You know a review’s going to be a doozy when it approvingly asserts in its second sentence that Slate‘s humorless killjoy of a film critic Dana Stevens “spoke for many” about, well, anything. Calling the review “Beowulf: War Porn Wrapped in a Chippendale Dancer’s Body” is probably a tip-off too. And the straight-faced inclusion of the sentence “The three beasts in the film in fact line up pretty well as stand-ins for Iraq, North Korea and Iran” would be exhibit C.

But what really perplexes me about Alexander Zaitchik’s Alternet piece on Beowulf is that it seems to argue that a movie whose main point is that warriors are about 60% bullshit and bluster, 30% greed, lust, and sloth, and MAYBE 10% bravery tops is some sort of paean to the glory of war, then goes on to support this argument, incomprehensibly enough, by calling attention to the film’s anti-Christian strain–only to completely reverse itself in the final paragraph and wonder if the point of the movie is in fact that war is not all it’s cracked up to be.

It’s a real head-scratcher.

(Via The House Next Door’s Links for the Day, which are all pretty great today.)

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