Beowulf. In 3D!

I'm not going to warn you about spoilers because if you don't know the story of Beowulf then you must be an invader from Mars. Seriously now, it's one of the classics.

Beowulf, the mythical poster boy for the phrase "Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it."*

Basic info: It's the story of Beowulf, which as I already mentioned you should know and if you don't then I'm coming to kick your alien ass off my planet. Unless you're here with a large army and deathrays, in which case: we surrender. The film is a CGI animation which is based on motion capture from the cast. Consequently the characters looks like the voice stars. Cineworld are offering two versions of Beowulf: The normal and the 3D version. The 3D version is definitely worth seeing as it does add the illusion of depth to the scenes (and unlike Superman Returns, most of the film is in 3D), but the odd thing is that in some scenes, the characters look flat and two-dimensional. It's just that you can see the depth of the scene behind them.

The film is wonderfully shot. Even without the 3D effect I saw, it looks stunning. The attention to detail is amazing. The characters don't have quite the realism factor that Final Fantasy managed to achieve, but it's pretty close. Some of the 3D effect was a little fuzzy, I'll admit (like the tentacle thingy), but overall it was excellent. The beast, only in CGI could it's horror be imagined, so it fits well into the film.

Also, not since Austin Powers and The Simpsons Movie have I seen so many SPWOs in one scene. SPWO of course standing for Strategically Placed Willy Obscurer.

One can only hope the DVD release also has a 3D disc version bundled with it.

Also saw the first trailer for I Am Legend, which looks good.

Score: B

OQ: Do you want me to go in with you?

OOQ: According Ray Winstone, he and his fellow cast spent days filming in blue skintight suit, "showing up all your lumps and bumps in all the wrong places. Which can be hard when you're standing in front of Angelina, who looks stunning in hers."

*Yes yes, I know he's also the poster boy for another well know phrase (one which is mentioned in the film) but that really would be a major spoiler, now wouldn't it?

Timestalkers

An oldie, but a goodie.

........is a phrase I used to say when I played the wrong track on my radio show. OK, usually it was because I was too busy pretending to be Scotty standing in front of the transporter controls, but hey; these things happen.

However, this little gem was on last night. It's by no means perfect (a flawed gem, if you will), but it is my personal yardstick against which I measure films of this genre. That genre is the time-travel film.

I have a soft spot for time travel films in my heart, like Millennium (the one about abducting people who are going to die in plane crashes to re-populate the future), and I think there's a film out there to be made by crossing that idea with Titanic. Some films in this genre are of course rubbish. Timecop to name one. And some make no sense at all, like Donnie Darko*. Not forgetting the all time "How to make a time travel trilogy" box set: Back to the Future.
So much do I enjoy time travel, that I even wrote an article about its use in fiction for the BBC Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy micro site.

But Timestalkers is deceptively brilliant. Starring the criminally under-used William Devane as a man with a mystery to solve. You see he's got an authentic tin plated photo dated from 1886, and there's a mysterious man in the background. A man sporting three fifty-seven (.357) Magnum in his holster. A gun that won't be invented until 1980.

And that's how the film hooks you. Clearly either he's mistaken about the gun, or the photo is a fraud. But every test says it's genuine. And he's a gun expert specialising in the old west.

For a film with such a simple premise, the story uses time travel very cleverly. One person needs access to a top secret base, so he travels back to 1926, before the base was constructed. He steps across the boundary and returns to the present.

The special effects do look very dated today. The time-travel effect reproducible on any decent vision mixing board and the opening credits of the time vortex, which probably cost a fortune to make at the time, could be re-created today using the visualisation system in Winamp.

A hackneyed ending sign posted several miles off does drop the score slightly. However it's still a great time travel detective story.

Score: C- Dated badly, I'm afraid but the core story is still very enjoyable.

OB: People recorded history through song. Not many folks could write back then.
Nope...chances were if you could write your name, you'd make judge.

*Please don't write in to complain. I've had Donnie Darko explained to me by a few people and I always tell them the same thing: if someone has to explain a film to me, then I'm probably not its intended audience.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age

I was intending to see Lions for Lambs this weekend, however in a marked departure from form, I read a few reviews beforehand. It has been universally panned by critics and movie goers alike, which put me right off. Normally I judge a film on its own merits, neither reading reviews or letting friends dissuade me, but the sheer number of bad reviews put me right off.
I await with anticipation the first review of this in the teamroom.

A little historic fact, a little poetic licence, a shedload of bloody good costume drama and you've got yourself a damn good historical biopic.

How good is it? Well put it this way, I don't normally enjoy period drama or historical biopic films, yet this film captivated me in a way that quite a few recent "blockbusters" have failed to do.

The story you can get from the trailer: Philip of Spain, leader of a Catholic country hates the English for being a Protestant country. This fact is not helped by a pope calling for holy war and calling the Protestants devil worshippers. However, the film shows a lot of the political aspects and verges into thriller territory at times. Whether the inferences are true or not are debatable, but it makes for a good story none the less. Samantha Morton plays Mary, Queen of Scots rather well, although the accent does sound a little forced.

There are also parallels drawn between Elizabeth I and our current monarch, for example; you never see either of them wearing the same dress twice. However, joking aside, there is a subtext that a person should be judged on their actions, not their faith, which was done with such subtlety that I barely noticed it. A pleasant change from the usual Hollywood message that's rammed down your neck, packed with gun powder, fused and then lit.

However the film does not shy away from awkward historical fact. It would be nice to think that our naval genius outwitted the Spanish armada, however the evidence all points to their grandiosity and over-engineering being their undoing. The Spanish ships were just so large that when a storm hit them, they could not manoeuvre. The English fleet took advantage, sent in fire ships and decimated the armada.

Personally I don't know why they didn't call it Elizabeth 2, because until it was pointed out to me that this is a sequel, I honestly didn't know. The argument that this would have confused Americans is touted as a kind of a joke, but that doesn't really hold water as, in my experience, confusing the average American is about as difficult as crossing the street and can be accomplished with such questions as "What is the capital of England?"* or sometimes even "Who is the president of the United States?" However it's nice that there's a reference to Raleigh's wish to establish a colony in the newly discovered America as a kindly reminder to our American cousins of their own country's origins.

OQ: Elizabeth is darkness, and I am the light.

Score: B Damn good film, highly enjoyable. Yes, some historical bunkum, but overall this is forgivable. *The answer is of course "E".