Sherlock Holmes

Posted on December 24, 2009 at 5:01 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Middle School
MPAA Rating:	Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of violence and action, some startling images and a scene of suggestive material
Profanity:	Some mild language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, sedation
Violence/ Scariness:	Action violence, hanging, martial arts, guns, poison gas, and various Victorian weapons, explosions, some grotesque and grisly images including corpses
Diversity Issues:	Strong, independent, capable (if criminal) woman
Date Released to Theaters:	December 25, 2009

Perhaps even the great detective himself could not solve the mystery of why Sherlock Holmes holds the Guinness Book of World Records title for having been portrayed on screen than any other fictional character, with more than 75 actors in more than 200 movies. And it would be hard to find any movie and television detective who does not draw something from Holmes’ mastery of the power of observation (“Lie to Me,” “The Mentalist”). There is something endlessly fascinating about the idea that someone could look at us and see what others are hiding from us, and even about the idea that he could see what we are hiding, too.

So here we are again with another Sherlock Holmes, this one from Robert Downey, Jr. and director Guy Ritchie. And that means an edgier, grubbier, somewhat younger Holmes. While stage and screen versions of the stories have generally focused on Holmes as a sort of hyper-controlled super-brain with little emotion or physicality, this version expands on a reference in the original Arthur Conan Doyle texts to Holmes’ being adept at “baritsu,” a form of martial arts and has a two-fisted Holmes who fights bad guys and even mixes it up just for fun. It also focuses on the books’ notion that Holmes was good at detection because he was bad at everything else and that unless he was completely involved in a case he considered worth his attention he does not have any other way to interact with the world.

Dr. Watson, portrayed as a bit stuffy and more of a biographer than a partner for Holmes, in this version is played by the not-at-all-stuffy Jude Law as someone who struggles with his own demons (a gambling problem) and loves the adrenaline rush as well as the sense of justice and the fun of fighting along side his talented friend. But things are changing. He has met a woman he wants to marry and that means moving out of the flat on Baker Street he shares with Holmes and less time for crime-fighting.

Downey is always at his considerable best with a character who has some boundary issues and his Holmes is as taut as the violin strings he plucks between cases. His eyes are the most expressive on screen since Al Pacino, large, liquid, knowing. Downey conveys the almost compulsive, almost Aspergers aspects of the Holmes character. In one scene, he waits for Watson at a restaurant, unable to stop noticing the dark, the sad, the painful at the tables around him. He seems to drink it all in through his eyes, ears, and pores on his skin. And his need to understand and conquer the worst of humanity outside him seems connected to a struggle within himself — and between him and Irene Adler, for Sherlock Holmes, Conan Doyle wrote, “the woman.” Here she is deliciously played by Rachel McAdams, suiting his description of Irene as having “the face of the most beautiful of women, and the mind of the most resolute of men,” and fetching in bustle and boy-clothes.

Production designer Sarah Greenwood has done a magnificent job of creating Victorian London and part of the fun is seeing some of the now-iconic structures still under construction — always a handy place for a fight scene, too. Ritchie’s kinetic camerawork lends a muscular energy that keeps the story from feeling antique. And getting used to a young, energetic Holmes who can throw a punch is not as difficult as you might think.

But other parts of the movie do not work as well. Ritchie, whose best films celebrate the gritty underworld of big and small-time crooks, seems to be more comfortable for some of the mid-level thieves, arsonists, and hoodlums Holmes and Watson run into, and every time they leave the scene a little bit of the life of the film goes with them. Mark Strong is not given nearly enough to do as the villain (titled, of course) and the mystery is not clever enough to make the resolution satisfying. You don’t have to be a super-sleuth to see the holes in the plot. Downey is better detecting than he is trading odd couple banter with Law, but so would anyone. Who could have imagined that in a Sherlock Holmes movie the fight scenes replacing the deductions would ring truer than the dialogue replacing “Elementary, my dear Watson?”

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Posted on December 13, 2009 at 7:58 am

In his last two movies, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) was becoming an adolescent. In this gripping and atmospheric film, based on the sixth book in the series, Harry Potter is becoming a man. He knows who he is and what he must do. He is angry and at times he is still impatient. He is developing confidence and judgment. But he is not yet ready to admit to himself, much less to Ron Weasley’s sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright) that he likes her very much.

Once again, author J.K. Rowling and screenwriter Steve Kloves expertly blend the most intimate and personal of teenage feelings with the grander concerns about the fate of the world. Indeed the two themes do more than blend; they complement each other. The threats deepen and become more complex as the children grow up. The personal is political, and vice versa.

As the film begins, the disturbances in the wizard world have become so pervasive that even the muggle society is affected. In an early scene that highlights sleek, post-industrial London, we see a bridge collapse due to a form of terrorist attack by the Death Eaters, the followers of He Who Must Not Be Named. But then we are back to the Victorian intricacies of the wizard world of Diagon Alley and Hogwarts. Harry is reputed to be the “chosen one” who can defeat Lord Voldemort. But there is another chosen one. Draco Malfoy, his father disgraced and in prison, returns to Hogwarts having undertaken some task so dangerous that his mother and aunt have visited Professor Snape (Alan Rickman) to insist on his unbreakable vow to provide support and protection.

Director David Yates and “Amelie” cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel brilliantly evoke the magical world, narrow, constricting spaces emphasizing the dire circumstances and adult awareness closing in on the characters. The special effects are organic and absorbing. Oddly, just moments after a beautiful transformation from easy chair to wizard, the one effect that does not work as smoothly is the simplest, as the footage is run backwards to magically restore a room that has been trashed. But the more complex effects and the overall look of the film are superb.

There is a new teacher of Defense Against the Dark Arts, of course. This time it is Snape, his Potions class taken over by Professor Slughorn (Jim Broadbent), who shows a special fondness for “collecting” star students like Harry but whose memory holds a crucial key to Voldemort’s strength — and his vulnerability. An exposition-heavy entry in the book series that sets up the powerful final volume (being split in two for filming) is absorbing on screen due to its control of tone and atmosphere and some truly creepy moments involving Helena Bonham Carter, happily gruesome as Bellatrix Lestrange and a couple of marvelously-staged action sequences.

There are classroom scenes as Harry finds help in an old potions textbook with an inscription that says it belonged to the “Half-Blood Prince” and extensive annotations that help him become a top student. There is a Quidditch game and a battle in one of the huge Hogwarts bathrooms. But increasingly the activities of Harry and his loyal friends Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson).expand beyond the classrooms. Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) relies on Harry for help in exposing Voldemort, their relationship developing into more of a partnership. Dumbledore’s most important lesson may be that Harry can do some things that even Dumbeldore cannot. This makes us, as well as Harry, all the more eager to see what comes next.

A Single Man

Posted on December 10, 2009 at 3:22 pm

Lowest Recommended Age:	Mature High Schooler
MPAA Rating:	Rated R for some disturbing images and nudity/sexual content
Profanity:	Strong language
Alcohol/ Drugs:	Drinking, drunkenness
Violence/ Scariness:	Attempted suicide, aftermath of car crash with bloody body, themes of grief and loss
Diversity Issues:	A theme of the movie
Date Released to Theaters:	December 11, 2009

Designer Tom Ford has exquisite taste, and his first movie is an exquisite movie. Based on a story by Christopher Isherwood, as adapted by Ford, it is the story of one day in the life of a British literature professor in Los Angeles, shortly after the loss of his male lover in a car crash. It is November 30, 1962. And so the awful isolation of grief is multiplied by his inability to acknowledge what they were to each other and who he really is.

Ford’s images are so meticulously arranged they feel like a perfume commercial. There is a remote quality that distances us from what is going on. But there are moments, as when we see a flashback of the professor (Colin Firth) getting the news from a sympathetic relative who has to deliver the message that the funeral is “family only” where the grief and the pain of holding it in is raw and real and devastating.

Firth is revelatory as the professor who feels that his truest self and his deepest emotions are invisible in a world in which being gay is still “the love that dare not speak its name.” We see in memory the man he loved (the always-enticing Matthew Goode) and in the present his encounters with a curiously attentive but respectful student (Nicholas Hoult, all grown up since “About a Boy”). And he spends the evening with his closest friend, a boozy fellow British expatriate (Julianne Moore) with whom he believes he can be almost completely honest, but who still sees him as she wishes he was. There is a hint that all of what happens on this last day could be in his mind; I suspect that it is, but either way, we are caught up in his emotions and his story.

Public Enemies

Posted on December 8, 2009 at 8:00 am

Back before the days when trashy faux celebrities from tawdry reality shows merited magazine covers and “gangsta” rappers postured and pretended to be killers, there was once a romanticized fascination with actual killers with names like “Baby Face” and “Pretty Boy.”

John Dillinger needed no infantalized nickname. He robbed at least 24 banks and killed several people, including police officers. But he had a rakish audacity and an innate populism that endeared him to people during the depths of the Depression. “I’m not here for your money,” he says to one bank customer who had the bad luck to be there during a robbery. “I’m here for the bank’s money.”

Dillinger became the most wanted man in America by law enforcement authorities and helped inspire the enactment of new federal laws and increases in budget and authority for the FBI. His story, ended when he was gunned down by the FBI coming out of the Biograph Theater in Chicago, has been the subject of many books and movies, and now this latest starring Johnny Depp as Dillinger, Christian Bale as FBI agent Melvin Purvis, and directed by Michael Mann (“Miami Vice,” “Collateral”).

In this diligent but somehow chilly and uninvolving retelling of the story the details seems right and Depp delivers a performance of enormous depth, maturity, and appeal. Bale, however, is a cipher as Pervis, leaving the story unbalanced.

It’s a forest and trees problem. The details are all careful and often arresting, but there’s no real sense of what the movie’s overall story is or why it is being told. We know how it will end, indeed we are there to see the big shootout, but that removes much of the suspense. Depp is fascinating as always but Dillinger himself is not all that interesting. Is he a sociopath? Is it desperation or rebellion? The focus on just the last portion of his short life does not give us enough of a clue. When he has the inevitable crime movie scene with Dillinger and his devoted girlfriend (Oscar-winner Marion Cotillard as a Depression-era Bess the landlord’s daughter), dreaming of escaping to a peaceful life, it is unconnected to anything about him we have seen before. What do we learn from this violent man’s devotion to one woman? He is impulsive but cagey, shrewd about today but not about next week, cocky but fatalistic.

And the movie fails to connect in any meaningful way to the parallels in today’s world. It’s a hat movie, pretty good but nothing more.

Once again, we now have a population that might secretly side with someone who robs banks, feeling that it is a just reversal of what the banks have done to us. But these days, we don’t glamorize criminals any more. We’re too busy keeping up with Jon and Kate.

Related Tags:

Based on a book Biography Crime Drama

Julie & Julia

Posted on December 8, 2009 at 8:00 am

“Julie & Julia” is — I can’t help it — a scrumptiously satisfying film about writer/director Nora Ephron’s two favorite subjects: food and marriage.It is based on two true stories. Julia Child revolutionized American notions about food with her cookbook and PBS series that brought haute cuisine to the “servantless” American housewife in the early 1960’s. Cookbooks and magazines in those days had recipes that included canned peas and crushed potato chips. But Child (Meryl Streep), newly settled in Paris with her diplomat husband, Paul (Stanley Tucci) fell in love with the fresh, subtle, deeply sensual quality of French cooking and decided to study at the Cordon Bleu. She was an unlikely epicure and an even more unlikely spokeswoman, over six feet tall and with a rather horsey quality, a voice with a trill that made her sound like a cross between Eleanor Roosevelt and Miss Francis of the Ding-Dong School. But she was passionate, knowledgeable, accessible, and completely fearless. She boned a duck with knives that could slice through granite and scooped up food from the floor and put it back on the plate, crisply assuring her audience that it was all right because no one could see them in the kitchen. Americans fell in love with boeuf bourguignon, chocolate mousse, and with Julia, too. Half a century later, Julie Powell (Amy Adams) was in need of some of Julia’s resolute forthrightness. While her “cobb salad lunch” friends made million-dollar deals on their cell phones, Julie had a half-finished novel and a job answering the phone in a cubicle, listening to the problems of people seeking help with their 9/11-related injuries and losses. She and her husband Eric (Chris Messina) lived in a tiny, dingy apartment over a pizza place, with a handkerchief-sized kitchen. But Julie wanted to do something big and important. She wanted to finish something. And so she decided to work her way through Julia’s famous cookbook, to take on every recipe including deboning a duck, to do it all in one year, and to do it in public, on the then-novel outlet of a blog. Both Julie and Julia were drawn to the literally hands-on nature of cooking, the sense of purpose and mastery, and the generosity of it. Ephron’s screenplay, based on memoirs by each of its main characters, touches on the parallels without overdoing it. And one of the sweetest is the rare portrayal of tender, devoted, and, yes, very passionate married love, even more palpably luscious than the abbondanza array of diet-busting delicacies.It is the Julia story that is the heart of this film and it is Meryl Streep who is at the heart of this story. A little bit of movie magic makes the 5’6″ actress tower over her co-stars and even the furniture. But it is sheer, once-to-a-planet acting that makes Child so touching and inspiring. No one is more adorable than Amy Adams, and she wrinkles her little nose and throws her little tantrums as a twinkly romantic movie heroine must. But Streep as Child is revelatory, real, and irresistible. In one scene, when she responds to some good news from her sister (wonderfully played by Jane Lynch), the mixture of emotions that cross Streep’s face in a moment tell us of decades of pain. In another, as the Childs and their friends celebrate Valentine’s Day, we see an expression of love and trust so deep and enduring and joyous and sexy that it makes most expressions of movie romance feel like whipped cream made with skim milk and fake sugar.This is a movie about food and love and courage and dreams and lots and lots of butter, and doing something — cooking or acting — brilliantly and with gusto. And it is delicious, nourishing, and good to the last drop. (more…)