A Final Problem

I'm reading Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warnings, right now. One of the stories in that book is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche, in which the retired Holmes keeps bees, travels to Asia in pursuit of a particular bee, obsesses over his last case, and deals with his impending mortality. There's a cottage industry in Holmes stories set during his retirement. It's a vast area of terra incognita in the Holmes canon, and writers have been rushing to map it out ever since the detective bowed out in "His Last Bow." Elements of such stories are often very similar. This can create a sense of deja vu if you read enough of them. I had a little bit of that while I was watching Mr. Holmes (2015, directed by Bill Condon), in which Holmes retires to keep bees, travels to Asia, obsesses over his last case, and ruminates over his impending mortality. It is otherwise very different from the Gaiman story I read this week. Based on the novel, A Small Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin, Mr. Holmes presents a more vulnerable Holmes, one whose mental faculties are failing as he nears the end of his life and one who lives with regrets over events he can no longer remember. Holmes can sometimes come across as inhuman--Sherlock's portrayal of the detective as a "high functioning sociopath," for one example--something that this film sets out to deconstruct. The Holmes one finds here is very human indeed.

Read more below the fold >>

A Final Problem

I had a discussion on the social networks last week that went something like this:

Me: There's a movie coming out that has both Stephen Fry AND Noomi Rapace in it, and I don't particularly want to pay money to see it. What is WRONG with me?

Friend: Hey, it's got Jude Law in it, too--and you know that alone is enough for me!--and I don't want to see it, either. Looks like shit.

Me: This is like that time that Chow Yun-Fat and Keith Richards were in a movie together playing pirates and I thought: "How can this be bad?" Hollywood turns everything it touches to shit...

Friend: Well, now, not EVERYTHING. But point taken.

Basically, I was not looking forward to Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011, directed by Guy Ritchie). I didn't like the first film at all. I thought it looked like mud and I thought it was a bit too arch, playing to Robert Downey, Jr.'s screen persona rather than to the character. Add to that my absolute delight with the BBC series, Sherlock, and you have a film that is completely superfluous to my interests. But then, as I note, they went and cast Stephen Fry as Mycroft Holmes and Noomi Rapace as a gypsy fortune teller and my resistance to seeing the movie with my partner (who has no such qualms--she's a much less demanding viewer than I am) evaporated. To my surprise, it wasn't awful, though there are elements that make me cringe.

Read more below the fold >>

A Baker Street Irregular

I have to admit that when I heard about the new BBC version of Sherlock Holmes--helpfully titled Sherlock--I was dubious. I mean, at this point, we have a century of re-interpretations and inheritors and after Guy Ritchie's "reboot" in theaters last year, I wasn't keen to see another one. Can anything new be brought to the party? It turns out that there can. The new series--the first season is a trio of hour and a half movies, really--brings us a thoroughly modern Holmes set in contemporary London, but changes almost nothing else about the character. Holmesians, who are notoriously picky about the character, honestly shouldn't have much to complain about. It's not particularly reverential, and it refuses to embalm Holmes and Watson, but it is certainly faithful to the spirit. It's a measure of the strength of Doyle's original that it has proven so easy to update. All of the pieces are in place: Holmes is still preternaturally gifted, but also kind of a prick about it; Watson is a returning vet from Afghanistan who blogs about their adventures rather than publishing them in the penny dreadfuls; Lestrade is still their contact at Scotland Yard; Mycroft is still in the background, as is Professor Moriarty; even Mrs. Hudson returns as the landlady at 221B Baker Street. It all hews very closely to the canonical description of Holmes, actually, and it works. It sets the hook (boy, howdy, does it!).

Read more below the fold >>

Last Call for 2009

The year is winding down. Here are the last stragglers for the Christmas week. I don't know what I'll get to this week. Something, I hope.

I was really irritated with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009, directed by David Yates) the first time through. I don't know if it's the fault of the filmmakers or the DVD transfer, but the damned thing was so dark that there were long stretches where I couldn't actually tell what was going on on the screen. Annoying. The second time through, I adjusted the brightness and contrast on my tv to compensate. I don't know that it was much of an improvement, but it did save on the eyestrain. The Potter movies continue to get metaphorically darker, too, which they take from the books. This is adapted from the darkest at heart of the books, but like the last film in the sequence, it seems like it rushes from set-piece to set-piece in order to get everything in. It's all plot at the expense of character. Still, it's not all bad. Daniel Radcliffe has grown into a pretty good actor, and Emma Watson finally gives a performance that's not all twitches with eyebrows and her mouth. I'll be interested to see how they do in the final story, now that they've been stripped of mentors and allies.

I think I was sitting too close to the screen for Guy Ritchie's version of Sherlock Holmes (2009), because the visual image was really soft. Checking the technical specs of the film, I find that it was filmed with both a 35mm camera and a HDTV camera, which explains, perhaps, why the image is softer at some points than others. In any event, the film is visual mud. I liked Downey and Law as Holmes and Watson, but I think turning Holmes into a kind of super action hero was a bad idea (I should note, however, that there is some justification for it in Doyle). I liked the presence of Professor Moriarty. I hated the way the movie uses him as a franchise builder. For the most part, this is a film for which I should have waited until it came out on home video.

Don't ask me what I was doing watching Punisher: War Zone (Lexi Alexander, 2008). I mean, this is a character who hasn't exactly had the best cinematic track record. I will say that I was curious to see Ray Stevenson in the part, having really enjoyed watching him in Rome. I was also curious to see another action film directed by a woman (and to see if Lexi Alexander is a patch on Kathryn Bigelow--she's not). Actually, the action sequences aren't bad. The glue that holds them all together, on the other hand, is awful. Every time a character opens his or her mouth to speak, you have to cover your ears. Stevenson comes off the best, mainly by virtue of having so few lines. I will also admit to laughing out loud at one scene where a petty crook is handcuffed to a chair as the FBI agent on the case negotiates with him, only to have the Punisher walk in and blow his head off. I guess you had to be there. Otherwise, this pretty much sucked.

I also watched District 9 (2009, directed by Neil Blomkamp) again because my partner hadn't seen it. It doesn't hold up well to multiple viewings, in part because I really hate everyone in the movie and I hate that it uses the "white savior" archetype. Odious.