I don’t know what’s hotter: AVATAR’s tails or Jolie’s wings.

Malevolent CGI and Magnificent Stupidity.

MALEFICENT is the story of Sleeping Beauty. Told from the point of view of the evil fairy. And you know what? She’s not evil.

First of all, I think this movie is trying to hurt our corneas. Does the CGI have to cover every single color in the visible light and ultraviolent spectrum so loudly? Secondly, magic. End of cred. Fuck you audience, we’re gonna do whatever we want whenever we want and none of it has to make sense even within its own story.

We meet Maleficent as a young girl (Isobelle Molloy), a good fairy with magic powers – and gargantuan condor wings, and two curlicued horns emanating from her skull, that makes her resemble the christian version of the horned devil. Young Maleficent spends her days whizzing around like a nonce amongst the screaming colors of the forest-swamp. One day she meets a human orphan boy named Stefan (Michael Higgins). We discover her kryptonite: “iron burns fairies,” so he throws away his ring, instead of sensibly putting it into his pocket. They will start a Friend Zone relationship that will last until they grow to adulthood as Angelina Jolie and Sharlto Copley. Never getting past first base is probably the reason the repressed Stefan one day chops off Maleficent’s wings to please his king, which could have been avoided with one little bang…

The king (Kenneth Cranham) is a doddering fool anyway – trying to invade Maleficent’s swamp for no good reason. What resources does it hold that his kingdom might want? What is his army planning on carrying off as booty? Or do they need lebensraum? Or are the swamp creatures attacking his land and he wants to turn them back? None of the above. No reason. No motivation. CGI battle ensues, with Maleficent leading an army of tree creatures and grass dragons and beating her wings until someone jizzes in their pants in the dark theater.

Later, when Mal magically builds an impenetrable wall of thorns around the swamp in a few minutes, we wonder why she didn’t do that in the first place instead of engaging in battle and putting all the lives of her precious woodland creatures at stake. Magic. Fuck you.

King  is obsessed with bringing down Maleficent. Why? What ideology is Maleficent promoting that needs to be stultified? None. What type of government is she running that needs to be dismantled? None. Is she in any way even worth a second thought, living way over there in the swamp while King lives out his life in his castle? Is there any reason that their paths will ever cross? None. Yet. Here we are engaged in conflict. Just because.

Medieval message: Whenever a 16-year-old girl touches a prick, bad things happen.

Why do people regard fairy tales as quality storytelling? The old yarns we grew up with were anything but quality – muddled, contradictory, motivation-less amoral plots with unformed characters that change personalities on a dime. And every fairy tale we think we know has been bastardized into a slick Westernized version of its European cracked vision (by Grimm, Anderson, Disney, et al). When we eventually read the full original tales, we realize they are twisted horror tragedies that no person in their right mind would narrate to their kids at “bedtime” – unless they want their kids to run screaming into traffic from the nightmares.

So. Sleeping Beauty. The tale you’ve been inculcated with has been turned on its head. And it’s still idiotic. Maleficent, fleshed out as a character only by Disney’s 1959 animated film – as the “wicked fairy godmother” – is the heroine here, a blameless sprite with a pornstar bod, who just wants to be left alone, and is mutilated for profit.

To elevate his position in the kingdom, Stefan rufies Maleficent and intends to kill her, but instead just cuts off her wings. (Is this a reverse castration metaphor? If he’s that repressed, why didn’t he just use her unconscious-time to get to that third base he’s been craving for decades?)

Stefan becomes king himself and his queen births a daughter. For revenge, Maleficent crashes the christening and puts a curse on baby Aurora: that she will prick herself on a spindle before her 16^th birthday and fall into a deep sleep, that can only be awakened by True Love’s kiss. Sounds sensible to me: her revenge is going to take 16 years, not counting the nine months she waited for Stefan’s baby to be born. What’s the rush?

Next sensible plot point is King Stefan burning all the spindles in the land, and entrusting Aurora’s upbringing to three slightly retarded fairies who take her into hiding.

Is this a re-imagining or a re-dumbing down?

So let’s recap: THEY came after Maleficent’s greenery. THEY tried to kill her. THEY cut off her wings. So she can be forgiven in wanting to lash out at her antagonists. But when she is shown striding towards the baby, why are we getting the impression she is “evil”? I’ll tell you why: Because we’ve been indoctrinated with these tropes since medieval times; we are remembering the motivation-less fairy who would curse a baby for no reason at all, just to be the villain of a pointless tale.

Maleficent inadvertently grows to love Aurora as she grows, and teen Aurora (magnificent Elle Fanning, who is unfortunately directed to be in a constant state of imbecilic wonderment or a Vicodin-high over the woodland creatures), regularly visits the forest and hangs with Maleficent, frolicking with the special effects that are trying to beat us into submission.

Jesus Christ! These drugs are better than the ones Judy Garland used on THE WIZARD OF OZ!

Prince Red Herring is Brenton Thwaites. Mal’s crow helper is Sam Riley (whom Mal turns into whatever animal she wants, because magic fuck you). Maleficent has the power to levitate people and throw them at will by gesturing – but she can’t fly without wings because magic fuck you.

Maleficent puts Prince Hunky to sleep on his horse, then “she needs a horse” to ride alongside Prince’s horse to the castle, so she turns Crow into a horse. When they arrive, she dismounts and magically floats the Prince along behind her. Is ANYONE registering this idiocy?! If she could float him, why did she need two horses?

Movie is filled brim to barrel-bottom with contradictory, paradoxical, lunatic magic that works only when it needs to and is forgotten when the plot calls for adversity. Maleficent can do literally anything with her magic, except the most judicious thing when it’s called for.

There is one great twist to the tale. Prince Lunkhead kisses Aurora when she is out cold and nothing happens. For it is Maleficent who truly loves Aurora – and inadvertently wakes her with True Love’s kiss. [insert wocka-chicka music]

Besides being literally unwatchable – the effects are just too effect-y – like all great fairy tales, there is a horrifying passage that is much more disturbing than people will admit: Maleficent’s disembodied wings are in a glass case in the castle, and they flutter in there of their own accord. Eeeuw! The glass case is broken and they fly to her – meaning they have their own sensory perception – and simply attach themselves. That was all it took? Why didn’t she use her magic and walk right in and TAKE them all these years? She turned her crow into a dragon fer chrissakes! She couldn’t turn an army of chipmunks into dragons to go get her wings?

And what is it with all these necrophiliac princes that keep kissing sleeping chicks who look like they’re dead?

END

DIE HARD With A Vagina.

A bunch of guys chase after Angelina Jolie. So what’s new?

Opening scenes of SALT show a sexy, bloodied blonde (Angelina Jolie) being dragged from a North Korean prison cell and tortured; she’s waterboarded, beaten, punched, screamed at; she’s slim, busty and naked – except for her exquisite frilly white lace bra and panties.

You lost me at Victoria’s Secret.

And after the North Koreans treat her with such respectful torture in the first scene, the blonde is released to the care of CIA officer Ted Winter (Liev Schreiber). On the outside, her Russian husband (August Diehl) awaits. He must be pretty happy that no one poked their genitals into his busty wife with the born-to-blow lips. ‘Cause you would think in a detainment camp where they renege on the Geneva Conventions on torture, rape would kinda be second nature. I guess North Korean soldiers just don’t have the high sperm count needed to be rapists of prisoners; not like American soldiers.

Written by Kurt Wimmer, directed by Aussie Phillip Noyce, SALT follows the blond prisoner, CIA intelligence officer Evelyn Salt (Jolie), after her rescue from North Korea, back into boring married life, until an accusation that she is a Russian double agent sets her on the lam. Supposedly a mole within the CIA, with a mission to assassinate the Russian president, Salt goes rogue to prove her innocence – or prove her accusers right.

Like its opening, SALT is one non-believable scene after another. Most of them can be passed off as action movie idiom, but then there are scenes like the capture of elusive, super-assassin Salt after merry chases and untold judo chops to faceless CIA guys who are either dead or going to be hospitalized for the next six months with broken limbs, crushed skulls and multiple contusions – and they let one weak FBI guy escort her away by holding her arm casually.

Act I is a one-trick pony. All Salt, no seasoning. CIA guys Winter (Schreiber) and Peabody (Chiwetel Ejiofor) chase Salt. And follow trucks that she jumps onto. And drive fast. And shout. And run. And shoot. And other white noise. The mildly-clichéd Manchurian Candidate backstory starts unfolding, which Liev Schreiber calls foul on (he was, after all, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE in 2004).

She’s MacGuyver, she’s John McClane, she’s Ethan Hunt, and she’s as brutal as any vampire slayer. We see Salt’s resumé – black belt, weapons expert, applied explosives technique, rapid assault, counter-surveillance, driving technique (that’s a skill? I guess for a woman it is), edged weapons, military freefall parachuting, unarmed combat… but she still runs like a girl.

Act II: Salt changes her hair color from striking blond to extra-silky brunette, so that she can walk amongst crowds incognito while she plots to do Russian stuff; and it works, cos not one human male with testosterone notices the leggy, leather-clad, raven-haired, busty trollop walking amongst them. Not one askew glance, not one crook look. Those classes at the Clark Kent School of Disguise really paid off.

We end up deep in the bowels of the White House war room, with a vanilla president (Hunt Block) looking way out of his depth to be ordering nuclear counter-strikes on Russia. And the plot thickens as Salt insidiously wends her way through inept Secret Service guys and security systems to assassinate Mr. Vanilla (like that will ever happen in an American movie!).

You’d think with all the crowing about the real life training they do for the combat scenes that director Noyce wouldn’t cut those scenes in such hard closeup, so we could see a little expertise and not just get a headache from the camera moves.

When they capture Salt five feet away from the president, after breaching the tightest security in the world (the White House), one would think they’d use a soldier built like a WWF brickhouse to escort Salt into custody, but no – still that same weak FBI guy.

No wonder everything gets pear-shaped again, which leads to the setup for a sequel. Oh no! More chase movie, more stunts, more weak FBI guys. A coupla suggestions: look carefully for the hot chick clad like a Goth amongst a rabble of middle America rednecks, and try using Hannibal Lecter restraints next time, tools!

END

Conspiracy Sneerly.

CHANGELING is based on a true story, but I think it’s fiction. I mean, come on – Angelina Jolie with only ONE child?

Clint Eastwood directs Jolie as Christine Collins, a working, single mother in 1928 Los Angeles, who comes home one day to find her son, Walter (Gattlin Griffith) missing.

As unbelievable as it sounds, the police (headed by Jeffrey Donovan and Colm Feore) deliver an impostor child to Christine six months later in a public political display, insisting it is Walter – against all the protests of Christine. They tell her that because she is the missing child’s mother, she is therefore “in no position to be objective”!

Christine takes this lying down. Now we’re getting closer to Angelina…

An activist reverend, Gustav Briegleb (John Malkovich) – whose name looks like Scrabble letters gone rogue – accuses the police department of corruption and incompetence, and the police prove the accusations correct, by desperately shoving Christine’s case down the public’s throat as a feather in their cap. They even send Christine a Consultant for Juvenile Services to spin their lie right in her face like a cheapshot Republican. The consultant says he will “put it all to rights,” yet as soon as he looks at the boy, “He’s got your eyes… and a little of your nose as well.”

To refute Christine’s claims that the impostor is circumcised and Walter was not, “he must have been traumatized and submerged the memory of the circumcision”; as to why the impostor is three inches shorter than Walter, “his spine shrunk during his trauma…”

It’s a little hard to accept that even the 10-year-old impostor (Devon Conti) could be in on the conspiracy. When this mother is pouring her heart out to him, beseeching him for the truth, how is he so well-versed in the Clint Eastwood Method of saying nothing? At such a young age, is he already indoctrinated with the spirit of the times that would regard women as inferior enough not to answer her? He also seems to take a leery pleasure in seeing Christine squirm. And how does he fool Walter’s friends, their neighbors, the school teachers? These questions are touched on minimally, but ultimately cannot be explained by the movie format, so leave us unbalanced – in this age of ultra-media that could disprove lies instantaneously.

Screenplayed by J. Michael Straczynski, CHANGELING is a strange blend of flopsy first act and then terrifying second act, involving a child-killer. About the time the police department are wrongfully dragging Christine into a mental institution for insisting the impostor is not her child, Detective Lester Ybarra (Michael Kelly) is stumbling on a ranch in the Los Angeles desert, where he arrests a stray boy (Eddie Alderson) who tells him a bizarre tale…

Two stories run congruently as Christine is traumatized and mistreated in the sanitarium, while Ybarra hears the stray boy’s testimony to being an accomplice to kidnapping and murdering numerous young boys with his uncle, a man named Gordon Northcott (Jason Butler Harner, who looks like a skinny Hugh Jackman).

The two stories intersect when Walter Collins’s name comes up in the boy’s story. We never discover whether Walter was one of the murdered boys or one of a few who managed to escape.

Writer Straczynski was inspired (is that the right word?) by the True Crime events of the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. Yet there was another True Crime enacted in this case – that of the police department.

If we find it hard to believe how a whole department can lie so brazenly, we only have to look to modern politicians – Hillary claiming she “landed under fire” in Bosnia, McCain claiming “the race is tied with Obama” – the only reason those 1920’s liars got away with their outlandish mendacity was that there was no DNA testing, no domestic photography… and no YouTube.

Once again, Eastwood’s film making is impeccable. We never question we are in 1928, with the surroundings, social mores and misogyny of the time; when women were treated like lower-class citizens, or at least like the hysterical, emotionally-unbalanced gender that Freud and others postulated they were.

Women were so subjugated and downtrodden that when Christine tearfully demands that the police captain keep looking for her son after she is given the impostor, she then apologizes to him for doing so. He maintains coolly, “Why should we keep looking for someone we’ve already found?”

Christine once told Walter, “Never start a fight. Always finish it.” Of course, that credo is the body and soul of Clint Eastwood. He said it flat out in WHITE HUNTER, BLACK HEART and each of his Avengers lives it to the bone. Christine (with help from her ally, Reverend Briegleb) would devote her life to exposing the police who handed her a changeling, finishing a fight they should never have started.

END

Movie: Chop Socky. Message: Kung Fooey.

With astounding cinematography, well-written characters, directorial creativity, incredible technical prowess and stunning animation, KUNG FU PANDA only lacks in one department – its message that Prophecy Is Better Than Practice.

Directed with kinetic frenzy by Mark Osborne and John Stevenson like Michael Bay meets John Woo, the awesomeness of the Panda is diluted with the insidiousness of the Pander.

Jack Black voices fat panda Po, who lives in a China where animals populate the land (mainly ducks and bunnies as the proletariat classes). Obsessed with kung fu, he watches from afar as the famous Furious Five (Monkey, Crane, Tigress, Mantis and Snake) show off their martial arts skills in the imperial palace. Through a series of mishaps, Po is accidentally chosen as the Dragon Warrior, a prophesied protector of the kingdom. The indomitable evil force he must combat is an exceptionally trained, villainous snow leopard called Tai Lung (Ian McShane, eating scenery like candy). The leopard’s prison escape is a chest-beating showcase of his thunderous kung fu talents that will have you howling for red meat.

Though this impossible matchup should end in Po’s grisly death, he triumphs. No surprise. Kid demographic. But it’s how he does it that sends chills up my spine with its insensate message – every few minutes, the promotion of laziness over dedication. Despite the film being beautiful to look at, despite kung fu as realistic and energetic as any live action thriller, despite A-level talent voicing these pixels (Dustin Hoffman, Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Lucy Liu, Michael Clarke Duncan), the laziness message is simply stupefying. To make it more stupefying, though a message like this should destroy the film’s credibility, instead it is regarded as laudable!

Which shouldn’t be a surprise in a society that has come to regard mediocrity as a favorable trait over virtuousity – America. What arrogance and hubris that bum-lazy Americans should set this tale in China, a land renowned for its rigorous discipline.

Silly mystical prophecy is no substitute for experience and hard work, yet that is how Po is chosen, over five warriors specifically trained for the combat of Tai Lung. Throughout the tale, the Furious Five warriors continually whine over how to defeat Tai Lung if an inexperienced pudge like Po combats him. Simple! When Tai Lung arrives, everyone fight him! Apparently, just because “the prophecy said” only Dragon Warrior Po can combat Tai Lung, no one else is allowed to step in and save the land. And this stupidity is borne out when the Five fight Tai Lung and fail.

The very discipline this movie exalts is simultaneously disparaged when Po goes Tom Cruise in THE LAST SAMURAI and attains proficiency within weeks by training with the little Common Panda kung fu master (Dustin Hoffman); proficiency which his peers took decades of dedication to attain. Relating to Everyman characters is fine, but there is another class of character we cannot relate to, that we aspire to (like the Furious Five, like Superman); higher characters that drive us to be more than just Everyman. But that’s too much to ask bum-lazies these days.

This message in KUNG FU PANDA is the same “Believe in Yourself” guff that allows Guitar Hero wankers and Air Guitar douchebags and Karaoke dipsticks to think they’re actually “talented.” The damnable, insufferable, noodle-eating message that youngsters glean from this otherwise-enjoyable movie is that proficiency is instantaneous if you would only “believe in yourself.”

No. It is not. “Believing” gives you the impetus to start training in your chosen art/profession. But it will take years to become proficient.

Why do I rail so hotly against this silly story element in this kid’s movie? Because I have tangible evidence that this wrongful message is being heeded unconsciously: in the form of piano students. Kids who have been playing for less than one or two years thinking they can perform rock songs authentically by learning them by rote, parrot-fashion; rushing blindly into the playing, no control, no technique, no knowledge, no feel, no practice, just glazed-eyed for the quick fix instant gratification. This primal behavior is directly linked to media of this ilk.

Murder and sex on film always get the bum rap for influencing children adversely, but “family films” – as I’ve always maintained – are far more dangerous and cause far more breakdown of respect for elders and institutions than a few bleeding bollocks or horsewhipped whores.

Everything about KUNG FU PANDA is excellent. Only the message is kung fooey.

END

Emasculation Proclamation.

Almost – but not quite – Bennifer.

Idiotically tagged “Brangelina,” the publicity-romance dream team of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie explode in popcorn bedlam in MR. AND MRS. SMITH, as married super spies who are unaware that each other is a spy.

Mr. Cucumber

…Real pros.

Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to popcorn and die – that’s how stupid this movie treats us. Employ the two hottest people in the world and we’ll just sit here and drool… never mind that they each have secret compartments stashed around their house, concealing weapons and money and neither of these supposed super spies ever stumbles upon the other’s stashes; never mind they hired actors on both sides for their wedding because they don’t have family ties and that neither of them were canny enough to discern this; never mind that when they are contracted to rub out each other we are allowed to see the WOMAN doing far more damage to the man than the other way round – and that’s meant to be “funny”… Never mind all that: look at those abs!… look at those ta-tas!

When both their spy agencies contract each of them to coincidentally take out the same target, Mr. Smith (Pitt) steps on Mrs. Smith’s (Jolie’s) death trap, leading to both of them discovering each other’s secret identity. Now the fun is supposed to begin. But it just gets annoying.

Both try to snuff each other while subsuming their wild sexual urges towards the other. Which leads them invariably to rough sex – in a house demolished by their feuding. The sex is so good (hey, it’s Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie) they end up banding together against both their agencies. It is the annoying lopsided battle between the two which gives this film away as the half-baked, politically-gutless, emasculating popcorn-pleaser it tries so hard to be. And succeeds at.

She rams the side of his car and keeps driving, uncaring of whether she has killed him – now think about how incongruous that would look if the MAN was the aggressor. In the house-battle, she carries a giant automatic rifle, he uses a handgun. When she brutally smacks him to the floor, she can ask, “Who’s your daddy now?” – yet how “funny” would that line be if the tables were turned? Even when he does beat her in a basic fist fight, it somehow feels “wrong.” But in a society that applauds equality for women, why shouldn’t he be allowed to kick her ass with impunity?

By putting herself on his level – an assassin aiming to kill him – she has no recourse to call foul on anything. Yet the film-makers very consciously and carefully never show the female being bested. And when bested, in a trite, unthreatening manner. Why is emasculating a man “funny” but derogating a woman politically incorrect?

Because the asymmetry is so ingrained in our society that there would be an outcry if the female was topped in a “masculine” manner.  I’ve said this many times: women don’t want Equality – they want Superiority. Women seek to empower themselves at the expense of men, never to actually improve themselves on a truly “equal” level. And the only reason men allow women to be portrayed as “superior” is because men want to curry favor TO GET INTO A WOMAN’S PANTS.

That may sound even smugger than Angelina Jolie and her magical dancing ta-tas, but you can’t argue with Truth.

There are a few funny moments. Vince Vaughn, as Mr. Smith’s assistant, does his Vince Vaughn, but most of the laughs are due to Pitt’s impeccable comic timing; the incongruity of marital arguments while escaping for their lives – but again, the humor is in HIM being bested in myriad ways. She’s a better driver, more tactically canny, he’s cheerful instinct and she’s anal planning (or should we just stop at anal – it is, after all Angelina Jolie? – after a job, he says, “I improvised,” she counters, “You deviated from the plan!”); she even has more kills than him (312 to his “60s,” in a scene that is analogous to a couple comparing past partners). So why is being more adept than him at everything considered “funny”?

You lost me at burning your bra.

Speaking of which, in their last Butch Cassidy & Sundance sequence, his bulletproof vest covers his whole torso, hers exposes her midriff. Reason? Dunno, maybe none of the MALE assassins would think to shoot at that smooth, flat-bellied section of her body where they fantasize plucking grapes from her bellybutton with their tongues roving wetly over the smooth hairless flesh.

Sexism? That’s what funded this movie in the first place!!!

END

So Close… Yet So Beowulf.

“I am Beowulf!” yells Beowulf.

Five minutes later, he full-throats again, “I am Beowulf!” for those arriving late, we presume… Divebombing into a raging sea of serpents, sword slashing on bloodied sinew, warrior man-meat glistening with sev– “I am Beowulf!” – Okay dude, now you’re just feeding some deep-rooted insecurity complex…

“Beowulf” is the oldest known English epic poem (Anonymous author), one of the first pieces to be transcribed from its oral tradition to manuscript (somewhere between 700 and 1000 AD.)  That’s a pretty awesome pedigree, with a hundred modern media incarnations shouldering their claim-space, so to tackle another incarnation one needs to bring something pretty extraordinary to the table. And Robert Zemeckis’s BEOWULF is definitely extraordinary – in one sense. And definitely mediocre in all others…

Beopoff

The extraordinary aspect of this 2007 incarnation is its 3D-motion-capture method. Pioneering this “realistic” method on THE POLAR EXPRESS (2004), Zemeckis now hones it to breath-defying proportions. Nothing is real, but it is obviously emulating reality through sensors on actors’ faces and bodies, and the zenith of “3D-cartoon” technology. At first, those bi-color glasses suck all the joy out of the moviegoing experience; then once you get used to them, you marvel at the whizbang technique itself, even though many action passages threaten to incite ocular myasthenia; after all the 3D wonder has dissipated, you can sit back to enjoy the movie on its movie merits, but by then, you’ve figured out it has sacrificed most of those merits for the sake of whizbang and annoying glasses.Now that was a whole lotta something for a whole lotta nothing. But I’d already paid for the parking, so I guess I was obligated…

In this Ye Olde English tale (set in Denmark and Sweden), lush lech King Hrothgar (voiced by Anthony Hopkins) and his reveling court are regularly terrorized by the ugliest person/creature in the world, with an oversensitive external eardrum, named Grendel (Crispin Glover, whose main dialogue outbursts consist of the word “Raaaargh!”). From across the treacherous seas (we imagine Zep’s The Immigrant Song accompanying him) comes Beowulf (voiced by Ray Winstone) and his merry men, borne only with the desire to accrue glory in slaying Grendel. A tacit bonus prize is Hrothgar’s nubile queen, Wealthow (Robin Wright Penn), whom Beowulf wastes no time in showing off his pecs to.

In the Great Mead Hall, Hrothgar’s manservant, Unferth (John Malkovich), pooh-poohs Beowulf’s tall tales (causing more unnecessary proclamations from Beowulf about being Beowulf) and Hrothgar unveils a gleaming chalice as a prize for Beowulf were he to defeat Grendel. Beowulf illogically figures that to beat Grendel, he must strip naked. That, and to give the queen a no-hands “wassup.”

In response to Beowulf’s men roaring ribald drinking songs into the night, Grendel appears at the Mead Hall and kills almost everyone, before his arm is ripped off by a nude Beowulf with artfully-obscured genitalia. (It irks me that our society still giggles whenever male genitalia are scantily-hidden by foreground objects – it’s a juvenile practice for juvenile viewers and pulls you out of the story quite forcefully.) Beowulf’s liege, Wiglaf (Brendan Gleeson), survives the attack, to fight and make running gags another day.

Grendel retreats to his dank subterranean domicile, mortally wounded; a poignant moment when we realize this “monster” is only a pathetic wretch with oversensitive hearing who, like many young garage bands will attest, only wanted the neighbors to “turn down that damn noise.” His most powerful witch mother (who looks like Angelina Jolie, only hotter), cradles him in her lullaby arms sadly, at which point Grendel whispers another gratuitous “Beowulf!” and dies (thereby promoting the second-ugliest person in the world to first place), which sends his mother into a dragon vendetta against the man so named.

There are plot twists which depart from the original tale, but this movie ties all the familial threads together very intriguingly: We discover that Hrothgar had “relations” with the witch to spawn Grendel – his son! When Beowulf enters the dank chamber to finish off the witch, she seduces him by simply turning up as Angelina Jolie. Years later we will discover that the dragon that firestorms Beowulf’s castle and causes the sacrifice of his arm and life is, in fact, the spawn of Beowulf from his union with the witch. It’s all very DAYS OF OUR LIVES and kept pretty succinct, whereas the original legend rambles on with trysts hither and thither complicating things… and that Olde English doesn’t help…

There is minimal exploration of other themes, but they seem forced at best: Beowulf’s lament of his legend growing greater than he ever was; of his age precluding him from iron-thewed battles, etc. but the movie itself knows that there is not much to itself, except its grandiloquent Things That Come At You From The Screen.

Though some viewers had trouble adjusting to the eyes of the characters, it all seemed quite realis– “I am Beowulf!”

Oh, give it a rest!

END