I've been a bad blogger lately, but I hope to get back into the swing of things. :-)
Part 1 is here
After finishing the work on my bathroom, I threw myself into the shower so that I could meet Blanch to go pick up Romeo to go see Beowulf. We were going to see it at the new IMAX theater, and I wanted to get there early, because even though it was the holiday, the last movie we saw there we ended up nearly nauseous in the front row. It turned out that the theater wasn't that busy, but we got there with enough time to get some popcorn and coke refills. So, all was right with the bad food world!
I have to say the movie was pretty great. Yes, they moved the story up to 500 AD to throw in a needless bout of Christianity, but the basics of the tried and true Beowulf story were there, fantastically rendered in motion capture, 3D animation. If you go see this movie, I heartily encourage you to see it in the 3D IMAX format. It is that amazing, and frankly, it is the future of cinema. I kept having flashbacks to a class I took in my freshman year of college called "Tolkien and Medieval Literature," and since Tolkien has one of the most famous Beowulf translations, we got to read it in the class. I wrote two papers comparing Tolkien's female characters to the ones in Beowulf called "Tolkien Feminism," which is interesting because in retrospect Tolkien was not feminist at all, in fact, he was pretty misogynist outside of the women in his family, but when you look at the women in Beowulf (not the movie however) where they really just functioned as mead servants, and then you have the tremendously feminist characters of Galadriel and Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings, it is easy for a freshman to make the mistake. The other paper was just a research into how they always named their swords, it was decidedly less academic. Anyway, I enjoyed the movie quite a bit. Certainly, it took liberties with the text, and the naked Beowulf wrestling with Grendel was a bit over the top (if not wonderful animated man candy). However, I recommend it for nothing else than the leap in technology.
After the movie, we made our way to Olly's, which was having a customer appreciation Thanksgiving buffet, and since Blanche, Romeo, and I didn't feel like cooking, we made our way there. When we got there, we discovered that the appreciation also involved FREE DRINKS for two hours. Woo HOO! Jack and Ennis joined up with us shortly there after, and we drank and drank and drank and drank. It was a fun time, which culminated in Romeo stealing a large ceramic turkey on a dare from me. We ended up going to Greg's for a while, and then we came back and pretty much crashed by 12:30am.
Friday and Saturday were pretty much party planning central for me, and I finished all of the cooking and cleaning with about 20 minutes to spare before guests arrived. I will blog more about that in the next post.
Happy Monday!
2 comments:
I'm reading the story Beowulf for a British literature course and it is set in the sixth century and it is also heavily influenced by Christianity. Grendel is a descendant of Cain; numerous references are made to God and the devil.
Okay, I did a little research to blow the cobwebs out of my brain, and you are indeed correct on the publication of it. However, I think it is up to the translation as to whether Christianity really played a roll in it.
I found this quote:
Although Cain is associated with Grendel, there's no evidence that Grendel, or his mother, is anything more than metaphorically of Cain's line. Cain is a trope, a figure used to provide an atmosphere that underscores the tensions surrounding Heorot and the history of the Scyldings. Once Cain is introduced, immediately following references to Heorot's collapse, it is understood that the Anglo-Saxon ethic of loyalty and humanity's "natural love" of each other is under threat. In this, Cain embodies the result of breaking the Anglo-Saxon ethic. As such, it isn't necessarily evidence that the Beowulf poet was attempting to propagandize the newer religion: the legend of Cain supported the Anglo-Saxon worldview, which is why the poet used it to underscore contemporary social mores.
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It's open to interpretation, but my main problem with the movie is that they made Unferth a priest. That was a bit ham-handed, and it slapped the Christianity from something on the periphery to front and center.
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