Runner's Heights: The Wrath of Grendel

Cumulative mileage: 95 miles...5 miles from a century!

The cumulative mileage makes me look heroic but there is more than meets the eye. While my running world continues to exist, my blogging universe shrank in frequency. Therefore, the cumulative mileage registers that huge surge, although that surge of jubilance actually belongs to Kevin Rudd, the newly-elected prime minister of Australia. I have got to take a moment to relish the victory of the Labor Party and the possible end of years of bigoted and ill-conceived politics of John Howard and in particular, his obsequious support of George Bush's quixotic ideas. Regret that non-sequitur, but back to the art and science of running. I can genuinely say, after almost five weeks of having quit coffee, that my muscles cramp less and I have been able to run, sprain-free, and increase my distance per week. I have to go back and look at the relation between high caffeine intake and adrenaline, etc. but in my case, it might be purely academic, because I don't believe that I am going back to the espresso machine for the mocha -- the visits are strictly to make a cup of chai with steamed milk.

We saw Beowulf in 3D at the AMC theater in Santa Monica. It was a wild ride, full of hijinks, cliches and poor performances. Zemeckis's high-budget animation is able to transport you to a Denmark far away in time and place thanks to cinematography, sets, and effects, but the experience once you reach there is stifling and full of stilted performances, notwithstanding the star-studded cast of Anthony Hopkins, Anjelina Jolie, and John Malkovich. The 3-D version is filled with the actual white knuckle teasers, such as the occasional arrow heading towards the observer and objects that appear out of nowhere, but these frills do nothing to save the hackneyed dialogue that the performers spit out with morbid disaffection. Due to his innovative performance-capture technology, Zemeckis apparently had the freedom to move the camera wherever he deemed fit and this single trait is also the weakness of the tech. During key moments of some scene, the lead performers often have difficulty making eye contact, making the scenes highly impersonal and distant. The extras in crowd scenes, on occasion, stare in random directions, giving the scene a disjointed quality that even the strength of the unfolding drama cannot redeem. Even some of the effects are shoddily integrated into the movie -- there is snow falling in many of the scenes but it lands neither on the performers nor on their flowing robes.

Anjelina Jolie in a state of undress will still continue to draw viewers to Beowulf, thus assuring its place in the top quadrant of the box office returns, but the movie is a piffle that should have spent more time developing the script derived out of the oldest novel in the English. Instead, this Beowulf is a campy movie experience rife with characters who appear stoned out of their minds. The filmmakers injected some grim moments into the movie that appeared hilariously funny because it was hard to take any of the performance seriously.