I Netflixed it last month. I thought it was pure turd. Although the locations were absolutely gorgeous.
Well, there’s the hatchet job he gave to the end of Contact, where he turned the entire theme of the novel inside out, making it something that it never was. Sagan is still probably spinning in his grave after that one.
I don’t know if I’d go as far as calling him a hack, but it’s blatantly obvious that he doesn’t give a rats ass for the source material in his movies.
That, and he’d rather spend all his time and money on flashy effects.
Yes, it is. The movie earns its PG-13 rating with both the bloody violence and the sexual humor and some nudity. For the Grendel fight, Beowulf is completely nude and the but butt area is shown completely. Unfortunately to keep the PG-13 they use Austin Power hijinxs to keep the groinal area off camera. That was a bit distracting.
There is also the shown in advertising full frontal nudity of Angelina Jolie, though it is Barbie nudity with the offending areas rendered impotent through smoothness.
But if I squint my eyes I could pretend it was really Angelina Jolie naked, right?
Thanks for the responses. That picture of naked-Barbie-doll- Jolie looks so so so stupid to me. Also, Jackdavinci summed up exactly what I’m confused about with this movie: “What’s the point of hiring actors to do all the motion capture, and making the figures look like the actors too? Might as well just have the actual actors.” Seems like the only point is the Director thinks it’s cool.
[total geek hijack mode]Ooooooooooh, if they ever do a Coheed and Cambria movie, they should do this sort of effect, it would work really well since the effect it supposed to be almost-real-but-still-doubting-it-all.[/hijack]
Well, generally, other than faces the characters don’t look like the actors. To make the same physical character with Anthony Hopkins would have him in a fat suit like Eddie Murphy. Ray Winstone has a body that he’d have only dreamed of even 20 years ago. The John Malkovich character evokes the person but I wouldn’t really say he looks just like him and same for Robin Wright Penn.
I can’t speak to the actual motivations but one advantage of it is that it allows stylization to match the animation style of backgrounds. Everything doesn’t have to be hyperreal. Rather than have to try and make fake look real you blur the line in the other way by taking the real and blending it to the fake.
Most of the time I thought it looked pretty good. Sometimes it was a bit too much like a really big computer game cut scene, but that may simply be because video games are where we’re most exposed to this style of animation.
Adapted? I think the story has been around for a while.
Gaimen is very over-rated, IMO.
Go rent the movie Gia. She’s totally naked and there’s a small lesbian sex scene with her.
That was my reaction, too. I got the whole “suppressed text” thing, á la Snow White, which I usually like, but I though this sucked.
Huh? I’m not sure what you mean by that. What has the story’s age got to do with adapting it for the screen?
In movie-ese, you write original scripts, but you adapt an already-existing story.
In other words, he&s saying that Gaiman adapted, rather than wrote, the script.
Crispin Glover is the coolest guy, ever.
I have seen the commercial for this at least a dozen times and thought it was a regular live action with cgi movie.
:smack: I totally missed the context of the post Waverly was responding to. Never mind.
I saw it on the shelf at Blockbuster and thought to myself "Somebody saw that Gerard Butler was in a blockbuster movie and decided to throw this previously-unreleased turd out there to see if they could reap any money off the success of 300 ". Queen Bruin seems to agree. But if you recommend it, I’ll check it out.
[/hijack]
I LIKE the Gerad Butler version. Sarah Polly not being able to do an accent but still delivering ridiculous lines that only work WITH an accent was the only negative.
I am going to go see the 3D version tomorrow. The reviewers seem to agree that this is something you should see in 3D in the movie theater and skip the DVD when it comes out. I’m easily persuaded (especially for 3D stuff).
My theory as to why Zemeckis used the motion capture and CGI was so that he could do it in 3D. Didn’t we have a discussion about his announcement of the new camera technology a while back? My search for the thread on SDMB isn’t coming up with anything, but I’m pretty sure I participated in a discussion on this earlier this year.
Here’s Ebert’s review. He seems to have liked it okay.
As for the question of nudity, first I see the film is rated PG-13, so that tells you something. Then there’s this from Ebert’s review: “When the king offers his comely queen Wealthow as a prize if Beowulf slays Grendel, the hero immediately strips naked, because if Grendel wears no clothes, then he won’t, either. This leads to a great deal of well-timed Austinpowerism, which translates as ‘putting things in the foreground to keep us from seeing the family jewels’.”
As for seeing it 3D in Imax, We have two Imax theaters in Bangkok, but we never go to them. Thais think nothing of having whole conversations with each other or using their cellphones during films, so we sit WAY down front to avoid that. Not possible to sit away from most other in the Imax theaters.
Beowulf is my first stop after work tomorrow. And I added B&G to my Netflix queue, as well. Thanks for that tip.