Like A Sparrow, or, Sing With Me, If It's Just For Today--
Apropos of - not nothing, but the new Beowulf film which I haven't seen and don't know if I will out of sheer masochistic duty (it would be one thing, if y'all and I could go MST3K it together IRL) and someone in comments somewhere around wondering just how plausible it would be to have a bunch of Viking warriors sitting around drinking beer and
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In a nutshell, it's not what you'd want Beowulf to be, it's completely lost the epic feel, notwithstanding grand action sequences. Er, major spoilers from here on in, obviously. For whatever reason, the writers tried to make Beowulf...mundane? human? something like that, except they did it wrong, and instead of magnificent old world angst he just ends up being sad and feeble and destroyed (in the second half, anyway). None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, Wealtheow is wispy and distant and just untouchable (except for one, one brief scene where she made me grin), Beowulf is a macho hero in the first half but without the bombastic crack, Hrothgar is a bloody drunk (wtf?!), Wiglaf is comic relief and incidentally the only character I could sorta like. There are a lot of nice little nods to the time period, like the two guys discussing the new Roman god whilst taking a leak, and some lines and scenes are taken neatly from the poem, but equally there're a number of anachronisms (especially in the dialogue!!!) and stereotypes (did we really have to start with a brawling Happy Hour in the hall?). Oh, and I would swear that Beowulf&co. are wearing ptergyes, and that he has Lupa on his breastplate, but don't quote me on that.
THE GOOD NEWS is that the movie was made for msting. I laughed my way through the movie and felt pretty good at the end. Beowulf's major line is "I WILL KILL YOUR MONSTER!", which is repeated about five times or thereabouts. Grendel and the dragon are amazingly funny examples of "attack weak spot for MASSIVE DAMAGE". At the end, there's a line that I swear is an homage to "it's only a flesh wound!" I want to know how the hell Beowulf got his hands on Angrist, because his damn sword cuts through everything. There's one bit where he guts a sea-monster simply by stabbing it, hanging on to the sword, and letting gravity do the rest. And then he does that again later to slice up the dragon's wing. It goes on, and on...
tl;dr no, don't pay money for it, but bootleg it or find some other way to watch it anyway just for the laughs.
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I mean, I can maybe see this if they want to make it 'reason old geezer goes off dragon-slaying is because he wants to recapture glory years of being monster slayer' but come on!
Sounds like the perfect film to watch for purposes of mockery whilst devouring a takeaway after stumbling in post-pub night out...
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It was actually a fun flick to watch, but maybe that was cos of the constant mst commentary my friend and I kept up.
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