Evil thoughts...

A friend of mine has just bought (and named) a Nabaztag, a wireless Internet monitor that comes in the shape of an undeniably cute rabbit. One of the key features of it is that it'll read out the subject line of any email you send to a designated email address.

Wouldn't it be a tad spooky if your cute Nabaztag rabbit suddenly started quoting lines from Donnie Darko? ;-)

(If I was going to get one, I'd call it Harvey...)

Beowulf - you'll wet your pants!

I've just come back from seeing a preview of Beowulf in the best possible scenario - at an IMAX screen in 3D. Let me tell you, it's a cinematic marvel.

I hadn't heard anything about it at all until the other day, when Angelina Jolie and Anthony Hopkins swooped in for the premiere. So I kinda knew it was computer-generated using virtual motion capture for the acting - which I had a bad feeling about because I really hated The Polar Express.

But I needn't have worried. The actors looked like the actors - hell, forget computer graphics. That *was* Angelina Jolie rising out of the water, as sexy as ever. Even if she did have a scaly tail and impossibly beautiful (if spherical) breasts covered in mud. The sooner cinema gets to the point when you can take home your own computer-genreated 3D model of your favourite character as you leave the auditorium, the better. Seriously, the friend I took with me had no idea the acting was computer-animated. She knew something was slightly off, but she assumed it was a side-effect from the blurriness of the 3D IMAX format.

Over here, it seems to have been given a 12A rating. Which is so wrong. The first minute lulls you into a false sense of comfortableness, before it's all blown apart in five harrowing minutes of gore, up close in CGI.

Once I got home, of course I had to look it up on Wikipedia. And while a lot of it did seem to have the Hollywood treatment, I was surprised at how much of it had been "changed" from the original story. Then again, the original tale has probably been augmented a lot (to say the least) over the years...