Miscellaneous Movie Musings

[innerSpaceman]

I finally saw Beowulf, and there's something I find very interesting about it.

As a live-action film, I would judge it a cornball failure ... yet as a cartoon, I deem it pretty much a rousing success.

As such, I'll grant it the benefit and consider it an animated tale. The characters pretty much look like the humans in Shrek, so I can go with the animated angle - even though the humans were crafted by scanning the movements of live actors and not by artisans of any kind "drawing" the animation. But there were plenty of creatures and locations that were traditionally animated ... hahaha, in the sense that computer animation has now become "traditional."

Some of the main characters look pretty photo-realistic, but they've still got that Shrek-ish feelling about them, and they move in a vaguely animated way. The background characters, and even some of the character roles, are completely Shrek-like. So it really comes off as an animated movie ... in which the somewhat cornball telling of the Beowulf tale fits just fine.

Oddly, while some of the characters look nothing like the actors who provide their voices (as would be typical for an animated film), a few are disconcertingly designed to look just like the actors who portray them ... further blurring the line between live-action and animation.


It's that blur that makes this an interesting movie for me. I'm fascinated that I apparently have widely different criteria for a successful live-actioner than I do a cartoon.

Also, though I'm certainly no Beowulf expert ... it appears they did a very good job in adapting the tale to movie form. Kudos for that.


Overall - - surprisingly not bad. Oh and Ray Winstone (who plays Beowulf) has a fantastic voice. Love the way he says 'Monsta."

[€uroMeinke]

We watched Poor Cow last night furthering our exploration of 1960's British cinema. While certainly flawed, I was still captivated by this film and it's stark tale of working class life and message that we are all bent. Not sure I'd recommend this to anyone, but it has me wanting to see more of what was coming out of England during this time.

[CoasterMatt]

I watched Frankenstein Unbound last night. In HD.

Best line of the whole movie - "Meet... My Monster!"

[alphabassettgrrl]

ISM- I had the same thought about Beowulf. The people looked mostly real, but the movements were stilted, and weird. The skin and clothes are too perfect and it feels fake and awkward.

We just watched Miami Vice the movie. I wasn't terribly impressed other than the fact that they hired women with muscle tone. That was hot. I'm glad we didn't pay theater prices.

[Sohrshah]

I didn't read IsM's feeling about the animated as being a negative feature of the film. am I worng? He called the movements animated, and ABG called them stilted and awkward.

My feeling is somewhere in the middle. Like IsM, I grant Beowulf the benefit of being an animated film. I also feel that the video capture elements were a little "too" real, a little lacking in the somewhat exagerated tradition of animation - be it 2-D or 3-D. The Final Fantasy movie, and lo, it's earlier video games cousins suffered from the same issues. The more surrent FF video games seem to have resolved most of the awkwardness of having photo-real animated characters moving "too" realistically, but I think that the strange quality of video capture is part and parcel to the technique.

Actors used to use posing as part of acting, and it was over the course of decades that the traditions of acting changed to become more realistic in execution. Animation, particularly the photo-real variety, has seen a very sudden change in its psychosymbolic language. The video cpatue technique is a big part of that sudden change, and it does come with advantages as well as the obivous drawback of awkwardness. Either we will get used to the rather eerie reality, or filmmakers will develop techniques for animating photo-real characters which have more elegant motion.

I think the adaptation was decent, though it was certainly about as true to the original story as "300" is true to the oldest versions of that tale. It's a modern re-creation of an old story. I do like that in this case Beowulf's mother is a creature of cruel beauty, not a hag. We, as a modern audience, can better understand the failure of a king if he is seduced by Angelina Jolie than by a grotesque hag, no matter how terrible her power. It just translates better to film.

[Alex]

I loved Beowulf the first time I saw it. I fell asleep the second.

Apparently novelty was a big part of what I liked.

[Motorboat Cruiser]

Kind of off topic but - Can anyone tell me the name of the movie that we watched at NA's home on New Year's Day? I can't think of the name and it is driving me crazy!

[Gemini Cricket]

Originally Posted by Motorboat Cruiser

Kind of off topic but - Can anyone tell me the name of the movie that we watched at NA's home on New Year's Day? I can't think of the name and it is driving me crazy!

CQ?

[Motorboat Cruiser]

That would be it! Thank you so much!!!

[innerSpaceman]

Just to clarify, I thought the animated feeling of the character movement in Beowulf was a positive. Anything that leaned toward it being an animated movie made it a better film in my eyes.

I love the adaptations to the story the filmmakers made, and I don't think it took things too far off. It was clear that Grendil's Mother could appear as a beauty, but that it was not her natural form (which seemed to be more a lizard-creature than a hag ... but i think the point being that she could appear as many things). The only bit I absolute hated about her appearance as a luscious siren were the stilletto heels she was sporting to aid the look. I couldn't help but think that, like Merlin in Disney's The Sword in the Stone, Grendil's Mother was a time traveler who visited the 20th century for fashion tips before heading back to the 4th century to seduce Beowulf. Ugh.


I thought the biggest change ... moving the third act from back in Beowulf's native Sweden to the Denmark of the earlier acts ... was spot-on brilliant. It let the tale keep the same set of characters (adding only Beowulf's yummy new concubine) and, for a movie, I thought that was clearly the best choice -- certainly warranting a departure from the version of the tale best known.

Keeping in mind, of course, that the written poem was set down centuries after the tale had been part of oral tradition for hundreds of years. I think it's safe to say the famous poem can not be considered the one, true version of the tale.

And though historians believe many of the characters are based on actual people, the tale of Ogres and Witches and Dragons clearly has fictional elements galore. Changing elements of Beowulf, then, is somewhat different an adaptation puzzle than 300 vs. historical fact.