Beowolf
 

I like the story. just brought the dvd home....

report at 11.

dude, wait, what?
 

It's a cartoon?!

looks like shrek!

wtf!......stillll, i'm intrigued.


Hrothgar!

Saw it in IMAX 3D...it was pretty cool that way.

Lord how I hated beowulf. lord, lord. all that war preening. I rooted for Grendel.

Oh I loved Beowulf! The poem not the film....haven't seen the film....am still scarred from '300'.....it's not good to study a period of history then watch a hollywood film of the same....not good at all :P


@ Bri. I've been reading a really interesting piece for my Medieval Queens and Queenship module, called 'The Lady and the Mead Cup', it draws on some of the Beowulf scenes to show the role of the Queen in the early medieval court. Very interesting. It's a field that's been sadly neglected by historians up until very recently. Kingship as a topic has been well studied, but queens have tended to be dealt with purely as individual biogs or in terms solely of their relationships with kings, not in terms of their office.

it was kinda cool, and kept my attention, but.....

if you're gonna make a movie to bring one of the oldest works of fiction to life for our enjoyment.....shouldn't you tell the actual story? not just make an action film with the same title out of it and change it all the fuck around? what happened to the waterfall scene? it's criminal.

hollywood sucks

I'll have to check that out, Dana. I read a LOT these days and am heading for the library this afternoon.

it's snowy and dull here. need some good reads.

Did you ever read Grendel?

(Note: I read it for school in the Dark Ages. I remember practically nothing about it.)

Yeah, Grendel, John Gardner. The literary conceit has it that to hear Grendel tell it, "it was just an accident he won! An accident...!"

Well, the videogame-graphics bits struck me as a bit dubious too, but didn't really damage the storytelling for me. I might reread my Seamus Haney translation this season. The climax, or "Beowulf, The Video Game" -- didn't hate that either. Updating the storytelling is not necessarily illegitimate. Hewing to the purist mode in something that rollicking can be very hard to actually make the story lively, and face it, the modern taste is not only for action, but for the action to be overstimulating. It was novel, yes, but not bad.