Beowulf & Grendel got its big screen debut here in Boston this
weekend and here's the review from the Globe. I'm gonna check it out
tomorrow. BTW are we sure when Sarah Polley said, "The reason I did
this movie was I get to get f*cked by a troll." she was talking about
this movie and not 'Guinevere'? Cause Stephen Rea really looks like
he fell off the ugly truck face first and got dragged for a quarter-
mile. Am I right people?


Beowulf & Grendel Movie Review
Vistas aside,'Beowulf' isn't quite poetry in motion
By Ty Burr
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Boston Globe
Published: 08/11/2006


Because he lived somewhere around the end of the first millennium
A.D., the anonymous writer of the Danish heroic epic we know as
``Beowulf" probably wasn't concerned with movie rights.

Too bad; in retrospect he gave away the store. Following upon Seamus
Heaney's best-selling 1999 translation, director Robert Zemeckis is
preparing a digital motion-capture version for 2007 (think ``The
Polar Express" with trolls), and while we wait for that here's a
scruffy live-action ``Beowulf & Grendel" from the Iceland-born,
Vancouver-raised filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson.

The film is very near a comedy, and I'm not sure that's on purpose.
Starring Gerard Butler (the Phantom of 2004's ``The Phantom of the
Opera," of which we will say no more for fear of scaring the
livestock), ``Beowulf & Grendel" is a watchably ludicrous mishmash.
It features gorgeous Icelandic settings, portentous intertitles, and
dialogue by way of ``Monty Python and the Holy Grail." If you've had
a few grogs, it's actually kind of fun.

The story, in case you slept through third-period English, is this:
King Hrothgar of the Danes (Stellan Skarsgaard) has built a great
banquet hall called Herot that's plagued by bloody visitations from a
monster named Grendel (Ingvar Eggert Sigurosson). Enter Beowulf of
the Geats, handsome and possessed of a seriously vorpal sword. He
rips off Grendel's arm in battle and sends him off to die, which only
provokes the monster's mother (Elva Osk Olafsdottir) to rise from the
sea in wrath. More swordplay, more triumph; in the poem there's a
later bit with a dragon, but the movie doesn't go there.

Instead, ``Beowulf & Grendel" aims for something between realism and
B-movie mythmaking. The monster is referred to by the Danes as a
troll, and he's a big, hairy fella; there's a possibility he may even
be a Neanderthal remnant eking out survival during the rise of Homo
sapiens. In practice, he doesn't get to do much besides snarl and
play nine-pins with the heads of his victims.

Over in Herot, things are spiraling out of control. Skarsgaard, a
talented actor who realizes he's signed up for a losing game, gives
us a method Hrothgar, funny, odd, and occasionally moving. ``Think
you need a beer?" he asks the newly arrived hero; later, quizzed
about the monster's motivations, he snaps, ``Oh, Beowulf, it's a
[expletive] troll! Maybe someone looked at it wrong!" Truly, this is
a king with huge tracts of land.

At least Skarsgaard tries. As a bewitching seeress named Selma (her
sisters must be called Babs and Muffy), the usually excellent Sarah
Polley bellyflops badly, with flat line-readings that prompt only
snickers. Maybe no actress could do anything with dialogue like
``You're the much-told hero from Geatland ," but Polley should have
drawn the line at the inter-species sex.

Yet ``Beowulf & Grendel" is hard to look away from. Those immense
Icelandic beaches and waterfalls are sweet on the eyes, and Butler
buckles his swash well, even when Grendel is pelting him on the
helmet with little rocks. The battle scenes are interestingly squalid
and unheroic, and Gunnarsson even goes revisionist on us by having
Grendel cut off his own arm. Grendel's mom, by contrast, is pure
creature-feature silliness.

In the end, ``Beowulf & Grendel" is barking up the wrong medieval
tree. Trying to give us the true story behind the epic, the movie
only reminds us of why humans write epics in the first place.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@....

Beowulf & Grendel Showtimes
Movie Showtimes for Saturday, August 12

Purchase Tickets from MovieTickets.com by clicking on a linked
showtime.

Kendall Square Cinema
1 Kendall Square
Cambridge, MA

11:35 am, 2:00 pm, 4:20 pm, 7:00 pm, 9:45 pm