Link to the show: Young Adult Movie Ministry Episode 32 on Substack
Release date: February 25, 2021
Movie of the Week
Beowulf (2007), directed by Robert Zemeckis
[Free on Crackle; On Amazon Prime Video; Digital rental on YouTube]
Who the Hosts Are This Week
Sam is a head with one very large distended eardrum. Alissa is a dragon-eyed dragon.
Special Guest
Dr. Ethan Campbell, Associate Professor of English at The King’s College (where Alissa also teaches), author of The Gawain-Poet and 14th-Century English Anticlerical Tradition.
Other Mentions
- The Polar Express (used as a verb in this episode, i.e. “they ‘Polar Expressed’ it”)
- Neil Gaiman (fantasy writer who was the screenwriter for Beowulf)
- International Congress on Medieval Studies (yearly conference at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo)
- Roger Avary (“the bad boy of screenwriting” per Sam)
- Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book series, specifically #19, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
- The incredibly appropriately named Ashburnham House
- Police Academy 6 (the God’s Not Dead of its era, per Ethan)
- “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936 lecture and paper by J.R.R. Tolkien)
- Maria Dahvana Headley and her book The Mere Wife
- Neil Gaiman’s poem Bay Wolf
- The Nowell Codex (which includes Beowulf and the Old English poem retelling Judith
- The Dream of the Rood
- The Venerable Bede
- Gemini Man (Will Smith movie that leans hard on deepfake technology)
- The Creature From the Black Lagoon
- Dial M for Murder
- Seamus Haney’s translation of Beowulf
- Also, Haney’s translation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes
- Norse myth about Sigurd
- Discussion about Sigurd in the movie Django Unchained
