Tweet Masterpiece Mystery - Sherlock Holmes

My problem with the Downey/Ritchie films is that they've taken away what, to me, makes the Holmes stories great. For example, in the second film, Game of Shadows:

1) There were no incidents of Sherlock making an amazing long chain of deductions and then explaining it. Mycroft gets to do it, but not Sherlock.

2) It wasn't a mystery. Why the hell would you make a Sherlock Holmes movie that's not a mystery??? They knew from the beginning who it was and it was just a matter of chasing him down and catching him. That's more TV crime show than Doyle mystery.

3) The banter between Holmes and Watson felt VERY forced and scripted. (That one is, of course, just an opinion.)

The writers and director seem to have no idea (was going to say "clue") about what makes the Doyle stories so timeless and are just looking at them superficially. That's why they're two hours of disguises and light-as-an-anvil banter. It's like how George Lucas thinks that it was the FX that made Star Wars a success. Yeah, how great were those FX-filled prequels?

Now, what I DO like about the Downey/Ritchie Sherlock is the idea of Watson wanting to be rid of Holmes and just settle down. That's an interesting idea. The BBC version however is much more in the spirit of the original stories regarding Watson (at least that's how I read them). He's fascinated and excited about the business. And he admires and respects Sherlock but is still capable of scolding him or bringing him back to earth when he gets too crazy.

I suppose the best way to think of the two series is this: If Sherlock Holmes never existed before the Downey/Ritchie films, I believe it would be forgotten a few years after the movies came out. But if he never existed before the BBC production, I believe it would be something that would live on and could quite possibly achieve a following and fascination similar to what Doyle achieved.

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Rainin' In The Sig

That pretty much sums up my feelings about the latest Robert Downey Jr. outing as Holmes. I didn't mind the first one so much, maybe the novelty of seeing Holmes on the big screen again was enough to get me through it, and I thought Downey & Law had some interesting chemistry, whereas Game of Shadows was just exhausting, and the utter lack of any sort of mystery was completely baffling. There was nothing to wrap your brain around, just a lot of running, shouting and shooting.

Eille Norwood is HAWT

Now if only more of his films were easier to see...

Here's an interview with Benedict Cumberbatch from the website Deadline yesterday, talking about the show.
http://www.deadline.com/2012/06/emmys-b ... -sherlock/

Season three starts shooting in January. By the way, American fans of the show should take a look at the dvd or blu-ray -- they cut out some lovely bits to save a few minutes -- not bad editing, but I enjoy this series for just those bits of character.

Bob

Sherlock just got five Emmy nominations. "A Scandal In Belgravia" was the episode submitted, and it was nominated in the "Miniseries, Movie, or Dramatic Special" section. The nominations are for:

Best Miniseries, Movie, or Dramatic Special
Best Actor - Benedict Cumberbatch
Best Supporting Actor - Martin Freeman
Best Directing - Paul McGuigan
Best Writing - Steven Moffat

The only two categories it doesn't have a nomination in are Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. It wasn't eligible for the former, and I don't know if it was submitted for the latter.

I haven't watched any of the shows it's up against but I really hope it sweeps the awards.

Edit: CORRECTION - It's 13 nominations. In addition to the above, it got nominations for:

Art Direction
Casting
Cinematography
Costumes
Editing
Music
Sound Editing
Sound Mixing

Well, Moffatt has been a Hugo machine, winning a bunch for best dramatic presentation short form for his Doctor Who scripts since 2005. I also thought TINTIN was excellent. They managed to take a bunch of characters I hated as a child and do something real with them.

Bob

And there's an AMERICAN series coming up in tne fall with Holmes in a contemporary setting! With an Asian female Watson! Redundant isn't it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_%28TV_series%29

It does sound as if it's not copying the UK series directly, but I give it about two months. Lucy Liu is in it so they're hoping to pull in the fanboys.

The article says CBS has tried updated Holmes twice before.

CBS's new show HOLMES comes on tonight. The Los Angeles Times gives it a good, if not great, review.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv ... 6953.story

It wasn't quite the disaster I thought it was going to be. It's certainly not nearly as good as the BBC show but there's a chance it could last out the season. It definitely doesn't seem like a show made by fans of the original stories; more like the "creators" of the show were just looking around for an idea for a show and someone said "how about a Sherlock Holmes show" (or, more likely, they saw the BBC show). Other than the names of Holmes, Watson, and Gregson, and their basic function, there was nothing at all that tied them to the originals. And I'm not too happy with some of the changes they've made to Sherlock himself (surprising since I expected to be upset only with Watson's changes).

If the BBC show, or the old BBC show (Jeremy Brett) are both 10s, this show is maybe a 6 so far. I don't think it'll improve though. One thing in its favor is that at least it deals with mysteries. The last Downey Holmes movie wasn't even a mystery.

Calm down. Premieres are often a little off. I do like the performances and although they do seem to plunder other shows -- including stuff from The Mentalist, I'm willing to give it a few more episodes before I turn off the series recording setting on my dvr.

Bob

Calm down. Premieres are often a little off. I do like the performances and although they do seem to plunder other shows -- including stuff from The Mentalist, I'm willing to give it a few more episodes before I turn off the series recording setting on my dvr.

Bob

If they're plundering The Mentalist, I'm already out. Nothing worse than a show I'm dubious about appropriating from a show I already detest.

Calm down. Premieres are often a little off. I do like the performances and although they do seem to plunder other shows -- including stuff from The Mentalist, I'm willing to give it a few more episodes before I turn off the series recording setting on my dvr.

Bob

Did I seem not calm?

Also, while I understand that some shows take a while to get their stride, that's not really much of an excuse. The "Sherlock" series hit it off right from the first few minutes, and movies have to get it correct in one shot too. Citizen Kane was a "premiere episode." So was "Gone With The Wind," "The General," every Chaplin film, "Sunset Blvd," "Jaws," "Star Wars," etc.

This Sherlock feels more like a rip-off of the series Monk, which was inspired by the Holmes/Watson dynamic, with the intensely phobic "defective detective" Monk accompanied by a paid companion who was meant to be a nurse, but winds up helping his investigations.

In this case, we get an aggressively obnoxious version of Sherlock, instead of the likeable, neurotic Monk, or as I like to call Jonny Lee Miller's portrayal, "ass-Holmes".

This Sherlock feels more like a rip-off of the series Monk, which was inspired by the Holmes/Watson dynamic, with the intensely phobic "defective detective" Monk accompanied by a paid companion who was meant to be a nurse, but winds up helping his investigations.

In this case, we get an aggressively obnoxious version of Sherlock, instead of the likeable, neurotic Monk, or as I like to call Jonny Lee Miller's portrayal, "ass-Holmes".

I intend to watch a few more to see if it improves, but I fear this is correct. In addition, there is no real sense of place, which you get with Doyle's Holmes and the BBC series. New York is a great city to set a series in if you are familiar with it and I don't have any sense of place despite recognizing the filming sites.

If you want New York as a character, watch LAW AND ORDER.

Bob

If you want New York as a character, watch LAW AND ORDER.

Bob

Or Sex in the City.

[Mike Gebert]

Always on top of pop culture as I am, I finally bought the two Sherlock series from iTunes while on vacation last week and have watched the first one (while learning just how long it takes to download a show from iTunes via hotel wifi; I had to leave the laptop running all night, the future's not quite here yet).

I liked the first episode a lot. I'm a little bothered that Doyle's marvelous eccentric increasingly seems to be regarded by our age as merely a DSM diagnosis of Asperger's; the world is so less interesting and varied a place when the psychiatric profession has had its way with it. But I enjoyed it as sort of a speed chess version of Conan Doyle, all the familiar aspects of the canon run through at high speed and done with droll humor.

Unfortunately the series has the problem that always seem to afflict big-budget adaptations of Holmes sooner or later— the problem of some odd happenings at some little house, the ruptures in Victorian order that produce such delightfully surreal stories as The Red-Headed League or The Musgrave Ritual aren't enough, so Holmes has to fight some Bondian villain with some superplot, and so we get Moriarty in episode 3, forcing Holmes to run around London like Bruce Willis running all over LA in the third Die Hard movie (I know you don't remember the third Die Hard movie, the one with Jeremy Irons, no one does, not even Jeremy Irons, so just trust me on that), and any actual deduction just turns out to be a matter of pressing some buttons on his phone or running a computer program till it produces a match. It has its moments, and as an episode is better than the rather weak and crudely sexually unfunny second one (the one with the Chinese acrobats out of Sax Rohmer), but I was left wishing for episodes 1b and 1c, the ones that follow the first one, have believable sized crimes in them, and allow plenty of room for deduction (with writing on the screen telling us what we're seeing) and interaction between Holmes and Watson and, in general, all the stuff that makes Sherlock Holmes not be John McClane.

Hopefully season 2, even as I know the Moriarty plot continues, will give Cumberbatch and Freeman more room for interplay with each other, and less with their phones.

There is something which has cropped up in this thread which I often argue with my Mum about when she moans that her beloved Agatha Christie's are changed when they are on TV: what works well in the written word does not always translate so well on the screen. This is why I think the Rathbone/Bruce films work so well. Rathbone certainly is rather like Doyle's description, whereas Watson is not. This may not have been how Doyle wrote these characters, but on the screen they work extremely well. Meanwhile while some of the Brett Holmes episodes do work very well, some of the others are so damned dour that you almost yearn for some light comic relief from Nigel Bruce halfway through.

Likewise, give me Peter Ustinov's Poirot over David Suchet any day. While Suchet is remarkably like the character in the books, it can also sometimes make for extraordinarily dull television, no matter how well made the programmes actually are. Perhaps Joan Hickson's Miss Marple is the exception to this - like the character in the books AND it works on screen.

Always on top of pop culture as I am, I finally bought the two Sherlock series from iTunes while on vacation last week and have watched the first one (while learning just how long it takes to download a show from iTunes via hotel wifi; I had to leave the laptop running all night, the future's not quite here yet).

I liked the first episode a lot. I'm a little bothered that Doyle's marvelous eccentric increasingly seems to be regarded by our age as merely a DSM diagnosis of Asperger's; the world is so less interesting and varied a place when the psychiatric profession has had its way with it. But I enjoyed it as sort of a speed chess version of Conan Doyle, all the familiar aspects of the canon run through at high speed and done with droll humor.

Unfortunately the series has the problem that always seem to afflict big-budget adaptations of Holmes sooner or later— the problem of some odd happenings at some little house, the ruptures in Victorian order that produce such delightfully surreal stories as The Red-Headed League or The Musgrave Ritual aren't enough, so Holmes has to fight some Bondian villain with some superplot, and so we get Moriarty in episode 3, forcing Holmes to run around London like Bruce Willis running all over LA in the third Die Hard movie (I know you don't remember the third Die Hard movie, the one with Jeremy Irons, no one does, not even Jeremy Irons, so just trust me on that), and any actual deduction just turns out to be a matter of pressing some buttons on his phone or running a computer program till it produces a match. It has its moments, and as an episode is better than the rather weak and crudely sexually unfunny second one (the one with the Chinese acrobats out of Sax Rohmer), but I was left wishing for episodes 1b and 1c, the ones that follow the first one, have believable sized crimes in them, and allow plenty of room for deduction (with writing on the screen telling us what we're seeing) and interaction between Holmes and Watson and, in general, all the stuff that makes Sherlock Holmes not be John McClane.

Hopefully season 2, even as I know the Moriarty plot continues, will give Cumberbatch and Freeman more room for interplay with each other, and less with their phones.

I personally prefer Series 2 over the first series especially A Scandal in Belgravia.

[Christopher Jacobs]

... we get Moriarty in episode 3, forcing Holmes to run around London like Bruce Willis running all over LA in the third Die Hard movie (I know you don't remember the third Die Hard movie, the one with Jeremy Irons, no one does, not even Jeremy Irons, so just trust me on that), and any actual deduction just turns out to be a matter of pressing some buttons on his phone or running a computer program till it produces a match.

Haven't seen the new Sherlock Holmes, but by strange coincidence I just watched the third Die Hard movie (DIE HARD WITH A VENGEANCE) on Friday night, thinking it was for the first time but suddenly realizing about 10-15 minutes into it that I'd actually seen it back when it came out (or at least the first part of it, as I couldn't remember much of the rest, so I might have dozed off during a theatre employee midnight screening -- after a spectacular opening the first half drags terribly but picks up substantially in the last half-hour). Actually Bruce Willis is running all over New York with Samuel L. Jackson, not L.A., which was where the original DIE HARD was set some 25 years ago now (!) and the second one was Washington DC at the airport. Finally saw both the first two installments for the very first time a couple nights before Christmas (my excuse being that it and DIE HARD 2 are actually Christmas movies, and the first three Die Hard movies happened to be on sale for about $9 each on Blu-ray at Walmart before Christmas).

Anyway, now back to your Holmes discussion...

Mike, I too was a little bummed that they got to Moriarty so quickly-- Doyle went through a LOT of stories before Moriarty ever came up, and even then he's in what, one story? However, two things that allowed me to excuse so much Moriarty so early:

1) These guys CLEARLY have a great knowledge and affection for the canon, unlike the makers of the Downy films and the U.S. "Elementary" series (though the latter is not as bad as I'd expected).

2) their take on Moriarty is novel, fun and intriguing. The end of episode 3 is great.

I hope series 3 has some "smaller" stories like Holmes often tackled. I just hope they get the opportunity to shoot it; Cumberbatch and Freeman are very busy lately. They were hoping to start shooting this month but I haven't heard if that's still on.

Hope to hear your thoughts on series 2.

[Mike Gebert]

1) These guys CLEARLY have a great knowledge and affection for the canon, unlike the makers of the Downy films

Though if there's one thing I'll give the second and definitely weaker Downey movie, it's that Jared Harris is an outstanding, grimly sinister and decidedly lethal-seeming Moriarty.

If Moriarty had never been written about, there'd be all these Holmes movies in which he faced off against the latest plot of Dr. Grimesby Roylott, played by George Zucco or Henry Daniell or the like.

Yes, Harris was very good. (He's good in Lincoln too, by the way.) As for that film, as I've said before, why the hell would you make a Sherlock Holmes film and NOT have a mystery? They knew from the beginning that the villain was Moriarty, then it was just your standard action film in trying to defeat him. Crazy. But it reminds me of the film I'm going to make: a James Bond film where Bond sits at home tending to his garden for two hours. Also, his name won't be Bond. It's going to be AWESOME! A clever twist on the genre!

PS: After you've seen episode 1 of Series 2 I'll tell you my favorite Holmes reference in it.

Edit: Just found out Series 3's shooting's been moved to March and it's supposed to premiere in England in December, which makes it likely that it won't hit the U.S. until January 2014 or so. Darn darn darn.