Kivrin

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows Robert Downey, Jr and Jude Law, with Stephen Fry as Mycroft

If you didn't like the first one this isn't going to be any better for you, unless you really really really like turn-of-the-twentieth-century guns. The first film, as I said at the time, had a number of canonical pleasures for a profoundly acanonical experience; this one had fewer canonical pleasures but was still an enjoyable, albeit even less Holmesian, experience.

( brief spoilers here )

Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, with the greater London area as itself.

First, tangentially, I have a very hard time not going into an extensive Izzardian Englebert Humperdinck routine every time I write "Benedict Cumberbatch." Bendybert Cummerbund! Umptydink Crummerbutt! Hashtytag Tumblrbunch! ANYWAY.

Second, and primarily, I enjoyed that quite a lot, particularly the relationships between John, Sherlock, Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft, the passing references to a number of updated stories (there was flailing, I'm not too proud to admit that there was flailing), and the recurrence of the number 1895. Because it is always 1895!

I have one major spoilery objection.

( OBJECTION )

Last night B&R and I watched the first half of the theatrical Prince Caspian movie, and... it kinda sucks. Some things may improve in the second half, but nothing is going to change the fact that it's extremely poorly structured, and absolutely oozing with skeevy race/culture stuff.

( spoilery details within )

There are some significant good bits, notably Eddie Izzard as the voice of Reepicheep and Anna Popewell (as Susan) kicking ass in archery, but overall, it's looking like a big-budget disappointment.

what kind of a name is Students Against the Treacherous Use of Fur?

The score for Sherlock Holmes is excellently evocative. Lots of frenzied pizzacato violin that made me happy and conveyed the idea of Holmes' playing without the need for potentially-awkward faking by the actor.

No, it's not canon. But it's my view that it would be redundant to make canonically faithful adaptations when Granada TV and Jeremy Brett did that a mere twenty-odd years ago. Some of the later scripts were crap, when they started trying to bulk out third-tier short stories into two-hour TV movies, but taken as a whole, I think Brett's performance and the Granada adaptations are definitive canonical translations for at least another ten years. So, someone else trying to do the same thing would be, well, silly. (And trying to make a big-screen big-budget translation of any canonical story except Hound would also be pretty silly, in my opinion.)

For something noncanonical, though, it... includes a hell of a lot of canonical pleasures. Clever deductions! Brilliant disguises! A really, really smart Watson who kicks all kinds of ass! AND KEEPS A BULL PUP! In both the literal (doggy!) and figurative (temper-losing) senses! A patriotic V. R. done in bullet holes! Geraldine James as Mrs. Hudson! (Okay, that's not a canonical pleasure, but I like Geraldine James.)

( cut for spoilers )
In short, I loved it. It's not a moving, talking Paget illustration, and isn't trying to be, so if that's your Holmesian pleasure, keep on walking. But if you like Holmes, and like slash, and action movies, and like pretty women in 1880s dresses, and pretty women in 1880s suits, you may really enjoy this one.

So, in the summer of 1991, I was thirteen, and after Dances with Wolves I had a bit of a crush on Kevin Costner (which was consistent with my habit of selecting nonfictional crush objects who were still safely unavailable due to being older, married, and/or dead.) So I saw Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. At the time, I found the photography lacking, but I really, really dug the film, and rented the video several times.

Several weeks ago I Netflix'd it, expecting it to be goofy, but thinking it might be a tonic action-adventure experience. breadandroses and I watched it last night, and, well. I was a very naive thirteen-year-old. I now think the film wasn't much to begin with, and it has aged poorly.

Things I'd remembered:
- the beauty of Mary Stuart Mastrantonio as Maid Marian. The cheekbones!
- Morgan Freeman as a magical Moor.
- Christian Slater (and a badfic-worthy plot twist.)
- Alan Rickman being Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham.
- the music (really, really well, because while I haven't seen the film for fifteen-ish years, I have the soundtrack and like to play it on road trips.)

I think the score is still really good. Though breadandroses and I found the sound levels on the DVD really problematic - sometimes the music was overpowering the dialogue, and some scenes were much much louder than others.

The rest of the film... well.

Things I hadn't remembered and/or never realized

- this movie is ridiculous. It takes itself veryvery seriously but it is ridiculous. ( Read more... )

In short, I do not now understand why this got my 13-year-old self obsessed with Robin Hood (to the point that I Mary Sue'd myself into a heavily Prince of Thieves-based version of the legend.) And I'm glad I didn't buy the dvd, even for $5.

Anyone know where I can find a good picture of the whole crew on the bridge at the end of the new Star Trek movie?

To sum up: the new Star Trek movie is FRICKIN' AWESOME.

( It was especially awesome to me because I was almost totally unspoiled, so I suggest that even if you don't usually avoid spoilers, you might want to this time )

( ETA meta-fandom-ical comment from BreadAndRoses )

Yesterday was a snow day, which was EXCELLENT. The accumulation wasn't snow so much as nasty icy slush, so I had no conflict about sticking to indoor pursuits. (Had it been beautiful with fluffy white snow, I would have wanted to go walk in it, if not actually play in it, and would have had regrets in any and all directions.) I went to some friends' house for pancakes, then came home and did laundry (including experiments in getting deodorant crud off t-shirts), tidied my room, scrubbed the kitchen sink and slew some encrusted grime in the bathroom*, read more of Honor Moore's memoir The Bishop's Daughter and watched the Anthony Head version of Persuasion and drank a lot of tea.

Today is cold and bright, and I spent the morning careening between enjoying that (and enjoying feeling rested, and enjoying supervising a congenial volunteer who's doing some data entry, and enjoying anticipating an upcoming visit from my parents and this evening's choir rehearsal), and feeling anxious about the people in the reading room, the mess in my office, this evening's choir rehearsal, the upcoming visit from my parents, my grandmother's health, my long-distance friendships, and my general existential/vocational okayness or lack thereof.

So. Some media blather.

( The Bishop's Daughter )

( Persuasion (200X film) )

Tangentially, here I shall enumerate

WHY I WATCHED ALL OF MERLIN

( Read more... )

Coming sometime: Why I Watch Hustle.

This weekend I watched Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters 2. Ah, the eighties. Shoulder pads and big hair on the women, more hair on Bill Murray, and action-comedy films with more dialogue than explosions. ( Read more... )

Last night I finally finished Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own, which I've been picking up and putting down for months. It's a remarkable group biography of four American Catholic writers, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton, and Walker Percy. Picking it up as I did, however, without more than a few faint impressions about the Catholic Worker movement and knowledge of the names Merton and O'Connor, I wasn't able to really appreciate the interweavings of the four lives. I was busy trying to keep track of what decade the overall narrative was in, and to assimilate the brute facts of each life. Though it's natural enough given the literary focus of the book, it frustrated me that the subjects' personal connections were so glossed over. I particularly wondered about Day's relationship with her daughter and the phantom grandchildren who appear only to carry her coffin. It would be good to read it again, after reading a regular biography of Day, and some Merton, and the O'Connor stories that Elie makes the most of in his analysis.

In Buffyverse fanfic news, I highly recommend Facing the Heart in Darkness by liz_marcs. It's a story about the New Council and Xander in Africa, told from the point of view of one of the holdovers from the old council, and it's terrific. It is also a work in progress, but it seems quite sure to be finished sooner rather than later.