{"id":28063,"date":"2007-11-20T14:37:17","date_gmt":"2007-11-20T19:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2007\/11\/20\/28063-beowulf-vs-the-lord-of-the-rings\/"},"modified":"2008-04-25T21:25:46","modified_gmt":"2008-04-26T02:25:46","slug":"beowulf-vs-the-lord-of-the-rings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/2007\/11\/20\/28063-beowulf-vs-the-lord-of-the-rings\/","title":{"rendered":"Beowulf vs. The Lord of the Rings"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"intro\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/opinion\/kamiya\/2007\/11\/20\/beowulf\/\"><img src='http:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/11\/story.thumbnail.jpg' alt='LOTR vs Beowulf' class=\"feature_image no-lazyload\" \/><\/a><strong>Gary Kamiya<\/strong>writes: Robert Zemeckis&#8217; new film &#8220;Beowulf&#8221; gives a whole new meaning to the phrase &#8220;the sublime and the ridiculous.&#8221; Zemeckis took the oldest and most important text of our ur-language, and turned it into a 3-D Disneyland ride so cheesy he should have called it &#8220;Anglo-Saxons of the Caribbean.&#8221; Of course, there&#8217;s nothing new or surprising about this. Hollywood has been profaning history and literature since long before Cecil B. DeMille cast Charlton Heston as Moses. If the Bible isn&#8217;t sacred, why should the oldest poem in our ancestral language be?But the &#8220;Beowulf&#8221; travesty is especially glaring, because of the obvious contrast with another work that mined the same ancient field: J.R.R. Tolkien&#8217;s &#8220;The Lord of the Rings.&#8221; &#8220;Beowulf&#8221; isn&#8217;t just a bad, although visually spectacular, movie, it&#8217;s a huge missed opportunity. With enough imaginative audacity, Zemeckis could have created a mythical universe, one that finds the mysterious threads that connect the distant past to our time. Instead, he turned our shared cultural heritage into a cartoon. (This hasn&#8217;t hurt &#8220;Beowulf&#8221; at the box office: It was the highest-grossing movie in the country after its first weekend.) <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/opinion\/kamiya\/2007\/11\/20\/beowulf\/\">Beowulf vs. The Lord of the Rings<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Gary Kamiyawrites: Robert Zemeckis&#8217; new film &#8220;Beowulf&#8221; gives a whole new meaning to the phrase &#8220;the sublime and&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[495],"tags":[279,266],"class_list":["post-28063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","tag-gary-kamiya","tag-saloncom"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1tLoH-7iD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28063","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28063"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28063\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28063"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28063"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.theonering.net\/torwp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28063"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}