Eccentric Flower talk:201001/Sherlock Holmes

Kymmz:

I'm looking forward to seeing the movie, though I was a little reticent after reading some accounts of it. However, after reading Cleolinda yesterday and you today, I'm 100% on board.

-- 19:54, 2 January 2010 (GMT)

Ursula:

>It's telling that some people, upon learning I am such a Holmes fan, assumed automatically I'd be that kind of hardliner. I think that proves my point about fans above.

I don't think it's that people are assuming the Holmes fans are such a rigid bunch. I think it has more to do with the way the film's been sold, as a sort of Will Smith "Wild, Wild West" action movie reboot job. I'm not a Holmes maniac by any means, but from a distance I took the film as Hollywood trying to once again jazz up a dusty franchise with lots of fistfights and explosions. This struck me (perhaps wrongly) as another Star Trek-style reboot. "This franchise is old and boring and awful, so we're going to ignore or actively antagonize the existing fandom and re-do this as something loud and aggro." There's an awful lot of that sort of thing going around.

Whatever its merits, I have a hard time getting past Jude Law as Watson. Of the a-list stars working today, he's probably the closest to my mental imagine of Holmes.

-- 01:19, 3 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

I can't stand Jude Law normally. This is one of the few films I've found him above-tolerable in.

Yeah, it's a little odd the way this film is being marketed. I'm not at all sure why they're doing what they're doing, or who they're trying to reach.

-- 04:00, 3 January 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

Clare and I saw it just now on our Date Night, and we both liked it very much. There is too much Guy Ritchie blow-em-ups and fisticuffs, and the movie would be tighter if they cut it back. But that is a nitpick, along with the Wild, Wild West anachronism problem, which thankfully isn't too pervasive (and, I am embarrassed to say, one anachronism I thought I spotted -- newspaper photographs -- actually had existed since 1873).

I'm a fan of the books (not to the extent you are, though), and I was very afraid that Ritchie would turn it into a cartoon. He didn't. The places where the writers deviated from canon -- sassing up Watson, making Irene Adler a recurring character instead of a one-hit wonder -- are substantial improvements over the original, and IMHO, Conan Doyle would approve.

I was also dubious about Downey playing Holmes; Ursula's right: Jude Law is an obvious Holmes. And yet, there's Downey, and now I can't imagine anyone else playing him at this time. He is one of best actors today.

-- 04:34, 3 January 2010 (GMT)

Iain:

What will interest some of you is that even though I know all this, and have read all this, and can quote you chapter and verse on Holmes until I bore you to tears (as indeed I may already have done), I have never written anything in the Holmes universe, never intend to, and I don't usually tell anybody about my Holmes fandom.

...OK, a complete side issue, but one must ask: have you ever written anything in any established fandom, ever? I know that you've written fiction on various specific interests, but an actual fandom with, like, literary or televisual or filmic stuff to take off from? It seems most unlike you, somehow.

-- 06:49, 3 January 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

SPOILERY QUESTION HERE; BE FOREWARNED!

Clare swears the bookie at the boxing match was Brad Pitt. Anyone know for sure? Also, intriguingly, the IMDb has a note that Pitt was rumored to be cast as Moriarty, but that the rumors were denied. It would make perfect sense for Moriarty to be shadowing Holmes that way, and perhaps even Adler, who was talking to him, didn't realize it was her employer (she claims not to have seen his face, I think).

-- 04:33, 4 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

The rumors about Pitt appear to have been just that. If he had even the tiniest cameo it would be the sort of thing IMdB would snap up immediately, and I see no indication of it there.

I do see someone on IMdB billed as "Golden Dawn Envoy," which I think confirms my theories about what mystical order the one in the movie was modeled after.

-- 14:53, 4 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

A comment from one of Cleolinda's threads re Moriarty:

"Rachel McAdams said no one in particular was actually playing him on set--it was a voiceover. And the rumor is that Brad Pitt did the voice, and Guy Ritchie won't deny it, and they're currently saying that he might actually play Moriarty in the sequel. But because they didn't show his face, they're not tied down to that. I knew this going in, and it really does sound amazingly like Brad Pitt doing a (good) British accent."

-- 14:57, 4 January 2010 (GMT)

ProfRobert:

Was "IMdB" a typo or a joke -- a reference to all the "noise" at that site? If the latter, kudos.

-- 19:21, 4 January 2010 (GMT)

Columbina:

Completely an underslept typo.

-- 19:31, 4 January 2010 (GMT)