an emphasis on the moron part of that word. Too many barf jokes, but no poo, pee or fart jokes, and the jokes are benign. Christopher Guest's mockumentaries such as Waiting for Guffman and Best of Show are very funny but there is an essential meanness to them. Guest takes simple people, fly-over country people, who are invested in some slightly ridiculous pursuit and hones and refines their lives down to being nothing but that, and mocks their artless sincerity mercilessly. It's rather British in effect, like the Mr. Bean movies. Very funny, but you have to steel yourself, to relax to the pain as you empathize with these dolts. At first you don't know where to look.

No such pain in MTS. One gag has the battle at Thermopylae between Xerxes and the Persians and Leonidas and the Spartans, one of the two or three most important to Western civilization, reduced to ghetto name-calling and break-dancing. "Yo mamma is so fat..." with side-to-side head action. Relax and enjoy it--I did. I don't know if it was meant to be a send-up of ghetto culture.

Another fetching gag is the bottomless pit, which Leonidas pushes irritating people into, and they are irritating. It's every curmudgeon's dream, the bottomless pit to shove whining people into, and Leonidas kicks fool after moron into it. This always works for me, and like a great Vaudevillian he left me wanting more.

Witless and fun.

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From Greek to Geek: Blu-ray really has won. This utterly trivial movie was released in a good transfer and with DTS-HD Master Audio. It is uncompressed, the same bit-rate and resolution as the original recording. The normal Dolby AC3 was wonderful, but this is as much above that as SACD is above the CD. And all this technical splendor for this movie. It's like eating a Big Mac off of Wedgwood but the potential is obvious. Warning. If you have a sound system capable of it, don't turn it up as loud as you normally would; you'll notice the airiness and transparency of the soundtrack, for compression always feels leaden, but after a while your ears will start hurting at sound levels that didn't seem all that loud. Yes, there is that much compression in normal DVDs.