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.