Wulfbane, In Listy Form

See if this sounds right...

THE CAST OF BEOWULF/CHARACTER LOOKS LIKE...

Robin Wright Penn/Robin Wright Penn
Angelina Jolie/Angelina Jolie, with a tentacle
Anthony Hopkins/Anthony Hopkins, chubbier
John Malkovich/John Malkovich, brunette
Ray Winstone (Beowulf)/Sean Bean with exciting scars and stubble

Think there's a problem here.

It's one of a few for Beowulf, but since my expectations were low, I went in looking for a movie in which:

• People talked some Anglo-Saxon. (Check. I actually do find that exciting. I am such a nerd.)

• Ray Winstone got angry enough to sound like Will Scarlet in Robin of Sherwood again. (Check.)

•There would be a kick-ass dragon. (Check.)

• And, perhaps most importantly, all eyeball violence would be sufficiently telegraphed for my viewing avoidance. (Nearly check--there's a sea-monster sequence that would do a Bugs Bunny cartoon proud, since that's the only other time I've seen people get eaten and then turn up behind a monster's eyeball.)

The movie was a lot of fun, without sacrificing the things I personally like best about Anglo-Saxon poetry, namely the pervading sense of cold and doom and the desperate grasp for immortality through fame. The thought that such people, scrounging for their very survival in the grip of a landscape they didn't fully understand and the compounding factor of a miniature ice age, set such great value on story that we now have Beowulf to screw around with in the first place fills me with admiration. That this is somehow turned into a story about karma whose moral is, basically, "everyone wants to sleep with Angelina Jolie whether or not they know she is a demon" does shallow it up a bit, but I left the theater a lot less indignant than I thought I'd be.