It’s delightfully shocking how few holiday movies I was able to tolerate in the festive season past. I am officially bah!- humbugging with the best of them, still very much a Christmas type (first to bring out the tree, smiling more, loath to bring the tree down, and so on), but bah!- humbugging, I say, when the coals are warm and the brain-matter is caffeinated, as if bah!- humbugging is scheduled to become an Olympic event soon. I am no longer faintly amused by the Fred Clauses of this world, no matter how many Paul Giamattis or Rachel Weiszes are thrown at me. I do not subscribe to the notions of mistletoe romance, and I do not make time for those Ben Affleck feel-goods full of snow; partly because Ben Affleck does not make any more time for them either. I may entertain thought of another Santa Clause film, but only if Tim Allen is fitted a portlier belly.
It’s possible it’s almost the end – that lunacy and self-destruction await, herein depriving me of my patience for the small things; or that I am becoming Harvey Weinstein. It’s also possible I’m just pissed, at the local cineplex’s inability to recognise that beyond the tinsel and the lights and the upset tummies, it is in fact Oscar season. It is downright heinous that any short-term screening of Up In the Air is up in the air, and that the appropriate parties are wholly blind to the beauty of pictures like An Education, or Me & Orson Welles; that instead the Twilight sequel’s been showing long enough for a dozen viewings, before or after which I could write its plot down on a business card; that for Pete’s sake I have not seen Inglorious Basterds yet. I know – it’s unbelievable, incomprehensible, that there’s no appetite for intelligent cinema in my present corner of the world; but the simple truth is that people where I live are not bah!- humbugging enough.
Then again... chances are they’re not bah!- humbugging enough where you live either. Maybe there’s a shortage of some kind, a deficit somewhere, or maybe it’s just time I took the canoli out again. I really didn’t want to. I’m in a support-group, attending meetings, and making busy with colouring books so I don’t have to take the canoli out – but the planet at large has just got to kidding me: every last one of you.
James Cameron, if I must start somewhere, for blowing this much money on a movie spilling over with cliché. Some studio executive for giving Cameron the money to blow on such a cliché salad. E!’s Ben Lyons, who I used to trust completely, for letting me pump more money into the big blue machine that is Avatar.
I’ve been involved in some stimulating conversations about James Cameron, in the run-up to actually seeing Avatar. I’ve met loads of disgruntled Terminator saddos, still reeling from the ineffects of Salvation last year, and truck-loads of schmucks who, like me, have yet to see Titanic. There is both scorn and admiration in what enthusiasm or perhaps passivity it takes to spend ten years directing a single movie.
I told a friend I loved Judgement Day about as much as any Terminator saddo, but said I found it hard to appreciate directors whose insignia was hard to identify; which this friend, a Phwoar! staffer no less, countered brilliantly, by asking me to suppose therein the genius lay.
When, in fact, therein the blank cheques lay. It was terribly insipid of me to bring up M. Knight Shyamalan, just because he too is shooting a film called Avatar, and/or Martin Scorsese, as I can barely discuss cinema without bringing up Scorsese, to argue the case for insignia. I quite rightly pointed out that gigantic special effects are more often than not meant to cover a lack of real directorial input, but somehow forgot to praise Steven Spielberg for always looking, no matter what the visual, for that shot no man has filmed before.
There’s a certain detachment from Cameron, once he’s given you something bright and shiny to drool over. I don’t underestimate his efforts; but the plot, a moral coin-toss on how an American security firm should approach a resource-rich alien civilisation, is ripped right off a headline on Iraq, and so’s the dialogue. All the central characters – the conscientious marine, the all-knowing scientist, the bad-ass army general, the sexy extra-terrestrial love-interest – all the ones you’re meant to be paying attention to, all are excruciatingly tiresome caricatures that Cameron, finally re-emerging, has brought back with him from the Nineties. It doesn’t help that despite all the graphical wizardry on show, Cameron’s eight-foot tall, Masai-styled aliens really aren’t that pretty.
They tame outerworldy pterodactyls and fly them – they perform a strange chant and eerily erotic dance when they need to contact their god – and they speak a language that somebody human took the trouble to ‘invent’. Welcome to 2010, Mr. Cameron: you’ll be surprised to discover, I’m sure, that we really have seen it all before.
I have never needed so desperately to get back into the theatre and purify myself of inconsiderate writing. Coincidentally, there’s something deeply inconsiderate about turning Sherlock Holmes, all literature’s favourite detective, into an unabashed cad.
I do like a good cad, fortunately, especially if his behaviour is being marshalled by one Robert Downey Jr. Would all the tit-wankers still reading this, please, kindly leave the room? With all due respect to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries were a veritable bore. There was a flourish, here and there, to Conan-Doyle’s writing, but a pattern also to his mysteries, emblematic of the formula that once sustained Scooby Doo cartoons, and a weekliness, if only you’d read them then, that must have made the series feel like a Victorian CSI.
Decent crime-writing, as with decent detecting, makes sure to tie up all its loose-ends. Mr. Holmes did so every after a waffling case – Conan-Doyle did not, depositing all reason, through Watson, at the feet of Holmes’ superior intellect. Unless you were big on Ludo, it was impossible to read through Holmes’ adventures and crack a case before he did, by wholly rational investigation, because almost always there was something only Holmes knew.
Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock is an unshaven, self-congratulating Englishman who loves his country and derives no pleasure from tea or crossword puzzles, but not exactly how Conan-Doyle painted him. This Sherlock is a social invalid with dependencies, a Sherlock whose pipe could contain absolutely anything, a Sherlock who enjoys mud-fighting coachmen beneath London’s streets, a Sherlock who talks too much, a Sherlock who has trouble concealing his erections... One could go on and on extrapolating how cool, how suddenly so human Ritchie and Downey Jr. make the man.
The director is simply the finest, grittiest portrait artist of London Hollywood has, and it’s uncanny how the actor never fails to make me walk away from his work with a spring in my step. Downey Jr., goddamnit, makes me want to chat up other people’s women and undermine several laws of physics, and honestly I am in the habit of doing neither. He can do it in an accent, too, and all it takes is five minutes at that acclaimed dude-pad on Baker’s Street, to begin to wonder who on earth, Sherlock or Downey Jr, is pretending to be who. “It appears, Watson, that I’m beginning rather to get away with myself.”
That last quote was this blogger as Sherlock, putting a check on that last paragraph. Conversations, again, suggested Jude Law would prove hyperbolic as John Watson, but among the dues Law is never paid are plaudits for how willing he is to compliment his fellow actors – see Road To Perdition, Enemy At The Gates, Closer, and My Blueberry Nights even, and be dazzled this time by how much work he’s putting in. Ritchie does him a favour, by rendering Watson the moral authority of the duo, and not just the humble Robin Sherlock’s Batman once condescended to at will.
Ritchie realises maybe he only gets to shoot one Sherlock movie, and thus waves a fine tapestry between a couple of the original tales, to form and fill a potent ensemble. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is a major player rather than just a hot client, Chief Inspector Lestrade (Eddie Marsas) isn’t nearly as daft as he is in the books, and Professor Moriarty, curiously conspicuous up to a point, is fucking frightening. The bass-clouded still of villainous Lord Blackwood hanging dead above the Thames offers sufficient testimony, all by itself, to show Guy Ritchie some respect.
Get the man a drink, once you’ve romped and rollicked through this charming picture, and sound the call of Knighthood for Downey Jr., sheriff of England.
