written inaction

The plan to go hiking today was scrapped just as Tuppence sat down on my couch with his usual pre-hike coffee in hand.  “I think we should bag it,” he says reluctantly.  I’m thrilled.  After yesterday’s debacle, I’m fairly certain that I’d make it maybe a few miles before I collapsed and was forced to sustain myself by consuming my own limbs while Tuppence went for help.  That’s too bad, I tell him.

The reason for this is clear through my apartment window.  It’s pouring and it’s cold.  Whenever I complain about the rain, someone makes a really clever comment about how I decided to move to Seattle.  Seattle does not have an inordinate amount of rain, it has a lot of mist and cloud cover.  The drizzle is light, and rain is fairly infrequent.  But that’s not the case today.

Sean and I comfort ourselves by watching several episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” on www.hulu.com.  It doesn’t help the fact that we aren’t going to do anything productive today, but it certainly makes us feel better about it.  As we finish up a particularly amazing episode, Tuppence has a brainstorm.  “Dude, we should go see a movie today,” he says.  That’s a great idea, I agree.  The movie is chosen and Sape is called to plan logistics and find movie times.  The masterpiece we’ll be indulging in?  10,000 BC.

“It’s the number one movie in America,” Sape says over the phone to Tuppence, “It looks awful.  Let’s go see it.”  And with that, our afternoon is booked.  Tuppence leaves to change out of his hiking clothes, and I stay in and try to work, unsuccessfully.  I also attempt to not watch more episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which is also unsuccessful.  But it’s raining, and the only thing I really have left to do is go to the store, and I’m not going to walk a mile with groceries in this deluge. 

As though on cue, the rain slows up and I am forced to pause my episode and trek out into the wet streets, up to Safeway where I shop, realizing once I am there that I have forgotten my member card.  While I throw an internal tantrum, I pass all the items that I might have purchased had I had the card, which ends up being a good thing.  As I’m checking out, Tuppence calls me to say he’s out front.  “Hey, I’m out in front.  Where are you?”  Crap, I say, I’m up the road about 5 minutes.  I’ll be there soon. 

This is not true. It’s still a half-mile walk with an impressive amount of groceries.  Ignoring the unlikelihood of actually keeping with this timeframe, I break out into a little jog, and in no time, a little sweat.  When I reach the house about 10 minutes later I unnecessarily throw a shoulder into the door as I open it, despite the fact that it opens outward, run up the stairs, throw all the groceries, bags and all, into the refrigerator, and spring downstairs to see Tuppence ambling up to my steps.  “You ready?” he asks.  Been waiting, I say.

The movie is everything that I could have wanted and more, if my desires were to spend $10 to see a movie written by the mentally challenged, for the mentally challenged.  The storyline was so preposterous, so terrible, so riddled with absurdity and inapplicability, that there was little more to do than take it as fact and hold roundtable discussions about the poignant social commentary the director had created.  

“That was awful,” says Tuppence at Green Lake Bar and Grill “I didn’t know the Egyptians used wooly mammoths to help build the pyramids.”  He says, taking a sip of his drink.

“Well of course it’s bullshit,” says Sape “everyone knows the pyramids were build by the Predators in Alien vs. Predator.”

“Fair point.”

Well that’s part of the commentary, I say.  It’s a nod to the steady globalization overtaking the planet and speaking to how the same is happening galactically.  To stay competitive, the Predators had to outsource the work to the freaky Egyptian demi-gods in the movie.  If they’d paid regular predator wages for that pyramid construction, it would have gone way over budget.  But as we all know, Egyptian human rights violations are second only to Kathy Lee.

Before there is time for a rebuttal, the food arrives, and discussion is momentarily haulted.

“Jesus!” says Tuppence, coming back to the table for the third time, “what the fuck is that guy doing in there, shaving?”

“You still haven’t taken a piss, dude?” asks Nic through his black-seasoned burger.

“No, dammit.  This place needs more than one bathroom.”

“Yeah,” agrees Sape, adding “I threw up in it last week.  That was a rough night.”

After we finish at the bar with a heated debate over the merits of Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome, we vote that this night should end with the completion of Beowulf, which we had begun watching the last time we were at Sape’s.  Since he returned it, we are forced to go back to the rental machine at the convenience store to get another, and in doing so, invalidate all of our higher education.  Four post-grad men grin goofily as the machine retracts the movie with a mechanical arm, moves it along a little conveyor belt, and spits it out into Sape’s hand like a VCR.  “That’s my favorite part,” says Sape “man, that was worth the $2 right there.”

At Sape’s house I am lovingly greeted by his dog, Siri, who first sniffs my hand, then headbutts my junk.  “Anyone want another beer?”  Asks Sape from the kitchen.  All set, I call from the floor.

Beowulf is as much as festival of CGI as it is a festival of inaccuracy.  I was a good sport about 10,000BC because there was no way that that was going to be good.  I had expectations for Beowulf, and they were not met. 

Watching it was fine, and very interesting to see figures done in complete CGI that weren’t supposed to be a toys, but a real people.  This also raised some interesting questions about the programmers attention to detail.  Who was in charge of making the cleaning woman’s large breasts sway just so?  What about the woman having mead licked off her cleavage?  What about the guy in charge of always keeping a candlestick, sword, or something similarly phallic in front of Beowulf’s naked man bits?  I just wonder what it was like in the rendering studio, especially when coworkers dropped by.

“Hey Ned, whatcha up to?” Says Tom, leaning on the cubicle wall.

“Just working on the cleaning lady’s boobs again.  Rick says they don’t jiggle enough to look real, so I’m doing some research online.”

“Wow,” says Tom, looking at the screen “I don’t recall that being in the script.”

“Whoops.  Yeah, sorry.  I’m on break.  So what about you?  I hear you did a masterful job covering up Beowulf’s manmeat with a candlestick in the mead hall battle scene.  I wouldn’t have thought of that.” 

“Yeah, well, we tries a lot of things, cucumbers, carrots, sausages, but you know, it just seemed cheesy and didn’t really pay the appropriate homage to the story.  So we went to block the cock with some candlesticks.  I think it works pretty well.  Have you seen Bill?  Is he done rendering that sword-blowjob scene?”

I’ll bet it was a great place to work until the lawsuits started piling up.

The real beef I had was with the accuracy of the story.  It was a good story to begin with—a classic, by all definitions.  They took and epic and turned it into a shitty romance (in the classical term), and made a hero with flaws and temptations, which is what we like now.  But that doesn’t change the fact that Beowulf is the story of a great, unflawed hero—a legend.  He is supposed to be uncorruptable, infallible, and concerned only with glory.  This Beowulf came off looking like a fraud, and I didn’t like it.  Why mess with a good story?