This Christmas sees the release of what looks set fair to be the most appalling film ever made by humans.
It's called Sherlock Holmes.
Perhaps you recognise the name.
Perhaps you may have read, or seen, something of the title character before.
Well, if you want future generations to have similar recollections it is vital that you stand up and say enough is enough. No longer can the talentless squirts of modern filmdom piss on the heritage they plunder without being answerable to we, its self-elected custodians.
Because if this monstrosity is allowed to pass unimpeded into the culture then nothing and nobody we love will ever be safe again.
You must do everything in your power to ensure that this film fails. But not just fail: it is not enough that it does disappointing business. It must belly-flop. It must disappear through a crack in the earth, leaving just a faint, foul smell where once it wallowed. It must make Ishtar, Waterworld and Hudson Hawk look like respectable minor hits.
If you have any regard whatsoever for the notion that cinema has a duty to show at least a soupcon of respect for its literary sources; if you have any affection whatever for Sherlock Holmes and his cinematic legacy, then please - do not under any circumstances see this film. Plead with everyone you know to do likewise. I don't care if Jude Law does things to you. Do not go even out of morbid curiosity. Every box-office dollar, every filled seat counts. You wouldn't have voted for Hitler out of morbid curiosity as to what the Third Reich might actually, rather than theoretically, have been like. Theoretically was plenty enough.
But if you have the least doubt, take a look at this trailer. It's all you need.
Admittedly the omens look good. The retakes were done in response to bad preview feedback, and if it's disaster we're after there are few safer hands for it to be in, directorially speaking, than Guy Ritchie's. But hope is not enough.
Let's go to work.
27 comments:
But how do you really feel, Matthew? *grins*
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I had heard this version was based on the comic(s) and not so much the original novels.
(I stopped hawking Viagra a week ago, lucky you!)
Eww, the when I saw the trailer at the cinema some time ago I thought it was some kind of a joke. Then I felt deep, deep despair.
What happens to this world? I really didn't have any high hopes for humanity, and still I'm depressed. Sherlock Holmes looking like a Belgian Blue, naked in a bed, the film title exploding... I repressed the rest.
I. Am. So. Horrified.
Ugh, Matty you got me a bit scared with this post ... take a deep breath ... oooommm ..... ooooommmm :)))
But I actually do agree with you. I don't understand the obsession with this movie (just as I don't understand the obsession with violent and irresponsible directors such are Tarantino or Richie), and I also do think that it looks like a nonsensical joke compared to famous ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES with sensational Jeremy Brett.
haha great post. I saw some clips on the news last night. and the fighting? lol the Guy Ritchie had the idea that sherlock was written as an athletic pro?. Its looks way too over the top. I will definitely not be seeing this crap.
it looks like sherlock holmes meets james bond. aka wrong on so many different levels. their defense is that holmes and watson were not as portly and old timey as they seem in past films but in "updating" it they've just totally obliterated any of the charm the novels and past films had. granted i have not watched the version with jeremy brett.
I stopped watching the trailer. UGH. As an antidote to all of this : starting at 5PM PST Dec 25, TCM USA will be showing Sherlock Holmes movies for 24 hours.
I know a lot of the old Hollywood Holme's movies are seldom faithful in plot to Conan Doyle, but they are much more faithful in spirit - and most important - just fun to watch.
Marvelous, marvelous post!!! As you can imagine, I wasn't planning on seeing this film to begin with but by golly I'll make sure I tell everyone I know not to either!! :D
I am in total agreement with you, Mr Coniam. The words "cinematic abomination" come to mind. Holmes in the books is, despite his occasional drug use, rather ascetic. To have him played by one of the most debauched actors still living is a travesty.
I think they just raped the Sherlock Holmes legend. I think Basil Rathbone and Conan Doyle both are turning in their graves, spinning so fast that they could support the entire American continent with electricity for a lifetime.
Matthew: My dear friend, I am so afraid you are bound for unhappiness here. This film has Robert Downer, Jr. playing his perpetual, fifty-year old, I’ve-never-really-worked-a-goddamn-day-in-my-life druggie bad boy with his shirt off. This is box office gold considering the current state of the piss hole we have come to call "Hollywood." I'm just grateful they didn't make Holmes a vampire with dark eyeliner into the bargain.
I would do anything if I could burn this film to ashes; throw the grey remnants into a pit in the swamp, then cover the bubbling pit with lime. Then, once that is accomplished, publicly flog every cursed person that had anything to do with its production, from star to key grip - just one, long line of public torture – done out of doors in a football stadium on the fifty yard line. Finally, for good measure, I view it as essential to sear, using laser technology, the memory of its production from every single living human brain that has viewed this trailer, myself included. But, alas, my powers are limited and we are all the worse for it. All I can do is watch this turn into box office gold over the holidays. Frankly, it all makes me want to take massive quantities of Viagra and screw myself into oblivion.
I do wish the news was better. -- Mykal
Thanks to you all!
I hereby appoint each and every one of you honourary commandos of the RRA (Rathbone Revolutionary Army).
I should probably not admit this, but I went to see it. Christmas morning in fact. Final analysis is that I've seen worse Sherlock Holmes movies, but I've also seen much, much better. And seeing this film make me start "Sherlock Sunday" on my 'Watching the Detectives' blog. Maybe it'll inspire some folks to look even harder for the old Holmes movies.
That said, Guy Ritchie appears to have degraded in talent over the past decade rather than increased. "Snatch" was a much better film in every way than "Sherlock Holmes."
Did I know you had a Watching the Detectives blog? I don't think so... I'm off there now, hoping to find that you are a fellow Chanatic...
Just out of interest, what Holmes films are in your opinion worse than this one???
"The Deadly Necklace" springs immediately to mind.
There was also one from the early 1930s--I forget the title and I don't seem to ever have bothered writing any notes on it--where Holmes was updated to then-modern times and had a room full of secretaries and some sort of computer/switchboard hat alerted him to crimes. Hopefully, I'll come across it again, as I work my way trough each and every Holmes film I can find.
And there were a couple of Rathbone Holmes that didn't sit well with me, but I'll be going over them all again and putting up reviews. (I also didn't take many notes, because i viewed most of those during a period where I was burned out on writing opinion pieces.)
And "Watching the Detectives" is a new addition to the blog line-up. It's part of my ongoing effort to sort and repost the thousands of reviews I've written for RT and elsewhere.
"switchboard THAT alerted him," not "switchboard hat" :D
Awww, I was really hoping he had a switchboard hat...
Actually, I know the film well. It's The Speckled Band, with Raymond Massey as Holmes. I really like it, actually.
Deadly Necklace and the like are fairly uninspired little quickies, and some of the Rathbones are plainly better than others...
all are hardly faithful to the letter of the books... but that isn't my problem with the Ritchie film.
It is the wilful, self-back-patting iconoclasm, served up by tossers in the mistaken belief that desecration is innovation. A different universe of disrespect from Rathbone fighting Nazis, or Massey with his ante-room of perky thirties stenographers.
over at the Volokh Conspiracy there is a endorsement of the movie:
http://volokh.com/2009/12/30/fear-not-sherlock-holmes/
quote
For those of you expecting what the trailer promised: a bloated, confusing, noisy, headache-inducing Christmas blockbuster weighed down with CGI and barely made watchable by the presence of He Who Makes Everything Better – star Robert Downey Jr. – you’re in for a surprise.
unquote
I still don't want to see it. But apparently the trailer is a lot worse than the film. I like to read the novels and stories best of all. For visual entertainment I like the old black and white movies with Rathbone, Wontner, Massey, Owen.
Matthew,
I have a friend who swears by the Massey Homles. I may have to seek that one out in short order for my "Sherlock Sunday" project. Heck, it could be when I refresh myself on the old Holmes films--which I haven't in most cases looked at in a good number of years--my opinion of Ritchie's movie will change a little.
But, as far as the film at hand goes, I understand where you're coming from. I felt the same way over Frank Miller crapping all over Will Eisner's The Spirit. I didn't feel this was quite as extreme an abuse, and I just took it to be yet another ill-conceived Hollywood adaptation of a great bit of pop culture. It seems just about EVERY filmmaker out there thinks they're smarter and better than real creative geniuses, like Poe and Doyle and Eisner. Invariably, they are wrong and that's why their adaptations suck.
(Actually, a guy who I think would have an interesting take on Holmes is John Johnson. He wrote and directed the only fully faithful adaptation of "Dracula" that I've come across.)
Hooray for you Matthew!!! This is my thoughts exactly on Robert Downer, Jr's Sherlock. (Borrowing Mykal's terrific phraseology there) I wasn't planning on seeing it either, but I will certainly take up the anti-Downer cause for you!
I didn't know about the further insult of Brat Pitt additions. Heaven save us from HIS Moriarty.
The TCM marathon, though supposedly planned to promote the modern release, only served to cement my love for the Rathbone/Bruce films and reinforce my opinions of anything directed by Guy Richie. I almost wonder if TCM did it on purpose for that very reason...
Anyway, count me in! :D
Pah! to that about the trailer being worse than the film. Either the bits where Holmes leaps out of a window into the river, fights a man on a building site to comic set-piece effect and is chained naked to a bed with only a cushion covering his balls are not in the film at all, in which case it's the weirdest trailer of all time, or they are, in which case it's the worst film of all time. I can see no middle ground here.
I must repeat, the problem is not that the film is not slavishly faithful to the letter and spirit of the originals - Hollywood has a long and distinguished history of not getting the point of great books, and that's fine - it's that it's a work that assumes the legacy in which it trades doesn't count for anything.
I'm with you, Noir Girl...
I've finally finished watching all the recordings I made of the TCM marathon. Not having TIVO, I set my alarm to get up at 530 in the morning to plonk in another disc. Very satisfying entertainment. (Except for the 60's-70's color films, not my style.) Was it Arthur Conan Doyle? No. Were they fun to watch? You betcha!
I don't know how it's doing across the pond, but here - where we have so little taste that even The Golden Compass was a hit - its currently number two at the box office.
Goodbye, Mr Holmes. It was nice knowing you.
I haven't seen the film nor have I any intention of but I thought that you might enjoy this piece about it from The Guardian…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog/2010/jan/06/sherlock-holmes-homophobia
damian
Yikes.
Dear Matthew
I worked on the catalogue of the Basil Rathbone Collection for Gravesend Books in the 1970s. It now resides at Boston University. Going through the effects and correspondence, I came away revering Rathbone even more than I had, but disliking Ouida immensely. This was a conundrum because Basil adored Ouida.
Cataloguing the collection was the culmination of a long term interest. It started with the Universal films of the 1940s because I had not seen the Fox versions at that time. For years, my wife and I were on the fringe of the Sherlockian circle in the States, less so on the Holmesian group in England. Although we did visit the great Holmesian scholar, Michael Harrison at Hove in 1980. We knew Richard Lancelyn Green slightly – his demise might make a suitable added sequence to Dead of Night.
The very old time Sherlockians loved Gillette (on stage), my generation revered Rathbone, and most everyone now agrees that Brett was the most canonical. Personally, I loved Robert Stephens in the Wilder film, although the Watson was a bit off the mark. As to the Downey film, take comfort in the fact that it will probably be better than any of its sequels. Alas.
Gerald
Gordon -
Thanks for commenting so interestingly.
How fascinating that you knew these eminent Sherlockians! I must find out more from you about all this. I like Private Life very much too, though I think my favourite Holmes all in all is Douglas Wilmer. I visited and interviewed him recently: the interview is on this site if you're interested; just click on his name in the index list.
I love Rathbone, Cushing, Brett etc too, of course. Norwood is the old-time Holmes who most intrigues me. Oh, and I also have a soft spot for Arthur Wontner. I'd hate for people to lose any sense that there is a right way and a wrong way of handling these stories, and while the right way allows for a huge amount of diversity there are still lines that cannot be crossed unless in explicit parody.
What does your enigmatic Dead of Night reference mean? Like so much on your own site it intrigues me greatly...
Very best wishes,
Matthew
Matthew
A clarification on my comment that Richard Lancelyn Green’s demise might make a suitable added sequence to Dead of Night. Richard was a fine bibliographer and
seemed a good fellow, but there was quite a bit of controversy about his death. One of the more straightforward accounts of the incident can be found in the BBC link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/3653645.stm
Film is my frame of reference, so it occurred to me that the unusual events surrounding Richard’s death, and its method, were bizarre enough to fit into the Dead of Night framework. Perhaps the “cuddly toys” reminded me of the ventriloquist’s dummy.
On reflection, a better allusion might have been that Barton Keyes might look askance at a suicide verdict -- by garroting, using a shoelace and a wooden spoon, and surrounded by cuddly toys.
Gerald
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