Too Much Geat For 2 Dimensions
I was having some trouble thinking of what to write this week, what with me putting off writing this blog entry until the very last minute and having very little to say. I spent most of the day in Salem visiting friends, and then I drove back on the highway through the midst of what I’m pretty sure was Hurricane Katrina’s reunion tour combined with a “Biggest, Meanest 18 Wheelers Ever” convention. A good and eventful day, to be sure, but not a good day for comedy. Mom suggested that I write about how Britney Spears’ 16-year-old sister is pregnant now, but I mean, really? I don’t make this out to be the classiest of blogs, but I’d like to think I could be a little more highbrow than that.
So anyway, today I saw Angelina Jolie Naked 3D, otherwise known as Beowulf 3D. Now I’m proud to say that I’ve read Beowulf (…mostly), and when I first heard that Angelina Jolie was going to be playing a sort of seaborne Hilary Clinton that gave birth to Grendel, which in case you don’t know is what Shrek would be like if he were combined with The Grinch and a double dose of Hannibal Lecter, I was a mite skeptical. I have to say, now that all is said and done, I’m pretty happy about the casting. I mean, seeing Angelina Jolie as a humanoid naked demon is great any day, but seeing her as a humanoid naked demon in 3D? That’s as close as I’m going to get.
Going into the Beowulf movie experience, I was expecting a generic sword and sorcery rendition of an epic poem about the Jack Bauer of the Dark Ages. Instead what I got was a 113 minute long tribute to nudity. The movie opens with a fat king parading around a mead hall with way too much of his body hanging out of the bedsheet he’s wearing, Angelina Jolie, as previously mentioned, avoids clothes in general, and Beowulf is completely stark naked for an entire 10 minute long battle scene. 10 minutes! An entire battle, too, with swordplay and flipping around really fast, and the entire time there’s always something carefully positioned to be in front of his wang. I think that the producers of Beowulf decided about halfway through that they couldn’t make a good enough profit on the strength of the movie alone, so instead they added the naked swordfight scene so that lonely housewives will have something to watch while they drink wine coolers.
This is the first time I can remember that I saw an honest to God 3D movie in theaters. Overall, I found it sort of uncomfortable. Beowulf is a movie with a lot of sharp things (swords, spears, arrows, teeth, claws, splinters) that get thrust or thrown toward the viewer a lot, more than I’d say is necessary. As a young boy, my grandmother instilled in me a deathly fear of poking out my eye on something sharp (which is to say nothing of a Red Ryder BB Gun), so for most of the movie I was instinctively thrashing around in my chair trying to get away from the giant bloody spear that Beowulf saw fit to shove in my general direction. When they weren’t doing that sort of thing, it seemed like the producers were very much in love with the notion of the fact that they were making a 3D movie, so they added lots of things that would seem out of place in a non-3D movie. Grendel screaming directly into the camera, slow motion tracking shots on thrown items, water/blood/pus/drool (3/4ths of these belong to Grendel) dripping onto the camera and, thus, the viewer. While I enjoy a bit of good visual trickery as much as the next guy, these are things I don’t want to directly participate in. I didn’t pay $9 to pretend I’m getting drooled on, because I can do that for free in the privacy of my own home. I really don’t want to feel like I’m back in the Dark Ages (pointy things, disease, and not enough hot evil naked Angelina Jolie to go around) – I’d much rather see Rushmore 3D, or The Big Lebowski 3D, or possibly Superbad 3D.
Oh, and did you hear about the videotapes of CIA interrogations that were mysteriously destroyed before Congress could see them? Yeah, maybe those were in 3D too.
Truman Capps is hoping that something really funny and poignant happens to him between now and next week.