Great Movie

Saw Beowulf in 3-D yesterday and it was so damn good I'm going to see it again today. I saw that it's got mixed reviews from movie critics, so I guess there are a bunch of movie critics out there who don't like movies. Ken Turan and Roger Ebert are so fucking jaded that they can't see that they've just seen Citizen Kane. Beowulf is incomparable to nearly any other movie that came before it beside Citizen Kane. Director Robert Zemezkis has up and invented a new visual language for the film that rocks hard and takes every opportunity it has to make a transcendently kick-ass movie with the expanded limits of CGI motion capture and this new Imax 3-D process. Swords fly over you, blood runs over you, and Angelina Jolie's bare ass is right in your face. Amazing! The action and the horror scenes are more inventive and immediately visceral than any movie I've seen in years, and I watch a lot of movies. The monsters are all off the hook, with Crispin Glover as the pathetic and tortured Grendel taking the cake as the coolest design for a monster possible.

It was written by, I think, two of the coolest guys on the planet. Roger Avary wrote and directed The Rules of Attraction, which is a similar movie to Beowulf in it's narrative invention, and also one of the best movies of the last five years. Neil Gaiman wrote my favorite comic-book and piece of literature ever with his 76-part series of wonder and horror called The Sandman. These two lovely gents got together and cooked up one hell of a movie. Besides the amazing action, this movie has some of the best characters in movies this year. Even the monsters are amazingly well-written. Beowulf is an amazing hero both as the legendary square-jawed hero he is supposed to be and as the morally complex character he becomes later in the film. Anthony Hopkins gives one of his best performances in years as King Hrothgar, a central character to the morality tale that is being told and also just a vibrant, hilarious, and deep person that was interesting to get to know, as with the many other great characters in the film, with great performances by John Malkovich, Alison Lohman, Robin Writght Penn, and a bunch of others. Avary and Gaiman have also managed to pack as many great sexual jokes into a PG-13 movie as could be possible, and it's a damn funny movie. The best parts for me are with all these ancient badasses just hanging around the hall and alternately having an awesome party and telling good jokes and then fighting monsters.

Its an epic adventure movie that is more maturely written than 97% of movies coming out this year, including bullshit dramas that are trying to be smart like that movie with Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts that's coming out. I'll bet anyone $100 that I will hate that movie. Just go see Beorwulf and do it in 3-D. Will change your life.