Driving along the A420

I've been driving into Oxford every day for the last week and a half to do some temping. It's a pretty slack job, I spend about 85% of my time on Facebook or surfing the net. I'm doing reception at the company that registers all .co.uk domain names for the UK.

Anyway, a couple of times last week, on the 50 minute drive to work the DJ played "I'll be home for Chrismtas", by Josh Groban. It made me cry both times. Needless to say that driving with tears in your eyes is not the safest thing to do. Not only is it a beautiful song, sung by a beautiful voice, but edited into the song are phone messages from various servicemen/women who will not be home with their families this Christmas. You should be able to have a bit of a listen by going here and scrolling down to the listen to samples section. I'm not usually one to buy Christmas Albums because they are a bit useless for the rest of the year, but I might just make an exception in this case.


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MOVIE REVIEW
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Beowulf: 2.5/5

Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Silence of the Lambs), John Malkovich (Dangerous Liaisons), Angelina Jolie (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider)

In a nutshell: Some pretty impressive animation, but would have preferred real actors.

Brief Synopsis: Based on an old Danish Poem, a warrior in 507 AD comes to a kingdom to rid them of the monster Grendel.

The first 20 minutes of this movie were strange for me. I did not know that this was a CGI movie, and so I spent the first 20 minutes waiting for the CGI to turn to real life people. When they didn't, I finally settled into the movie and did enjoy it. The story has been told many a time, and lends it self to an animated treatment. Sometimes a little too violent, the action is exciting. The characters are life like - the characters looks almost exactly like the actors who are lending their voices to them - and the scenery is quite rich. However, everything is so close to being real, but not quite, that it is somewhat distracting and I wondered through most of it, why didn't they just make a proper movie the way they used to.