and the sands of nevada go drifting away.
Dec. 29th, 2009 09:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hawkwing_lbI have been to see the Sherlocke Holmes film.
Friends, I was surprised. Pleasantly surprised: it might not be Holmes - there is too much of Robert Downey Jr. being action-hero-man! for that - but it's a surprisingly good film for all that. The dialogue is fast and sharp and clever; the relationship between Holmes and Watson is very true to the sort of old-married-couple dynamic I always imagined them having, and for a two-hour film, there's still an awful lot going on: it doesn't stand around wasting time, and unlike certain other films I can think of, the plot is tight and believable - there's no great gaping hole in the middle of this one. Quite the opposite.
It's pulp adventure, rather than pulp detective. The Victorian period is the last great baroque era, and they did the sets and the CGI wonderfully, making a messy and crowded and believable London. It made me happy, lifting a couple of scene-setting shots directly from the ITV/Granada productions, and using a very similar sense of colour - I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone who isn't me, but, you know. My impression.
I do feel a little betrayed by the decision to make Sherlocke Holmes a sexual creature: I've always felt that his heedlessness of his body's physical welfare is part and parcel of his obsession with the intellectual, with the details that only make sense to the minds of people who think as fast and notice as much as he does, and the Irene Adler of the film did not impress me as someone who could and would outwit Holmes on the intellectual field. I suspect this isn't the actor's fault, since when she was given sufficient material to work with, she did show decent acting chops, but the film wasn't all that interested in her as a person, more as a cypher for the invisible presence of Professor Moriarty, the unseen Man Behind The Curtain.
It wasn't that interested in Mary and Watson, either, for that matter, which disappointed me a little as well. A little less fascination with shiny pretty explosions and a little more thought on the ways in which relationships and people interact could have made it a much more well-rounded film, and satisfied me on more levels.
But that wasn't the movie it was interested in being, and I suppose I oughtn't blame it. Since the movie it was interested in being was a damn sight better than I expected, and a whole hell of a lot funnier.
Friends, I was surprised. Pleasantly surprised: it might not be Holmes - there is too much of Robert Downey Jr. being action-hero-man! for that - but it's a surprisingly good film for all that. The dialogue is fast and sharp and clever; the relationship between Holmes and Watson is very true to the sort of old-married-couple dynamic I always imagined them having, and for a two-hour film, there's still an awful lot going on: it doesn't stand around wasting time, and unlike certain other films I can think of, the plot is tight and believable - there's no great gaping hole in the middle of this one. Quite the opposite.
It's pulp adventure, rather than pulp detective. The Victorian period is the last great baroque era, and they did the sets and the CGI wonderfully, making a messy and crowded and believable London. It made me happy, lifting a couple of scene-setting shots directly from the ITV/Granada productions, and using a very similar sense of colour - I'm not sure if that makes sense to anyone who isn't me, but, you know. My impression.
I do feel a little betrayed by the decision to make Sherlocke Holmes a sexual creature: I've always felt that his heedlessness of his body's physical welfare is part and parcel of his obsession with the intellectual, with the details that only make sense to the minds of people who think as fast and notice as much as he does, and the Irene Adler of the film did not impress me as someone who could and would outwit Holmes on the intellectual field. I suspect this isn't the actor's fault, since when she was given sufficient material to work with, she did show decent acting chops, but the film wasn't all that interested in her as a person, more as a cypher for the invisible presence of Professor Moriarty, the unseen Man Behind The Curtain.
It wasn't that interested in Mary and Watson, either, for that matter, which disappointed me a little as well. A little less fascination with shiny pretty explosions and a little more thought on the ways in which relationships and people interact could have made it a much more well-rounded film, and satisfied me on more levels.
But that wasn't the movie it was interested in being, and I suppose I oughtn't blame it. Since the movie it was interested in being was a damn sight better than I expected, and a whole hell of a lot funnier.
