Literary adaptations.

Last night at the movies, I saw a big old stand-up display thingie for a new movie called Beowulf that will be out at Christmas. Beowulf? Can they mean the Old English heroic poem? Will it be in Anglo-Saxon and dubbed into modern English, or with modern English subtitles? Or in modern English, with Old English subtitles, a more scintillating choice? Who will play Grendel? And more importantly, who will play Grendel's mom? And will Beowulf use the f-word?

These are important questions to be sure, but they were distracting me from my daughter's and my out-the-theater-door rendition of "Spider-Pig," which we were singing as we left a 9:30 p.m. screening of The Simpson's Movie. Which was plenty of fun. Zippy and visual-joke-y and an equal opportunity offender, if you were inclined to be offended. Interesting to me how the two movies I've seen most recently with college daughter, TSM and The Bourne Supremacy (there cannot be another Bourne movie, can there? But if there were, what would be the new word: we went from Identity to Ultimatum to Supremacy, so what--Utter Annihilation? Hegemony?), both have as a subtext the "global war on terrorism" (and I quote). Not that I need to deconstruct that for you.