Wednesday, November 21, 2007

Beowulf Thoughts Continued

I had intended to write a lot more about Beowulf in my previous post, but my writing was interrupted by an urgent need to go back to bed, as, for whatever reason, I was up half the night struggling to sleep.
So what was going to be a mildly spoilery post ended up not being spoilery at all.
I really don’t have too much more to say about the movie, but there were a few things I wanted to add.
Mostly just some of the quips I made to Scott in the course of the movie.
For example, the queen, as portrayed by Robin Wright Penn, was the most incredibly glum character I’ve ever seen. If even I think you’re too glum, then you definitely need to get on some anti-depressants. I said to Scott, “Would it kill her to smile?”
It reminded me of an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer, while reading the paper, has the following exchange with Lisa:

Homer: Sheesh, look at these refugees. How about a smile?
Lisa: Dad, they’re suffering under terrible conditions!
Homer: Well moping isn’t going to make it any better.

Of course, and here’s where some of the spoilers come into play, I guess you can’t blame the queen for being glum, given that both of her husbands saw fit to knock boots with some ancient pagan monster.
At one point the queen asks Beowulf, “Is she really so irresistible?”
I said to Scott, “Duh…she’s Angelina Jolie!”
When Beowulf is suiting up to fight the dragon, the queen says, “It looked better on you when you were a young man.”
My rejoinder on his behalf was “Well, your breasts used to be above your knees.”
As for Grendel, it was made clear that the reason he was launching his attacks on Heorot was that the noise of their revelries were painful to his overly sensitive tympanum. When the queen was singing a song the action shifted to Grendel’s lair, where the noise was sending him into a rage.
I said, “He’s not evil; he just hates musicals.”
There was enough singing in the movie that I turned to Scott and asked, “When did this movie turn into Spider-Man 3?”
In a strange way, the scenes in which Angelina Jolie – who you’re not actually seeing on-screen at the time – cradling her dying son and speaking in a mixture of Danish and English was actually kind of a turn-on. I know it’s weird, but it’s at least better than being turned on by her when she was a CGI fish in A Shark Tale.
(Seriously, that was one sexy fish.)
In any case, I’ll say once again that it’s a great movie and well worth seeing just for how amazing the technology behind it is, though that’s far from the only reason.
There were great performances captured from all of the cast members, particularly from Crispin Glover as Grendel. Of course, I can easily imagine Crispin Glover acting like in real life.
So yeah, that’s my slightly less in-depth than I’d intended take on Beowulf.
Not much else is going on, so I guess I’ll bring this entry to a close.

1 comment:

Merlin T Wizard said...

We definitely had some great MST3K moments during the movie. I did mention that Jolie's voice was amazingly seductive and sinister at the same time. I think she really vamped it up for both her on screen and off screen scenes.