I’m excited enough to squirm in my seat. I’ve already downloaded a copy from Project Gutenberg to re-read this week.
The kid was so excited about this movie that when she saw a preview for it this summer, she immediately called me to ask if I knew there was going to be a movie based on Beowulf?!!!? (Besides being a music geek and an art geek, she’s something of a poetry geek.)
Friday morning, when I saw it was to open over the weekend, I texted her frantically to ask if she could wait until Thanksgiving to see it, so we could go together.
A mailing list I’m on notes that Roger Ebert is back in top form in his review. (Thanks, JRH, for the link.)
Here are just a couple of the many gems:
To this court comes the heroic Geatsman named Beowulf (Ray Winstone), who in the manner of a Gilbert & Sullivan hero is forever making boasts about himself. He is the very model of a medieval monster slaughterer.
“I saw the movie in IMAX 3-D, as I said, and like all 3-D movies it spends a lot of time throwing things at the audience: Spears, blood, arms, legs, bodies, tables, heads, mead, and so forth. The movie is also showing in non-IMAX 3-D, and in the usual 2-D. Not bad for a one-dimensional story.”
Anyway, the kid and I will be going on Thursday, and I expect that we’ll enjoy ourselves immensely, at least in the same post-modern laugh-at-it-as-well-as-with-it way that she and I have enjoyed classic movies going back as far as “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” when she was about 5. Maybe we can even, as we did back then, find an air hockey game for after the show.
Politics, Technology, and Language 