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Hey, I’m a Lion Here: The week I watched that Idris Elba movie ‘Beast’
I should have known something was up. At the start of the week, I heard an ad on NPR for The Lion King being performed at the Kennedy Center this summer. Then again, maybe that’s not where it all started — the weekend before we were at the library and one of the twenty or so books we checked out for the girls at the local library was Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail by Lesléa Newman. Some years earlier we had read them The Cat in the Hat and its sequel. There was also Jon Agee’s Lion Lessons. And sometimes, I must admit, I have worn hats or needed to shave.
On Tuesday night of the week this all happened, I sat at home watching that Idris Elba movie Beast (2022). The movie sprouts from a family tree that includes The Birds and Jaws. Deep Blue Sea swims into view. And one of the characters wears a Jurassic Park shirt. The animals are all out of sorts is what I’m saying, and when animals in movies are all out of sorts, the people are in danger. But the film’s opening sequence gives the attack lion a motive and that’s somewhat out of sorts with many of the film’s antecedents. There’s not a lot of mystery to Beast — just an angry lion.
Still, Idris Elba’s character is along for the safari in the same way all those other films tend to have a dad figure who underneath the genre of it all is a…
