.wtf? no, seriously, W.T.Fing F?

[aesc]

Oh my God. I went to see the new Beowulf movie last night, and it was...


Wow. There are no words. It's even worse than the Canada/Iceland Beowulf and Grendel from a few years ago, which came very close to being unmitigatedly horrible but at least had great lines like "Who cares why a fucking troll does what a fucking troll does?"

The pain was nearly flawless. The new kind of CGI animation is vertigo-inducing (am I looking at real people? oh, no! Cartoon! And Robin Wright Penn's face is weirdly bloated!), Angelina Jolie and her golden, nipple-less breasts (WRONG WRONG WRONG, and her Russian-accent-inflected quasi-Old English), the rampant and rampantly awful Freudian imagery (hero, sword drawn and erect, walking into the cleft of the mountain), Beowulf's compulsive nudity, Old English rap (just because it's rhythmical poetry does not mean people played drums as accompaniment!), brutal raping of the plot and characters... I didn't think Neil Gaiman was capable of such a thing, but apparently he is, because OH MY GOD the atrocious suckiness of this movie begs, buggers, and is incapable of description.

I came very close to going upstairs and barfing on the projector and then burning it, but the people I was with (all fellow specialists) convinced me it would be more fun to stay and insult it. It was the weird kind of fun where you're laughing and insulting something (and there was SO MUCH in there that was funny in a horrifying way) because the alternative is to become violent or ill, or violently ill.

Also, people? For those of you thinking about writing the fourth Beowulf screen adaptation, please to remember that Hrothgar is not a.) an alcoholic, b.) senile, c.) afflicted with Tourette's, or d.) all of the above. He doesn't wear a toga, formal gift-giving does not involve the random flinging of coins, and twelfth-century stone castles do NOT belong in 507AD Denmark. Neither does Christianity. Also, just because they're northern Germanic women doesn't mean they're whores.

Oh, and there was a teenaged boy in the audience with a copy of Seamus Heaney's translation. If he was reading it for its own sake, yay for him. (Though I have issues with Heaney's translation, it does have the merit of being the most readable and interesting yet produced.) If he was reading it for Angelina Jolie, poor boy, the disappointment he must endure.

That isn't remotely all, but I should stop now.

Now, I'm tired, a bit hung over from all the wine I had to drink to cope with this monstrosity, I have to rake today, go to the library, and find some way to deal with people whose disorganization is visiting havoc upon my life. I am disposed to be cranky and hostile today.

In other, much happier news: Awesomest of awesome birthdays to mrsdtaylor! May you have a gift-wrapped Enrique on your front step today *snuffles you*

Comments

[gramarye1971]

Why do you think that is? I mean, is it just because people get so caught up in trying to modernise it or 'adapt' it that they lose sight of the story?

[aesc.livejournal.com]

I think that's part of it. There's a lot in the poem that isn't modern-audience friendly--the very, very long dialogue, the interpolated stories (that do, in fact, have narrative importance but most readers dismiss as being irrelevant and wasting time), the fact that the poem is often sold as "epic" or a piece of action poetry with grunting Vikings and so when people read it they're inevitably disappointed to find out it's mostly talking with, comparatively, little action. Consequently, when the adaptation is written and marketed, it has to be marketed as action, not as the boring poem people remember being forced to read in high school.

Which for me is profoundly disappointing, because I think a good, interesting adaptation of Beowulf could be done, if writers and producers weren't so desperate to distance the movie from the text it's theoretically based on. It would be hard, because the poem doesn't really seem to tolerate much in the way of interference, but it could be done without being horribly butchered the way Gaiman's done.