Movie: Beowulf

Rifftrax has one up for Beowulf, so we watched that movie this weekend.
Before starting, I remarked that the last thing I'd heard about this movie was "So, Beowulf's coming out this weekend," and then no one ever spoke of it again. I should have taken this as a warning. I have a new concept of hell thanks to this movie. When you go to hell, before they decide which level to send you to, they put you in holding in a Wal-Mart, and every television in that Wal-mart -- everything in electronics, all the advertising TVs, all of it -- is playing this movie. And none of them are synched to each other.

I was expecting 300 only with Danes. 300 was the funniest thing I've seen in years; I laughed my ass off. I mean, the rhino... and the spear... And the guy who just stands there as his head gets chopped off. Nooo! *snickers* And the ninja monkeys. It's just... hilarious. And there's an excellent Rifftrack on top of that. We're trying to figure out how to get a legit copy without actually giving any money to the original creators. Used or something.

Beowulf was... not funny. And not dramatic. And not very good at all. The Rifftrack couldn't even save this one.

So, Hollywood takes the oldest known writing in the English language, a great heroic epic, and shits on it. Beowulf isn't a hero; he's a lying, sex-crazed bastard who sold his soul for power. Which ended up killing a few hundred to a few thousand people. Because God knows that Hollywood hasn't put out enough anti-heroes over the years. *eye roll*

If they were going for a "winners write the history books" theme, they failed. Terribly. Honestly, if they wanted to do that, they needed a story that everyone in their audience would recognize. Robin Hood or King Arthur or something. It doesn't have to be something that everyone knows by heart (although that would be preferable), but the audience needs to be able to go "wait, you're doing it wrong."

I was also not expecting it to be all CGI. I knew it had been heavily CGI'd, which I dislike to begin with, but all... That reduced by half the amount of seriousness I could even give it. I felt like I was watching a drama acted out by Shrek extras. The animation was bad -- and when I say that, please understand that I don't mean the modeling or the texturing, I mean that actual movement. Characters don't even have skeletons, much less a full muscular-skeletal system. And Grendel's mother walks like Futura (the robot) from Metropolis -- I mean the 1926 movie Metropolis. And she kept doing that comic-book real-women-fall-over-when-they-try-to-stand-this way hip cocked farther to the side than is anatomically possible thing. Made me want to strangle someone.

Actually, the overall sexism in the movie made me want to strangle someone. I was expecting this one to fail Bechdel's law, because the source material only had two women -- and that's if you count Grendel's mother as a woman.
But no, the makers added women for the express purpose of denigrating them. Because sexual harassment is funny, you see.
On top of that, we stripped Grendel's mother of almost all of her power. In the source, she's the final boss of the game as far as Hrothgar's people are concerned. You thought Grendel was a problem; pff, try this. In this movie, she's been reduced to a baby making machine. She kills a few guys off camera, but mostly she sleeps with kings and then throws her kids at them later. Thank you so much, movie.

Oh, and thank you too for throwing the nudity double-standard right in my face. I really didn't want to see Angelina Jolie's digitally-created crouch right in the middle of my screen, but it's exceptionally insulting after all the forced efforts to hide Beowulf's batch in the battle with Grendel. Look, either give him 300-style shorts, or just show it. None of this kitchsy crap. The movie's already R-rated anyway...
*shoulder tap*

This movie is PG-13? THIS movie is PG-13?! WTF is wrong with our ratings board?!?! I found a forum discussion afterwards talking about this movie, and there were adults who had to walk out/turn it off 10 minutes in because they couldn't take all the gore. Add on the denigration of women and full nudity, and this should've been a no-brainer R. But what's even more infuriating is that you know -- you know -- that if they'd shown Beowulf's schlong, it would have booted them right into an R, maybe an NC-17.
So, let's check this. Hyper violence bloodbaths, OK. Full female nudity, OK. Full male nudity, absolutely no way!

Because a penis is far more damaging to a kid than any amount of violence, but it doesn't cause any harm or long-term effect to reduce women to collections of body parts that exist solely for the purpose of sex.

If you haven't seen the documentary This Movie Has Not Been Rated, you should go do that. It nicely talks about the absurdity of the American movie ratings board. Although do be forewarned that it contains the sex scenes that were cut out of other movies to avoid an NC-17.

And Beowulf? Sucks. Not even the Rifftrax helps.

Draco In Leather Pants

It's not what you think. ^_~

TV Tropes has an entry called "Draco in Leather Pants", which describes the phenomenon in which fans embrace a character that's supposed to be unlovable, perhaps downplaying their (often glaringly obvious by design) faults to do so. TV Tropes has various theories on this (which leads me to remark that the site has an overall attitude I don't care for, BTW), but they don't include one that I think contributes to at least some cases:

Poor original writing.

Draco's a good example of this, especially when Rowling complains about his following because "he's not a nice man."
I'd say most of the Draco fandom was established sometime during books 1 thru 5. Looking at those alone, what do we see of Draco? Yes, he's a mean kid. He's a thorn in our heroes' side, but not a real villain.
We've seen him with his father twice. The first time Lucius was nitpicking just about everything he did (Book 2); the second Lucius was basically ignoring him so that he could heckle Arthur Weasley, but had bought him the best tickets to the sporting event of the year (book 4).
We've seen him with his mother once (book 4), and she was basically looking down at everything and annoyed to be there.

A passive reader will just take Rowling's "he's mean" and leave it. But fandoms aren't made of passive readers. So instead, let's get into this kid's head for a minute and run around. What do we find in here?
Well, we find a kid from a cold, critical, and terribly racist family. He's spoiled materially, but he doesn't get a lot of affection. Like all kids, he wants his family's approval on at least some level. He's been completely sheltered from the race his father despises, and so has no basis for comparison other than what he's been taught. He doesn't have any real friends. Oh, he has plenty of hangers-on, but on some level you gotta figure even he knows it's because of his family's money and power.
What you've got here is a sad, pathetic, insecure, lonely little boy lashing out in a desperate attempt to get someone to actually give a damn about him. Gosh, I wanna go huggle him now. I'm not going to hate a kid like that. I'm going to hate his actions, and I'm going to think he's an annoying little prick, but as a human being he is a sympathetic character if you bother to look.

If Rowling didn't want that, she did a poor job of thinking out the character.