Virtually nude Jolie may stimulate medieval lit study

• "Just don't take any course where you have to read 'Beowulf.' " -- Woody Allen's advice to college-minded Diane Keaton in "Annie Hall."

• "I felt exposed." -- Actress Angelina Jolie talking about seeing her computer-generated likeness virtually naked in the movie version of "Beowulf" that opens Friday.

• "I'll take any excuse -- Angelina Jolie included -- to talk about Beowulf." -- Associate Professor Rich Johnson, teacher of "Beowulf" and co-chair of the English department at Harper Community College in Palatine.

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Sometimes bewailed as the bane of high school English literature classes, the ancient poem "Beowulf" is about to get a new twist. Director Robert Zemeckis' movie "Beowulf" opens Friday in spectacular, 3-D, computer-generated, "motion-capture" action with stars Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins, John Malkovich, Crispin Glover, Robin Wright-Penn and a "virtually" naked Angelina Jolie.

"I'm going to take a group (of students) to see it. We have a field trip planned," says an enthusiastic Johnson, 46, who cut his teeth on "Beowulf" the old-fashioned way -- translating the first-millennium poem from the Old English manuscript.

Reading the poem in Mr. Epes' 10th-grade literature class that spanned the genre from "Beowulf" to Virginia Woolf, the 15-year-old Johnson appreciated the ancient "monster story" about Beowulf the hero taking on Grendel, Grendel's mother and a dragon.

It wasn't until graduate school (a Georgetown grad with a master's degree from New York University and a doctorate from Northwestern University, where he specialized in Anglo-Saxon English) that Johnson saw "Beowulf" as so much more.

"That's when I realized what a treasure trove of history, language, fantasy and epic battles it was," says Johnson, who rattles off a few of the 3,182 lines in the incomprehensible (to us non-lit majors), guttural babble of Old English verse. "It's about proper behavior -- by that I mean the heroic ethos -- courage and honor. The monster fights are almost incidental."

Well, if you are playing "Beowulf," the video game that came out this week, the fights are a big deal. The game is rated Mature 17+ for "blood, intense violence, partial nudity and sexual themes." Players can unleash special attacks by using their "Carnal Power."

That "carnal power" doesn't come into play in the original poem, which is violent but not at all as sexy as the movie. Even appearing a tad reptilian, Jolie speaks for many when she tells the movie press, "I love my tail."

When Johnson pictured the dam of Grendel battling Beowulf, "it wasn't Angelina Jolie, I can tell you that," the professor says. "More along the lines of an ogre or a troll."

(Perhaps a computer-generated hybrid of Rosie O'Donnell and Ann Coulter, or John Travolta in drag.)

"I want to know what I'm getting into," says Mundelein's Carmel Catholic High School teacher Judy Colman, explaining why she and her husband, Peter, (both British literature and English teachers) will see the PG-13 film before taking senior students on a field trip to the movie Wednesday.

"I think 'Beowulf' is one of the works we do that help the students get into British literature," Judy Colman says, adding that her students seem to "have fun with it."

Just as the Disney movies "Pocahontas" and "Hercules" "turned kids on to American history and Greek mythology," watching Jolie in "Beowulf" or chopping off heads in the video game might spark an interest in the original story, Johnson says.

"They may not draw their roots from the poem, but they draw their inspiration from the poem" Johnson says of the moviemakers. "I'm excited about it. The more exposure this poem has the better off instructors are."

And who better to bring more exposure to poetry than a virtually naked Jolie?