Ever since I was a child in Catholic grade school, I've thought it unfair and arbitrary that women couldn't be priests. It flew in the face of everything I ever learned about the fundamental equality of men and women in the eyes of God. It seems even more illogical to me as an adult -- allowing women to be ordained would solve the priest shortage, for starters, and Protestants have had women clergy for decades and seem to be doing OK. It's also one of the reasons why I am deeply ambivalent about the Catholic Church; as a woman I feel that I am considered by definition to be a second-class citizen.

So I applaud the efforts of the women priests to challenge this particular point of doctrine. Sometimes you can change an organization from within. Other times you must vote with your feet and leave it. The women priests are hoping to change the Catholic Church from within. They may very well fail, but at least they will have tried. If they end up evolving into a splinter sect of the Catholic Church, so be it.

Nicole Kidman's beautiful but masklike face almost looks like a product of motion capture. Maybe she should have just played Grendel's mom and been done with it.

The usual tropes have emerged:

- Families with two working parents are neglectful materialists! No, wait, they work for reasons like financial survival, personal satisfaction, etc. that have nothing to do with buying Ashley a BMW for her sweet sixteen!

- Families without kids have nobly sacrificed their potential offspring for the good of the planet! No, wait, they're self-centered and immature!

- Families with kids are killing the planet with their selfish, spoiled, toy-hoarding, carbon-emitting spawn! No, wait, they're passing on their love and nobly providing the next generation of social security - paying workers!

- Corollary to the above: your kids may be cute and affectionate now, but prepare for deep dark depression and excessive misery when they become teens! No, wait, my teenaged kids are doing fine and we actually still communicate with each other!

Sheesh. It's enough to give a person whiplash.

Have kids or not. Have a bunch of kids or just one. It's your choice. But whichever one you do, quit acting like your decision is the only morally correct one and everyone else's decision is immoral and evil. I'm frankly tired of hearing people whine about it. How about we try to respect the decisions of others even when our opinions differ?

Naah, too hard. Let the mommy/daddy/kiddie wars begin!

Under this amendment, would women be tried for involuntary manslaughter if they miscarried? Would pregnant women be charged with child endangerment if they smoked or drank? What if they were taking prescription medication that might possibly harm the fetus?

Would women be charged with neglect if they didn't take their prenatal vitamins? What if they ate swordfish and other high-mercury fish? What if they refused to diet themselves down to a "healthy" pre-pregnancy weight? Would Colorado jail women who didn't follow their OB/GYN's orders, so that the fetus would be in protective custody?

Would women have to get their IUDs yanked at the Colorado border? Could they bring oral contraceptives in from out-of-state? What if they're on Depo-provera, which takes time to wear off? Would every woman taking hormonal contraception be pre-emptively charged with feticide?

Perhaps one reason why Robert Zemeckis took a radically different approach to "Beowulf" than Peter Jackson did to "Lord of the Rings" was to avoid this kind of comparison between the films! Jackson was wildly successful in bringing Middle-earth and its inhabitants to life because he paid close attention to its physical aspects, creating props and sets with an insane degree of detail. Middle-earth is a character in Jackson's films as much as Gandalf, Frodo and the rest of the gang are. While he did occasionally get carried away with technology, grounding his movie in the physical gave it badly-needed versimilitude and allowed it to overcome some of his poor decisions about how to adapt Tolkien's text.

If Zemeckis had gone this route, he'd have been viewed as a Jackson wannabe (and probably an unsuccessful one at that). Instead, he took the opposite approach, abandoning the physical and boldly using CGI not only for backgrounds, creatures and effects but for the actors themselves -- thus risking a plunge into the uncanny valley. He had the advantage of Jackson in that his audience brought fewer preconceptions to the film; Jackson in hiring two of the most popular Tolkien illustrators as concept artists for his film went out of his way to make his movie be consistent with fan expectations.

We can certainly argue whether Zemeckis' approach to "Beowulf" was successful or whether it's true to the spirit of the original poem. (I have read and listened to Seamus Heany's "Beowulf" translation but haven't seen the movie yet, so for the time being I withold my judgement.) But I think we need to recognize how different his thinking was from Jackson's. Perhaps a better movie to compare to "Beowulf" would be "300" -- both in its warrior ethos, its roots in the past, and its filmmaking approach.

And it's not as if Zemeckis went out and burned everyone's copy of "Beowulf" -- to carry on Tolkien's analogy, the stones of the original tower are still there, waiting for someone to reassemble them, climb to the top, and catch a new glimpse of the sea.