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Last Friday Simone and I went to see Beowolf in IMAX 3-D. We were joined by some of the women from her office and, in spite of a promise there would be at least one other guy in the group, there were none. That still didn’t stop me from frequently reciting a chorus of “Angelina Jolie’s 3-D boobies” before, during and after the movie.

The plot and scenery was relatively simple, there were the obvious monster battles, and revolutionary special effects… but it all seemed familiar.  I haven’t seen Polar Express, so the filming technique used once before in that movie wasn’t it. I didn’t recognize the story or any variation on it, so that couldn’t be it. 

A few days later, I finally realized the parallels between Beowolf and Clash of the Titans. Between the mythological story and revolutionary special effects (not to mention the very successful weekend box office), Beowolf has a chance to be this generation’s Clash of the Titans. It’s even quite likely the NEXT generation after this one will look back on the special effects with the same snicker kids today might when they look at Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion technique.

Fun movie, but very graphic and really, really bloody. It’s kind of like watching Pixar remake Braveheart.

There’s a scene near the beginning where Beowolf is completely in the buff (Norwegian ’shrinkage’ never mentioned), and the subsequent scenes take advantage of strategically placed swords, smoke, flames and shadows to keep the his appendage off-screen.  That’s fine once or twice, but when it happens throughout the scene it becomes satirical, and reminiscent of the strategically placed objects in the Austin Powers movies.

What Angelina Jolie’s nude self does to Beowolf’s sword while seducing him has to be the least subtle sexual innuendo in the history of film-making.  It actually made me laugh!

Watching the movie on a seven-story screen makes the ultra-closeups prevalent in 3-D movies even more enriching.  Filling your complete field-of-view, you really feel like you’re in the character’s personal space bubble. The placement of the camera is key to telling a good story, and camera movement that is only possible with CG is used effectively.

This could have been a movie that buried IMAX. With Digital 3-D projectors starting to fill in newer cineplexes instead of the more expensive, larger footprint IMAX systems, IMAX could have seen a lot of theatres moving away from their technology.  However, the most interesting number to come out from this weekend’s box office take was that 40% of the gross was from IMAX 3-D and Digital 3-D theatres. IMAX is getting all the praise, because it’s their processing technique that allows both kinds of theatres to show 3-D movies.

The two new James Cameron movies will be out in 2009, will both be shown in 3-D, and are supposed to show off some revolutionary new technology that made Spielberg and Peter Jackson giddy when they first got to play with it. 3-D may not become the mainstream, but it’s interesting that budgets (and technology) have finally gotten high enough for movies to exploit this technique.

When it comes out on video, I’m going to see if I can use this to convince Simone (and myself) that we should upgrade our entertainment system to HDTV. It’s probably my best chance to convince Simone - at least until a movie comes out featuring Matt Damon’s bum.

Curious what ever happened to the Smurfs Movie that came out shortly after the cartoon series took off, I checked it out on IMDB.

I knew that the Smurfs were a French creation before it was English, so I wasn’t surprised to see the film title was also originally in French (La Flûte à six schtroumpfs). However, I was surprised to see that the movie came out in 1976 - five full years before the cartoon series was produced, and seven years before being released in English.

Apparently more faithful to the source material, this kind of explains why there was no Gargamel, Azreal or Smurfette. It also explains why the smurfs are in the dark for the first half-hour of the movie.

I still remember seeing it at the Cineplex in Eaton centre, and again at a friend’s birthday party. I must have been about seven years old to see it in 1983, which would put it as one of the first movies I remember seeing (along with 1983’s “Never Say Never Again” and, of course, 1981’s “Empire Strikes Back”). In those days, blockbuster movies stayed in theatres longer than a weekend so it’s difficult to gauge exactly when I saw any of those films.

They might be sitting on the promotional value of the original, since there is a new Smurfs movie script in development, but they’ve been working on that for years. I don’t think we’ll see it in this decade. So where’s my DVD? Or high-definition transfer to HD-DVD?

With over 400 episodes, they are supposed to start releasing the seasons on DVD sometime this year.  However, we can probably skip the last one where they travel through time.