Beowulf and se laolic podcast

Hwaet!!! I have read all the posts about the upcoming Beowulf movie and even downloaded the HD version of the trailer to watch. When I saw Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mommy I thought - ok, have an open mind it could be interesting. Then this morning on the way to work I listened to the first chapter of the Beowulf podcast with these two guys from some other movie review podcast (with an intonation and vocab that sounds like they are from "Dude Wheres My Car"). My resolve started to break even more as I listened to them. I don't think we should position Beowulf as "that really weird poem that most of you probably read through Cliff Notes in school" and then play a clip from Annie Hall where Woody Allen says to Diane Keaton - "don't take any class where you have to read Beowulf."

There is already a sense of having to dumb down what is probably one of the most noble epics we have in Western literature. I know the 3D and motion capture elements are all designed to get people off their couches and back into the theatres (and yours truly will be seeing in in the 3D Imax version I'm sure) but wouldn't a podcast be better served with exploration into the poem to give people a background perhaps interspersed with interviews with the actors (would love to hear Anthony Hopkins - Hrothgar in the film - actually read some Beowulf.Here is a wonderful opportunity to revive interest in Beowulf for a new generation (as the LOTR films did).

There can be so many interesting ways of doing this (hopefully some new books, perhaps finally Tolkien's translation of Beowulf will be published), etc. I don't think we are inspiring this be immediately dumbing this work down to that really hard poem you had to read in the high-school! Thoughts???