Sherlock Holmes

[badlands]

has anyone seen it?

[Michael]

I have not. Was hoping to catch it yesterday (Christmas Day) but my plans evolved in a different direction.

[GamgeeFest]

I saw it yesterday and enjoyed it very much. Note that I've never read any of the books or short stories, so only have previous Holmes movies to compare it to. This Holmes and Watson seem rather tougher than their counterparts, but I think that's a plus. There is of course the mandated sequel set up at the end, and they could perhaps trim 5 or 10 minutes off the run time, but overall, it was fun, fast-paced, the chemistry between Downey and Law were spot on, and the villian perfectly creepy, if somewhat predictable.

[Zagor]

Personally I thought it was a fun, exciting movie. I saw it with a fan of the original stories who hated it however (personally I don't like Arthur Conan Doyle's stories much so the differences didn't bother me).

[Arcadia]

I enjoyed it. I didn't think I would, because from my reading of the stories I get that Holmes was moody and dour, but even though the Holmes in this movies was a bit frivolous in parts, he was serious enough that he was engaging. The movie moved well, I was never bored. I was also concerned that the computer effects that I noticed in the previews would spoil the sense of the period, but I didn't even pay any attention to them.

[RobRoy]

I've read the books, watched any number of different actors play the characters, and in the main I enjoyed the story. I think it fell apart later in the third act, which was unfortunate. Most of the interesting characterizations, such as Holmes' analysis mid-fight dropped away never to be seen again. It would have been nice if they'd supplied a few extra clues to the audience, but figuring out the "mystery" wasn't really what the movie was about.

[Arcadia]

I was charmed by the clues being revealed, when I sometimes didn't even realize there was something to wonder about. As the movie progressed, I enjoyed picking out events that might be explained later. I'm going to take my husband to see it, and I'm not going to tell him about the clue parts.

[august]

Neat article originally in the NY Times. Excerpts:

.... Holmes' scenes here of bare-knuckled fisticuffs would have surprised Conan Doyle less than they have upset some of the movie's critics. As a young man, Conan Doyle was an accomplished boxer, and in a couple of the stories he attributes the same skill to Holmes.....

By the time Conan Doyle died, there had already been scores of silent films based on Holmes, along with a dozen or so stage plays, several of which Conan Doyle saw. Holmes' immense public appeal was precisely what annoyed Conan Doyle. He thought Holmes took attention away from his other, more serious writing....

Had Conan Doyle been a better writer, the problem might never have come up. Holmes is so memorable because, like later superheroes, he is less a fully developed character than a collection of fascinating traits. Raymond Chandler once complained that Holmes was little more than a few lines of unforgettable dialogue and an attitude.

Yet Holmes' vagueness and incompleteness on the page are what make him so irresistible as a pop figure, on whom we can project our own interpretation. A lot of what we know, or think we know, about him - the deerstalker hat, the cloaks, the catchphrase "Elementary, my dear Watson" - comes not from the texts at all but from subsequent imaginings of him, the movies especially...
.........

.....the oddest thing about the movie is that Holmes is here lovable and endearing in a way that he has seldom, if ever, been before....

One of the characters in the Ritchie film remarks that there is a fragility beneath all Holmes' logic and ratiocination, and it's true. Downey's character is as needy as he is superior. He still delights in showing off his cleverness but less out of snobbery than because he can't help himself. He lives for an audience.

He requires a case not so much to exercise his formidable intellect as to get himself out of the house so he can dart around, throw some punches, wear disguises, wind up nude and shackled to the bedposts. His frustration, you can't help feeling, might stem from the fact that in the Victorian age, the proper vocation for him hasn't yet been invented. He's someone who needs to be in the movies.

[RobRoy]

Interesting. I hadn't realized there was any "purist" outcry regarding the movie. Perhaps that's because I've been pretty busy with other things than to worry if Ritchie was going to "be true" to Conan Doyle.

Holmes was regarded as something of an expert martial artist: he was an amateur bare-knuckles brawler, whom a prize-fighter commented on his skills as "wasted" when he became a detective, stick-fighting and "baritsu", a form of Japanese martial arts.

[Zagor]

Interesting. I hadn't realized there was any "purist" outcry regarding the movie.

My friend's major beef with it wasn't the portrayal of Holmes so much as the overblown world domination plot.

[august]

I hadn't realized there was any "purist" outcry regarding the movie.

There really hasn't been any of consequence. Probably some on the internet, but as we know, that doesn't count. The NY Times writer clearly knows his details (the boxing and the baritsu for example) and is pointing out that if you are a real purist, this is just sort of creative extrapolation from the original. Organized purist fans that have been around for nearly a century have beein doing stuff like his from day one in what we would now call fan fiction, but were called pastiches back in the day. Even things that later made it to the screen (like the cocaine addiction, closer connections to Moriarty, etc.) were speculated in fan gatherings and publications generations ago. Unlike a lot of more recent fandoms where people worry about what "really" happened in make-believe (e.g Eowyn didn't really rescue the Fellowship, it was Glorfindel) Holmes fans take great pleasure and sport in adding to the fiction, doing fun frivolous things like "proving" Holmes was related to Tarzan, or that he was responsible for capturing Jack the Ripper or Mata Hari, etc.

[RobRoy]

My friend's major beef with it wasn't the portrayal of Holmes so much as the overblown world domination plot.

Interesting. Given England's dominance of the world stage at that time, I didn't even blink at the idea. This is the same time frame when the sun never set on the English Empire, after all. If Blackwood had succeeded, I didn't see any reason why his ambitions couldn't have spilled into an attempt, whether economically, or militarily.

August, I had thought that the cocaine use was canonical? Isn't that where we get the "seven-per-cent-solution" phrase from? Or did you mean addiction to cocaine in the fullest sense, such that it could have debilitated Holmes from overuse?

[august]

The latter. The novel The 7 Per Cent Solution had Holmes genuinely addicted to it, and seeking help from Sigmund Freud for treatment. But Holmes purists mainly enjoyed the fact that Holmes was atop the best seller lists for the first time in generations. And there were tons of nods to the original stories in it, so it might as well have been written by a fan. Ironically, it was written by Nicholas Meyer, and most Star Trek fans see him the same way in relation to Wrath of Khan.

The movie version was the same - technically purists could have been upset about a blonde guy playing Holmes, but Nicol Williamson was so perfect for the role otherwise that no one cared. (Although I'm sure one person in each state may have cared, and one person in each country outside the US may have, so had there been an internet in 1977, all 250 of those would have complained on the same site, saying "See? We're the majority!") :laugh:

The movie likewise played with so many things in the book, right down to Watson limping due to his war wound...but also referring to being shot in the shoulder! :jester: (Doyle clearly stated Watson was only wounded once, but sometimes forgot the location, since he knew he was writing make-believe, and that it didn't matter.)

By and large, the unspoken rule in both genuine Doyle fiction as well as a century of pastiches is that any time there is some obstacle or dilemma, Holmes reveals that he just happens to be an expert in that field having studied it years earlier, and then he proceeds to save the day. :bg:

[RobRoy]

The movie likewise played with so many things in the book, right down to Watson limping due to his war wound...but also referring to being shot in the shoulder! :jester: (Doyle clearly stated Watson was only wounded once, but sometimes forgot the location, since he knew he was writing make-believe, and that it didn't matter.)

This was the same with Watson's name. Sometimes he is James while at other times he's referred to as John. Young Sherlock Holmes paid homage to this by having Holmes guess one, and when Watson said he was the other, Holmes stated that would have been his other guess. :thumbsup:

[august]

There was an excellent "explanation" of this. Since it's only Watson's wife who ever calls him James, someone speculated that this was a pet name, possibly the English version of his middle name, which could have been "Hamish," since he does say his middle initial is "H." :jester: :hellohands:

[RobRoy]

There was an excellent "explanation" of this. Since it's only Watson's wife who ever calls him James, someone speculated that this was a pet name, possibly the English version of his middle name, which could have been "Hamish," since he does say his middle initial is "H." :jester: :hellohands:

Or Conan Doyle mixed up his "facts" again.:whip:

[Zagor]

Interesting. Given England's dominance of the world stage at that time, I didn't even blink at the idea. This is the same time frame when the sun never set on the English Empire, after all. If Blackwood had succeeded, I didn't see any reason why his ambitions couldn't have spilled into an attempt, whether economically, or militarily.

I think it wasn't so much the unbelievability of it more the fact that world domination plot wasn't in keeping with the style of the original stories. I've only read a couple of them myself so I can't say how accurate that view is.

[august]

Nope, not in keeping with the tone of the original stories at all...but none of them would make for a full-length action film. Virtually all were chamber-dramas, just a few pages in length, only a fe characters, often just involving the theft of some jewels, an aborted blackmail plot, a scheme to cheat someone out of an inheritance, etc. Some were murders... but they were usually less complicated than the typical CSI plot. The PBS versions take about a half-hour of material (or what the crime-solviong portion of a typical Law & Order episode usually lasts) and stretch them out to 50 minutes with long langorous shots of the British countryside, and extended dramatizations of things mentioned just in passing. e.g. one sentence like "the butler and the maid must have been lovers" becomes a 5-minute depiction of their affair.

In Holmes' last bow, aptly titled "His Last Bow," he and Watson come out of retirement to foil a German spy on the eve of WW1, but even then I think it's just some stolen blueprints or documents or something.

The world domination is very much in keeping with the subsequent century of movie versions though, including The Seven Per Cent Soultion (where he was dueling a German villain on top of a speeding train) Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (where he saves England from a D-Day like coastal invasdion by the Nazis) and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (title says it all. ) Plus of course Watson always said that so many of his adventures with Holmes could never be told due to their sensitive nature and the reputations of the people involved, so maybe this was one of them! :laugh:

Or Conan Doyle mixed up his "facts" again.

Well exactly - he does that dozens of times, because basically, he didn't care. Watson was very very similar to Doyle, and Doyle has him admit that he's often lazy. But that's why it's fun for fans to "prove" that Watson wasn't wrong, he just left out the explanatory details, and his literary agent Doyle never thought to get him to correct them. :bg: For example, there' a wonderful Kennedy-like "magic bullet" article that explains how Watson must have been wounded both in the shoulder and leg by the same bullet.

[RobRoy]

[august]

Under the spoiler cover, that would be King George though, right? Since it's set in WW2....