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.wtf? no, seriously, W.T.Fing F?
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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
mrsdtaylor! May you have a gift-wrapped Enrique on your front step today *snuffles you*
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*
Beowulf
As for 'Beowulf', it was kinda sucky wasn't it? I had to admit it lost any emotional impact on me when they did the 'Beowulf strips off' bit and then proceeded to strategically place 'stuff' in front of him so there was no full frontal (even if it was cartoon) nudity. I just kept flashing back to the similar scene in the Austin Powers movie and it made me giggle.
:-)
Re: Beowulf
I was hoping for a sausage :D
what you (and by extension they) do?
What do I do? It's kind of one of those questions where I know the answer until someone asks me :D
I'm a medievalist, and my area of concentration is Old English literature, so the language as it was written from around 600-1066 (with bleedover into the late twelfth century), with related interests in Latin. (If you want to do anything medieval, even just concentrating on a vernacular like Old English, Middle High German, Old French &c., you have to be fairly conversant with Latin stuff.) People sharing my particular brand of madness spend a lot of time translating (like Beowulf (http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a4.1.html), for instance), working with manuscripts, and trying to find out more about the literary traditions of the period, the various relationships different texts have to each other, how ideas were transmitted, that sort of thing.
When it comes to medieval movies, mostly we bitch and complain about how awful they are :D