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Beowulf and Grendel: heroic epic
WE ALL KNOW the story of Beowulf, the hero from Geatland who rescued Danish King Hrothgar by destroying the monster Grendel and his mother. We know how Grendel had savagely slaughtered Hrothgar’s thanes celebrating in the great Hall of Heorot, how Beowulf tackled him,...
Epic Tale is Poetry in Motion
Trolls are bothersome at the best of times. At the worst of times they can be downright deadly. That's what the sixth century Danish king Hrothgar (Stellan Skarsgard) learns in the epic revenge tale Beowulf & Grendel. Hrothgar kills a troll but spares its young...
Beowulf & Grendel – moview review
Coppola was the most famous, but I suspect every filmmaker gets to play Col. Kurtz eventually. Icelandic-Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson's mad folly is Beowulf & Grendel, a gamy retelling of the Anglo Saxon epic on what seems the least hospitable film location...
THE WIND, THE VOLCANOES AND BEOWULF
Making a film in Iceland in October was no picnic for Sturla Gunnarsson and his cast and crew, MICHAEL POSNER writes Director Sturla Gunnarsson has seen his share of tough feature-film shoots, from Diplomatic Immunity (1991), part of which was shot amid nightmarish...
A very troll sense of humour
BEOWULF & GRENDEL Troll-on-witch sex, it can be said with a heck of a lot of understatement, isn't a beautiful thing to behold. All the grunting and the body hair and surely the halitosis -- not to mention the dank and smelly caves -- hardly make for a romantic...
Beowulf rides again
With swords and monsters all the rage, an ancient literary hero is now a hot showbiz property It's revered as the first epic work of English literature, although it's written in what looks like a foreign language. And it has become the bane of English students...
Beowulf & Grendel an epic movie
Starring Gerard Butler, Stellan Skarsgård, Sarah Polley, Ingvar Sigurdsson. Written by Andrew Rai Berzins. Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson. 103 minutes. At major theatres. 14A By stripping the ninth-century epic poem Beowulf down to its narrative bones, and by shooting...
Real characters emerge from myth
Beowulf & Grendel's people have both hero and villain in them Warning: 14A: Gory violence, sexually suggestive scenes, coarse language.103 minutes Grade: B "You want a beer?" -- Hrothgar "Oo-o-hh, yeah." -- Beowulf Seems an entirely appropriate way to greet the...
Epic
Beowulf & Grendel was shot on location on the Icelandic coast.By stripping the ninth-century epic poem Beowulf down to its narrative bones, and by shooting it with an unembellished, steely realism, the Icelandic-born Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson has made...
Eaten alive
Icelandic saga Beowulf and Grendel pits good against evil You can't go too wrong with a movie in which a 10-foot human monster gets his arm ripped off and sees the bloody fleshy stump nailed to the wall. But then again, that same movie also features Sarah Polley with...
The ladies are hungry for Beowulf
The ladies are hungry for beowulf: Gerard Butler's insatiable fans are storming the border to catch their sixth-century stud Border alert! A certain Scottish studmuffin is responsible for a wave of hysteria set to soon wash over Toronto -- an ilk of enthusiasm usually...
The hulking warrior prince with a heart
[i]Alpha male actor who plays Beowulf relishes role of hero with chinks in armor [/i] Canadian director Sturla Gunnarsson calls Gerard Butler the "manliest man acting today." It's a tall claim in a business bursting at the seams with six-pack abs and dancing pecs of...
Grendel? Hah! Try battling the wind
Director Sturla Gunnarsson has travelled all over the world making movies since he grew up in Vancouver, but he'd never experienced anything like the conditions he faced while making the medieval epic Beowulf and Grendel on a primal stretch of Iceland's coastline. The...
Epic film based on epic poem makes a few, mostly good, changes
Review: Beowulf and Grendel Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson Starring Gerard Butler, Stellen Skarsgard, Sarah Polley and Igvar E Sigurdsson Opens Friday, 10 March All right, so you've heard about this famous Beowulf poem of bygone days, about the Danes and Geats and...
Troll Story
Starring Gerard Butler, Sarah Polley. Written by Andrew Rai Berzins. Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson. (14A) 103 min. Opens March 10. A lot can go wrong when you're making a movie. A whole lot more can go wrong when that movie is an adaptation of an Old English epic poem...
FROM ANCIENT EPIC POEM TO THE SILVER SCREEN
Beowulf & Grendel is lost in translation If anyone ever suggests that adapting a thousand-year-old 3182-line Old English epic poem into a movie is easy, laugh. Despite the inherent difficulties, however, Beowulf & Grendel director Sturla Gunnarsson delivers a...
‘Beowulf and Grendel’
Starring Gerard Butler, Sarah Polley, Stellan Skarsgård and Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson as Grendel Directed by Sturla Gunnarsson We are about to swamped with Beowulf films, in the same way we were inundated with Robin Hood outings a while back and other cluster films...
Beowulf & Grendel Go to Canada
We have recently been alerted that the upcoming film Beowulf & Grendel has finally secured a wide release in Canada on March 10th. Besides the release, the good people over at beowulf-grendel have alerted us to two new movie posters for the film as well. We have...
Keeping it real
Editor -- While animation ("Animation brightens our collective imagination," Feb. 8) has its place in society, the thought that it will come to replace other forms of filmmaking boggles the mind. Sorry, but I want to see live human emotions on the screen, not their...
EL rates the top 10 movies of 2005
ONE MOVIE FAN’S OPINION * Good Night and Good Luck - I was taken back 50 years to the Senator Joe McCarthy hearings and was thoroughly engrossed with this film, all done in black and white and combined with actual news coverage. It's an excellent portrayal by David...