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Last night's film at Lady Alysande's was meant to be A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the Bing Crosby version, which I'd ordered from the US a few weeks ago, and left at Lady A's other half Q's porter's lodge, only to find that it disappeared. Lady A subsequently borrowed Beowulf and Grendel from a film reviewer friend, with Q frantically reformatting it for his home-made projection system as VC and I arrived.
Lady A and VC had been apprehensive about Beowulf and Grendel, largely thought the knowledge that St Brendan appears in it. I don't know the stories but I learned from both that Brendan and Beowulf don't fit well. As it happens neither had anything to be afraid of - Brendan here is a personification of the Christian voice in the Beowulf poem, apparently, introduced at the point in the story where critics are agreed Christian themes are introduced, and done away in a casually brutal fashion by a hitherto sidelined major character towards the end. My main issue with the film was the dialogue, which lurches clumsily from the heroic, to pub closing time talk, to the 'hood. I took a little time to get used to Gerard Butler's Scottish Beowulf, who surfaces - literally - in such a way that I expected him to say that he's been walking along the sea bed and all he knows is that he's two days out from Inverness.
In this version Grendel's motivation is textbook stuff - as a bearded, blond child he saw Hrothgar kill his father, and since has nursed the mummified head in his cave - and a new character, Selma, a witch who lives outside the Danes' settlement, in her person (a slightly underfed Sarah Polley) negotiates what becomes an equilibrium between Beowult and Grendel, even though realisation comes too late. The production has a homespun feel, as if the cameras have just been set rolling without any great effort to compose actors and scenery into an image that tells a story. Sturla Gunnarsson's picture could thus be a useful corrective to anyone feeling that they have been exposed to too much of Peter Jackson's vision of Tolkien's middle earth. There were some striking pictures, though, such as the Geats' ship sailing through a frozen landscape in search of Grendel's lair, that spoke to my sense of personal location. I thought of Britain as an island suspended between the north and the west, and I come from a part of the country where that tension is most felt. I live in a 'western' territory, but watchign the film made me yearn for the north; the Christmas visit to Northumberland will be insufficient, I think. I need a visit to northern Scotland, Iceland or parts Scandinavian.
Lady A and VC had been apprehensive about Beowulf and Grendel, largely thought the knowledge that St Brendan appears in it. I don't know the stories but I learned from both that Brendan and Beowulf don't fit well. As it happens neither had anything to be afraid of - Brendan here is a personification of the Christian voice in the Beowulf poem, apparently, introduced at the point in the story where critics are agreed Christian themes are introduced, and done away in a casually brutal fashion by a hitherto sidelined major character towards the end. My main issue with the film was the dialogue, which lurches clumsily from the heroic, to pub closing time talk, to the 'hood. I took a little time to get used to Gerard Butler's Scottish Beowulf, who surfaces - literally - in such a way that I expected him to say that he's been walking along the sea bed and all he knows is that he's two days out from Inverness.
In this version Grendel's motivation is textbook stuff - as a bearded, blond child he saw Hrothgar kill his father, and since has nursed the mummified head in his cave - and a new character, Selma, a witch who lives outside the Danes' settlement, in her person (a slightly underfed Sarah Polley) negotiates what becomes an equilibrium between Beowult and Grendel, even though realisation comes too late. The production has a homespun feel, as if the cameras have just been set rolling without any great effort to compose actors and scenery into an image that tells a story. Sturla Gunnarsson's picture could thus be a useful corrective to anyone feeling that they have been exposed to too much of Peter Jackson's vision of Tolkien's middle earth. There were some striking pictures, though, such as the Geats' ship sailing through a frozen landscape in search of Grendel's lair, that spoke to my sense of personal location. I thought of Britain as an island suspended between the north and the west, and I come from a part of the country where that tension is most felt. I live in a 'western' territory, but watchign the film made me yearn for the north; the Christmas visit to Northumberland will be insufficient, I think. I need a visit to northern Scotland, Iceland or parts Scandinavian.