Last night, I went to see Beowulf with a bunch of my unsavory pals. This was our third attempt to put together a group of people to see it, but third time is a charm and there ended up being around a dozen of us including Blue Blood hotties Scar 13, Tassy Pink, Joel Awesome, and Kitty Von Klau, Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Allan Amato who shoots for Scar13.com and more. It was kind of cool because it seems like it is becoming less common to have a bunch of people get together for something simple like seeing a movie. Yes, I’m thinking of going to see a movie with naked vikings fucking water sprites as a wholesome activity. You have to consider what the rest of my existence is like to put it in context.

We saw Beowulf at the Arclight so we could view the 3D version. The Arclight has extra-comfy chairs and prides itself on its high tech theater equipment. This is Los Angeles, so the front hall featured a display with actual costumes worn by actors in the movie. I sort of thought they were all in motion suits and they made the flick video game style, but I guess physical outfits were involved at some point. I liked the clothing anyway. I think I need to start wearing a royal cape around. The Arclight personnel handed us 3D glasses on the way into the theater.

Spoiler alert: If you didn’t read Beowulf in school (or at any other point), then the rest of this might include spoilers. I studied all the Icelandic sagas in school. When I was in college, I actually took a class called “Kinship and Law in Medieval Iceland.” And now it is my job to do things like write up the Beowulf movie. I guess I wasn’t wasting time and money at university after all. Phew.

Most of the Scandanavian sagas came from many troubadours through oral tradition and they were about heroism and adventure. And possibly about the fact that vikings tended to drink mead stored in flasks which were fabulous breeding grounds for hallucinogenic fungus. Beowulf, by contrast, believed to be by one author of English or German origin, is almost a satire of the saga genre. In the book, it is unclear whether the hero Beowulf or the monster Grendel is really the protagonist. Grendel is a sympathetic monster and some scholars feel that he represents nature in the epic battle between man and nature. It seems like, in these environmentally conscious times, the movie makers would have hit the green message a bit harder. Personally, I buy recycled where I can, even if it costs a bit more. But I roll in a big American car and I leave my air conditioning on when it is hot, whether or not I’m home. So this didn’t exactly damage my enjoyment of the movie.

The main deviation from the original poem is in the nature of Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother. Scholars disagree vehemently with one another on whether Grendel’s mother was a heroic female warrior who, in response to the killing of her son, simply carried out the requirements of blood feud and debt. Or whether this descendant of Cain was monstrous in appearance. In the poem, Beowulf is described as killing her with a magical sword and then using that same sword to decapitate Grendel’s corpse and bring his head back to the mead hall. It is entertaining to think that the screenwriters looked at this and wondered why the warrior would have only brought back one head if he had slain two monsters. Their explanation might not be so true to the original, but many things can be explained by Angelina Jolie’s wet, buoyant, gold-slicked, CGI boobies. Many scholars believe that the original Beowulf poem was a Christian propagandist restructuring of familiar tales to impose Christian values on them. So one can hardly blame a modern retelling for imposing current rules of cinematic story structure on the film. Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother not only allowed Robert Zemeckis to bring us hot naked viking/water sprite sex, but it also honestly ties the Grendel portion of the Beowulf saga and the dragon portion together much more neatly, for modern sensibilities, than the original does. Some feminist scholars argue that Beowulf has a three part story structure where the battle with Grendel’s mother is as important as the one with Grendel and the one with the dragon, although the story is generally viewed as having a two part structure. It would probably be reaching to call the Zemeckis adaptation a feminist retelling, but it is tidy modern story structure for a modern audience.

Much as the original saga was almost making fun of the braggadocio of its predecessors, the Beowulf movie is sold as a costume adventure blockbuster, but it points out that maybe the adventures just are not really that great. When Beowulf kills Grendel, the monster is tragic and, despite Beowulf’s humorous and aesthetically pleasing nudity, the warrior comes off as a bully, brutalizing a monster who is no match for him. It is uncomfortable to watch and the monster takes an agonizingly long time to die in his mother’s arms.

The movie pretty immediately switches tone from a certain almost cheesy brashness to a dismal and depressing ever after. The plot goes briskly from the warrior king yelling “I am Beowulf!” Flava Flav style to telling his young slave girl that none of it was as great as it should have been, not the battles, not the treasures, not the kingdom, not the women. She seems distressed that not even the women excited him in a particularly pleasant way, but he pretty much confirms that he can’t even summon interest in sex.

Beowulf set out to do battle for glory rather than gold, but he has acquired both through his exploits. Beowulf’s closest companions revere him. He is a king. He has wealth and many followers. People keep telling him that his praises will be sung after everything then alive has turned to dust. But, basically, nothing feels good.

Unusually, for a Hollywood blockbuster, the writers of the movie get top billing in the closing credits. The screenplay was written by the very impressive duo of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Neil Gaiman is very well known in comic book and science fiction and fantasy circles. If you are gothic, you are probably familiar with his Sandman comic (or should probably at least fake like you are.) If you are more fandom-identified, then his somewhat tongue-in-cheek novels may be more your thing. Although Quentin Tarantino is the name everyone knows from Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary also has a screenwriting credit on it and has said in interviews since that he can’t hang out with Quentin Tarantino because the man just sucks the ideas right out of him. Roger Avary is probably best known for having written and directed the solid film adaptation of one of my favorite books, Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, (which Forrest Black and I shot some promo for with Scar 13 years ago.) There is some buzz about whether the technology involved in making Beowulf will ultimately somewhat replace actors, or at least turn them into licensable clip art. I will be interested to see if this sort of technology will ultimately mean that writers and scenic designers and people like that will receive more credit for how a movie turns out. Before I knew anything about how Hollywood works, it used to trouble me, as a consumer, that whether or not I enjoyed a movie depended very much on plot and story structure, only movies were never advertised as “written by the guy who wrote that other thing you liked.” A great actor with a horrid plot is generally Michael Madsen in that awful poker movie which comes on late night cable only. No Oscars there.

Perhaps because the original Beowulf saga mocked the more traditional sagas, although the movie is marketed as an epic adventure for fantasy fans, it feels almost like the viewer is being told that what they were coming to see is not as terrific as they might think. After the credits ran, most of my group of mighty thanes went to get shabu shabu. Everyone kept asking each other if they liked the movie. Except for Scar, who had promised to dislike the movie beforehand, no one seemed to know if they felt like it was a good movie or a bad one or somewhere in between. I know the film left me feeling a little extra aggro such that I wanted to attack the waitress when I asked her for a sparkling Voss water the seventh time. Not that people doing their job badly doesn’t annoy me normally, but not in such a visceral way. I think Joel Awesome and I might have been the only ones who were somewhat familiar with the saga genre. (Wait until you all see the super hot signature couples set of Joel and Kittie which Forrest and I shot for BlueBlood.com. All that hotness and smart and well-read too!) I think the movie was well-done and technologically interesting, but, being familiar with the original, I was mostly sort of kicking myself for being surprised that it was not a feel-good movie.

The message of the Beowulf movie seemed very much: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, with 3D glasses, and despair.” (Joel says that, when he was little, he used to confuse Gilgamesh and Grendel, so I can stick Ozymandius in my Beowulf if I want.) Fortunately, we had to give the 3D glasses back to the Arclight after the movie. It was disorienting, at first, to look at the world without them.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.