sherlock holmes: the night, for he, is quite bromantic...unhook the chemical warfare device and take the order of the golden hind down...

Sherlock Holmes: a movie

guess what doesn't stink worse than my shoes? Sherlock Holmes the movie. why? a., the person who wrote the script, the actors, and the director all seemed to have read the books. b., despite the souped-up action sequences, they captured the characters pretty dang well. c., downey junior's british accent, though not quite as successful as renee zwelliger's (sp???) in bridget jones (i'm a little biased, but maybe not entirely though), sounded pretty dang good to me. i should have laid more stress on the "read the books" aspect of this thing. i haven't perused sherlock holmes in quite a while, but when i was in grade school my ambition was to someday write my dissertation on him, so i consider myself (absolutely inaccurately) an authority on the subject, and really they did a good job. it's like with the a&e pride and prejudice (yes, the holy grail of the pre-1900's fangirl, and, yes, i'm invoking it): those involved in making the film did mess with the characters a little, but really, really didn't do anything that makes one want to shoot said film-producers in the face (and nothing gets a pre-1900's fangirl more violent than screwing with her characters, brosephines).

now, as always, i'm speaking subjectively. there are hardcore holmesians out there who are going to say the movie has NOTHING respectable to do with the books, and they are probably correcter than i'll ever be. if i were a real thoroughgoing reviewer (da da di da di da di da di da di di di di dum), i would have reread some conan-doyle before writing this blog entry, so as to address the veracity of these probable claims (hey!). and granted, the excess of explosions, holmes' prowress as a street fighter, the involvement of a mid-construction bridge apparently borrowed from both history and kate and leopold, the reappearance of irene adler, borrowed from the beekeeper's apprentice, and the holmes/watson bromance that gets drawn out in a manner not very conan-doyle-y, would give the aforementioned holmesians some fodder for their blunderbusses (blunderbi?). but, dudes, we've got to, if not respect, than at least acknowledge laurie r. king's additions to the holmesian canon (cold burn...i like her books, i just really love being rude). and i think that these aspects, especially the street fighting, which, to me, sort of re-forms the self-punishing aspect of holmes' drug usage, and the bromeo part, re-interpret, but don't exactly destroy, the whole holmes thing. a generation (?) of holmes interpreters have gotten at the hard outer shell of the character--his inhumanity is portrayed to striking effect by both basil rathbone and that awesome nervous dude on the bbc. leave it to il downey jr. to insist on holmes' interiority (not that it wasn't in the script, you know, just that he did it so--greatly). the movie sort of tells the story within the story--it doesn't do so along lines that are inarguable, but i personally do think it does it well.

okay, and then there are non-holmes-specific matters on which to challenge the movie--for instance, the addition of that irritatingly cliche'd chief-of-chief-of-police guy, the mano-a-douchebag fight on the half-built bridge, the exercise in mystical cartography that brings back to us, not so much the conflict of lonnrot and red scharlach in the awesome death and the compass, as the filmic depiction of tom hanks re-remembering various symbols he saw once, but shiny, like ether, and, oh, IDIOTIC, like the da vinci code itself--in short, all the little things that bring dan brown's vapid, toxic influence so delightfully back to us, like burping up the lingering remnants of something you've just heaved out of your stomach.


i mean, is sherlock holmes a lonely, brilliant, often shirtless man-child who doesn't know how to express himself to his closest companions and so takes his emotions out on crime? i don't know. i'm not sure. but i'm buying it. aside from the parts where (as with avatar) the more ridiculous aspects of the plot became too obtrusive, i really liked this movie. i liked that holmes and watson were in love without being precisely gay; that was very hellenic of it. i read this book for class that basically argued that, as part of the aftermath of wilde's trial, it's impossible for us to understand male relationships as they would have been understood at the time in which conan doyle was writing (or earlier...song of roland? yeah, we don't get that). so this movie made a good approximation of that as well.

final words: reinterpretation is unavoidable in a remake. excessive reinterpretation is WRONG, almost even WRONGER than dan brown. i felt that the reinterpretation in sherlock holmes, though within a rather wide spectrum, was not excessive. into the new century the holmes-man cometh, and i think he could be looking waaay worse.

avatar: PLEASE get me started

Avatar 3-D, directed by James Cameron

oh my god. being, underneath my crotchety exterior, a...what's the opposite of misanthropist? pro-antrhopist? at heart, i really enjoyed this movie for the first 35 minutes.

before, that is, i realized that i was watching ferngully 3-D. the thing is, you have to give a james cameron movie a chance, because there's always the possibility that you're watching aliens. but in the case of avatar, quasi-ironically, we're not watching aliens, moviegoers. we're watching titanic, but with even less emphasis on a tautly constructed plot.

i was the kid who walked out of titanic at age 14 or so going, "my god, did she have to get back on the boat and run around for another hour and a half?" and i am the adult who's walked out of avatar going, "my god, i didn't realize that a movie could fist itself. with itself." avatar constructed the manifold and then jammed itself up the manifold.

now, i liked the first 35 minutes precisely because the plot was being unobtrusive with itself. yes, the movie's premise for having scientists wearing alien bodies so that they could TALK to the locals for the sake of financial gain didn't, as my friend pointed out, make a ton of sense, but the acting was very good--the characterization was pretty cool--and the CGI world was so beautiful that one didn't even quite realize that sequences taking place in the forests of pandora were basically composites of the scenes underlying "can you feel the love tonight" in the lion king and "can you paint with all the colors of the wind" in pocahontas (if the pandora forest feels familiar, yes, this is why. "can you feel the love tonight," "can you paint with all the colors of the wind," and ferngully. in 3-d. also when the stormtroopers--that is, marines--come out at the end, it feels a lot like the marin headlands in the return of the jedi).

but when the plot started establishing its presence? no. just no. the fairly cool characterizations gave up the field without even a hint of a fight--they got whipped faster than a xanthian by a kiss-my-anthian. this wouldn't have been so bad if cameron hadn't gotten the actual plot of avatar out of something like a "complete idiot's guide to plotting a high-concept sci-fi/adventure film." but he did. and did he ever. there are highs; there are lows. aladdin; 300; tron; war games; braveheart...you name it, it's in there. oh, and ferngully. have i mentioned ferngully? in 3-d, no less.

this review was mean. and i had fun. it's possible that the target audience was intended to be younger than myself (which would explain the disney themesong at the end)...but then what was with the language? you know what it is? if cameron wants us to take his "ecological message" seriously, he needs to think with his head and heart and not make the blue people's dialogue sound like fake "noble savage" mid-nineties-speak. he needs to not kill off the man of color (yes, even within the blue person tribe, there is a black man, and yes, he does die--just like jazz, the black transformer, dies in michael bay's transformers). he needs to not grind his storyline out of an approach to plot that amounts to mcdonald's "whole cow" approach to all-beef patties.

in short, he needs to not remake ferngully on a 16 billion dollar budget. in 3-d!

modius operandius

why review? i mean, really. i don't like it when people review me (that is, i kind of do, but...it's complicated. suffice it to say that the amount that i like getting reviewed well is almost as embarrassing to me as the degree to which i hate getting reviewed poorly [or not reviewed], and so the whole experience of being reviewed can legitimately qualify itself as "distasteful," even when it makes me happy). reviewing things is just rude. there are enough opinions out there without adding mine to the mix.

but one can't resist, if said one is me. i love reviewing crap. i try not to be mean; i understand that, along with the desire to take our money, publishing companies and movie distribution companies at the very least represent individuals who are passionate about what they've accomplished--and at the most, probably don't despise us to the degree that they like to pretend. they are filling the demand, here. i mean, i voted with my dollars to see transformers II: revenge of the fallen. at the risk of revealing my codependent relationship with hollywood, it at least feels fair to say that i deserve what i got.

but being mean is FUN. it is a pre-daddy-taking-t-bird-away good time. it is a snarker's high. with snarkdorphins. and considering the fact that i'm probably never going to meet any of the people i review, it's a safe-ish outlet...well, for me. i should respect the sensitive, fragile natures of those around me, but i don't. gotta unleash somehow. can't be all sweetness and light all the time.

in the interest, finally, of demonstrating to what degree my taste is kind of terrible, i'll be attempting to review everything i read, see, and listen to that isn't for school and i make no guarantees about television. because i feel like it'll make me a better writer, and because, you know, what the hey, maybe joining the dark side for a bit will give me a better perspective on reviewers--how they can be so beautiful and so sad.

plus then maybe this blog can function like the bluth's one house in sudden valley--as a pristine selling unit for possible blogging jobs. because who WOULDN'T want to hire me to write like this? eh?