Guyliner - the new iteration.
So the historical group had a movie night. And after an episode of a perfectly respectable documentary on the Normans, for actual historical content, we moved on the the evening's entertainment portion: a movie I'd never heard of before, Pathfinder.
To make a long review fairly short, it was awesome in its badness and perfect MST3K fodder. It's a movie about Norse and Native Americans which appears to have been made by people who have vaguely heard of both groups, but never done any actual research. It features Karl Urban in a near-perpetual state of shirtlessness (one of the few positive selling points in the whole thing), seasons that oscillate wildly between summer and winter, Norsemen who appear to be a cross between orcs and Klingons (with the social graces of neither), and a crudload of gratuitous guyliner, which those of us in the audience started calling Viking-liner about half an hour into the proceedings. One of them (the young lady who owns the DVD in question, in fact), even made a macro afterward:
If your audience can handle a lot of CGI gore (all of it cheesily unrealistic), I highly recommend this film for your next beer'n'movie night. I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself. Way too much plot getting in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say, but since you'll be completely lost about what's going on in approximately 5 minutes, who cares? And you won't have to worry about laughing or cat-calling over any important dialogue, either. Dame Ruth says, check it out. ;)
(ETA: Oh, and if you want some real info about the Norse exploring North America, as a bit of brain-cleaner afterwards, try this excellent, if somewhat baroque, Smithsonian site.)
To make a long review fairly short, it was awesome in its badness and perfect MST3K fodder. It's a movie about Norse and Native Americans which appears to have been made by people who have vaguely heard of both groups, but never done any actual research. It features Karl Urban in a near-perpetual state of shirtlessness (one of the few positive selling points in the whole thing), seasons that oscillate wildly between summer and winter, Norsemen who appear to be a cross between orcs and Klingons (with the social graces of neither), and a crudload of gratuitous guyliner, which those of us in the audience started calling Viking-liner about half an hour into the proceedings. One of them (the young lady who owns the DVD in question, in fact), even made a macro afterward:
If your audience can handle a lot of CGI gore (all of it cheesily unrealistic), I highly recommend this film for your next beer'n'movie night. I laughed so hard I nearly hurt myself. Way too much plot getting in the way of the story, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say, but since you'll be completely lost about what's going on in approximately 5 minutes, who cares? And you won't have to worry about laughing or cat-calling over any important dialogue, either. Dame Ruth says, check it out. ;)
(ETA: Oh, and if you want some real info about the Norse exploring North America, as a bit of brain-cleaner afterwards, try this excellent, if somewhat baroque, Smithsonian site.)