Sherlock Holmes

When I teach the Sherlock Holmes stories to my kids, one of the first questions they have to ask is "are Holmes and Watson gay?" And it is a fair question, one that this new film makes little effort to put to bed, so to speak. Overall, the film is kind of OK, nothing that particularly insulted my intelligence but nothing that particularly engaged me. The thing that did fascinate me, however, is how close Holmes, Watson and the Holmes formula itself stayed true to the source material.

Now I am sure there is a small army of Sherlockians (or whatever) pooh-poohing the movie, possibly in the manner of Star Trek fans who were insulted that last summer's film didn't feature more people sitting around tables. But as a layfan of Holmes, I was quite impressed as to how Guy Ritchie managed to take one hundred and fifteen year old source material and make it into a contemporary adventure film.

While the film overall was not as engaging as I would like, there were still elements within the film that were particularly strong. Holmes's inner monologues as he thinks and assesses possibilities as the world moves in slow motion around him, as well as the dinner scene (if you have seen it) where the camera and sound design allow us to observe that Holmes is seeing and hearing everything around him; he can't shut himself down, he can't get his mind to slow.

Overall, Sherlock Holmes was an alright film with some very good touches that I appreciated more on an academic level than a visceral one. But Robert Downey Jr is always fun, Jude Law actually plays someone with a sense of humour, and Guy Ritchie has remembered how to direct films now that he is Madonna free.

(500) Days of Summer

On the plane back from Egypt the other day, I watched Up and it made me cry. It was a very good film. But I also watched (500) Days of Summer, and despite it being clearly inferior to Up, it has really stuck with me.

The thing about is I honestly can't figure out why it works. It was a really engaging, enjoyable movie that has so many flaws as to be almost comic. But the movie still transcends the sum of its parts to be emotionally resonant.

In a nutshell, the movie depicts the 500 days between a greeting card writer (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meeting a girl named Summer (Zoey Deschanel), falling in love with her, being dumped by her, and getting over her. The "hook", as it were, is that the movie is non-linear - we jump back in forth in their relationship as moments resonate back and forth over time. That is quite clever and very effective.

I think the greatest flaw of the film is the non-personality of the characters. The film is built around the relationship between these two, but we learn so little about them and who they are as to almost be a joke. They are hastily sketched by pop culture references and favourite bands. The first time they talk, it is about the Smiths. Basically, she is quirky and he is enchanted, and you have seen them in all sorts of other films in the last decade and that is all you need, the film makers decide. And, you know what, that is all you need.

The film isn's so much about them as it is about their relationship. And relationships are different beasts than people. We don't need to know why he is in love with her; what matters is that he is in love with Summer. As the movie progressed, it became clear that Summer was a McGuffin, the point wasn't her, but Tom's (I had to look up the character's name) feelings for her. There have been a lot of films about "relationships," but usually they are about people having relationships. This movie really was about a relationship, and as ambiguous and non-specific as that sounds, it somehow worked. That overall, nebulous idea overcame the dramatic shifts in tone and level of realism, the unknowable characters, the twee shorthand and the scene stealing kid sister. The heart of the film worked fantastic and allowed everything else to work with it. The emotional honesty and love and pain in the film pulled the whole thing together to make a charming, engaging and at times painful film to watch.

So, rent it or watch it on a plane or a movie channel. I just needed to type my way through my thoughts. Summer is a McGuffin. There you go.

MK - Further to our discussion earlier today ...

Doctor Who: the End of Sense Part 1

Russell T Davies has written a lot of great episodes of Doctor Who. Like, really great - "Midnight", "Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways", "Gridlock", "The Sound of Drums". He also wrote, what is to me, the worst episode of New Who, he wrote 'New Earth,' the series two opener, an overstuffed, campy run around that barely made sense, even when squinting. And now, with 'The End of Time Part One'. Finally, after years of trying, Davies has managed to top himself with something even more terrible.

At his worst, Davies's scripts have a first draft quality where odd things seem to happen in odd places and audacious, ridiculous ideas exist for the sake of being audacious and ridiculous. The results aren't always good, but they are usually at least entertaining. Most of of Doctor Who's specials fall into this category. Only 'The Christmas Invasion' and last month's 'The Water's of Mars' are what I would call particularly good. But while rarely approaching Who at its best (or Davies at his best), the specials have at least been overblown spectacles that have their own certain charms. But finally, with part one of his swan song, Davies has managed to make Doctor Who charmless.

Right from the word go, with Timothy Dalton's rather inelegant narration about "bad dreams," "The End of Time Part One" came across as simply dire. I literally could not believe what I was watching it was so bad. Actually, that is not entirely true - Wilf in the church was actually a good scene, and then the cafe scene was fantastic - but almost every other scene was terrible. It verged on non-linear, the scene to scene movement. Wilf and the oldies - including that woman who wants to sell insurance to other oldies (now that pulled me out of the show) - seemed to be in a completely different show than the strange quasi-mystical resurrection of the Master, and then all the scenes in the industrial wasteland where the Master can now fly and has laser hands, and then the guy who plays Friar Tuck in Robin Hood shows up on auto-pilot, and the werewolf's girlfriend from 'Being Human' is a cactus alien, and none of it made sense together. And holy fuck, John Simm must have just been desperate for some mustard, because his performance was nothing but ham and cheese. Simm is a really good actor, but his Master, so sinister back in Series 3, was trying to out camp old Who's Master. I mean, the episode literally ended with a solid minute of Master laughter! I timed it! A full minute of laughing while all sorts of ridiculous Simm in a dress or a too large suit sight gags played.

And then Timothy Dalton announced that the Time Lords were coming back, which is a terrible idea, because the show is far better off without them, but whatever. By that point I was so shell shocked at what I was watching it almost didn't matter. I know this was a "Part One," but I still can't figure out what the actual plot of the episode was, other than maybe some people look for the Doctor, some people (including the Doctor) look for the Master, and then out of nowhere the Master makes the world into an Aphex Twin video, but without anyone saying, "Roll on".

This hasn't been a particularly coherent review, but it wasn't a particularly coherent episode. I really, really, really hope Part Two is better, but really, it can't get much worse.

Anal Anal Animals in the Court of King Moonracer

OK, weather permitting - and it is not very permitting right now - I am off to Egypt to enjoy Christmas somewhere warm. But in the meantime, please, attempt to enjoy my Christmas gift to you, the Anal Anal Animals Christmas EP, In the Court of King Moonracer. King Moonracer, if you have forgotten, is the King of the Island of Misfit Toys.

You can find the EP at: http://www.sendspace.com/file/e35vug.

It is six original songs plus a reissue of the classic Kissing Time Christmas release, You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch added as a bonus track.

Haiku of the Day

I have had enough!

I'm not going to go to work

For the next two weeks.

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Haiku of the Day

It's a basic fact:

Diagonal cut toast

Is simply the best.

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Haiku of the Day

Scrape frosty windows,
Blowing hands to keep them warm;
A proper winter.

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Haiku of the Day

Dark winter morning,

Breath appears and turns to ice -

Hanging in the air.

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Sunday Afternoon at Some Wholesaler

This afternoon Mademoiselle Kitty, R-Kid and myself went on a trip to North America.

It was fantastic - giant shopping carts, giant sized packages, giant deals - this afternoon, we went to the London Costco.

North Americans, you know what I am talking about, but to the British reading this: Costco is a members only wholesale warehouse. Everything is available in bulk sized packages and containers - toilet paper comes in packages of forty-eight rolls, for example. We found a package of PG Tips that contained 1620 tea bags. Yes, sixteen hundred tea bags.

We worried that the London Costco would be a British version Costco - a cheap, tacky, decidedly inferior attempt at something similar to a Costco but missing the mark. Britain is fantastic for this sort of cultural failing. It does British things very well, but in its love affair with North America, very often when it tries to recreate North American things it misses the mark completely, bungling so many of the details. But Costco was right. It was proper.

So it was decidedly nostalgic to visit it and shop, browse around at all the dumb crap that you don't need until you see it for the first time. Like a home breathalyser kit; it would totally be fun for parties. Or a chair that you had never thought of until you see it in the aisles.

Oh, and Costco sells everything. Food. High end electronics. Toys. Clothes. Furniture. Full size backyard football nets (yes really). All available at wholesale prices, and the savings are passed on to you.

Realistically, it offers online prices in a shop. The great thing is the groceries, which are real savings, but only if you have large families, a giant freezer, or you are buying for functions or non perishable stuff. MK getting a Costco membership (she's an independent businesswoman!) is not going to really impact my life, but maybe save me some money on TP, the savings of which I will then spend on a big box of animal crackers or something, but it was an awesome afternoon and provides another oasis to battle homesickness besides TGI Fridays.

And MK did enjoy making fun of R-Kid and myself for unironically pointing out that virtually everything was "a good deal". But we are from Winnipeg.

Three Camera Sit-Coms

I was reading Dave Baddiel's column over at The Times Online on the subject of canned laughter in sit-coms. It's a defence of it, as he rightly points out that the laugh track in by far the majority of sit-coms is via a studio audience, either watching the performances live or at a screening of the episode. I've sat in the audience for both types.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the three camera sit-com recorded in front of a live audience, and how weird it was that culturally we accept non-diegetic laughter as being part of a TV show. Yes, I know, blah blah blah single camera blah blah blah The Office and Arrested Development. But the three camera sit-com is still here, and the thing that is interesting me is that it is possibly the last to the origins of the medium and the notion of recording live performance (If we don't count Saturday Night Live in America, which actually is broadcast live). A three camera sitcom is literally a short theatrical play, complete with audience, recorded and broadcast.

TV drama long ago left these roots behind, it added the fourth wall as soon as it could, which in America was pretty quick. Live dramas, like Playhouse 90 and the like were long gone from the schedule when I was born. In Britain, it is a whole different matter, as the "live theatre" aspect of the BBC's corporate culture lingered on for decades. Its love of videotape (immediate) over film (shapable) still exists today, though with the arrival of HD, things are certainly going to change.

Interestingly, thinking about it, at least in US terms, the three camera sit-com was vanishing in the 1960's. If you think back to a lot of the memorable American sit-coms of the sixties, shows like Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, The Beverly Hillbillies, even Hogan's Heroes, these were all generally recorded on film, and while the streamlined simplicity of weekly TV production often required the vestigial lack of a fourth wall, these shows were more filmic in nature, not necessarily bound to the two sets in the studio.

I guess what really changed that was the arrival of All in the Family, which very specifically went back to the live production of the early years of television in order to create a rawer, more "honest" production. It quickly became apparent that if you wanted to appear "modern" as a sit-com, you followed this route - which on the whole is incredibly ironic, but such was the tenor of the times. Perhaps tied to this, shortly after All in the Family's debut and immediate cultural importance, CBS cancelled all of its "rural" sit-coms (and it had a lot). It replaced them with urban comedies, contemporary comedies. Compare The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres to this new generation: The Bob Newhart Show, MASH or The Mary Tyler Moore Show. While MASH was a film based series (though still containing the laugh track that this post started with), having a finger on the pulse of America meant three cameras and a live studio audience. And pretty soon, relevant or not, that was the norm. Plus, it was slightly cheaper.

I remember the first batch of single camera comedies that started showing up in the nineties, and how alien they looked and felt. They were usually short lived things on FOX where the humour was too weird even for me.

But now we're seeing another divide - three camera sit-coms are old fashioned and out of touch, and single camera ones the only source of "real" humour that doesn't appeal to your mother in Indiana. It is rather odd, perhaps, to see hipsters (myself included) trying to explain why they enjoy The Big Bang Theory despite its traditional format, it is like the Cool Kids aren't allowed to like it because it uses three cameras. That is an amusing cultural bugaboo, that a television programme can not be funny because of the staging of it. Of course staging has an impact, but to say that it simply can't be funny - well, that's just silly. But to a certain extent I think that. And so do you.

I reckon pretty soon someone is going to take the sit-com back to being live, being a short play, and all us Cool Kids will be all over that like flies on shit. "How cool, cutting edge and arty!" we'll squeal. "How honest and full of truth!" we'll proclaim.

But back to the laugh track: I guess dramas have music, sit-coms have laugh tracks. Both are there to emotionally lead the view to the place the director wants them to be. Both make little sense if you think about them. I wonder when film scores began? Certainly the theatre doesn't use music to score a play, and all the music in a musical is pretty much there to support the singing and dancing. Opera might have some actual music that isn't completely related to the song, but who was the first guy to think about sticking music non-diegtically into a filmed narrative? I guess it just seemed natural after silent films. For decades the music - played live - had been a part of the cinematic experience and part of how the stories were told - or supposed to be told. I imagine some directors were annoyed about the lack of control they had over what was being played and how well it was being played. Actually last night at dinner a friend was telling me about how he recently watched Buster Keaton's The General and the soundtrack was simply a loop of Scott Joplin's greatest hits, with no regard for matching image to music. We decided the DVD should have had an extra audio track that was just the sound of a projector running.

And so, almost one thousand words later, after saying a whole lot without ever feeling like I got to the point, I have decided it is time to eat waffles.

Haiku of the Day

In misty morning

Shapes fade in and appear

As if from nothing.

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I could star as man with back pain today

I heart Great Britain

Despite what you think, this is a real sentence, and not the result of some crazy random headline making web page:

A jury has cleared Prince Charles's former royal harpist of burglary while she was hooked on heroin but has found her guilty of handling stolen goods.

Read about it here.

I really love the idea that Prince Charles has a harpist on the payroll, presumably ready to play whenever he claps.

I heart the interweb

I just got this email from a Meredith Bowman:

Hello, Steve, I’ve heard that your wife is about to give birth to your firstling and you’re going to be present at the childbirth. You know, two years ago I became a father too, but after I had seen my young wife in labor I couldn’t bring myself to make love to her for several months. So there are a few tips on how to avoid my sad experience.

Someday I dream of having a firstling, and I am going to be saving this email in case I can't make love to my lovely young wife because I saw her in labour. And we won't be having sex, not because my lovely young wife will not want to have sex because she has had a firstling forced through her vagina, a baby that is now keeping us up all hours of the night and now totally taking away all of her time and forcing a complete change to her and our priorities, but, I'm sure, because l just be the sight of having that firstling bloodily crowning that stops the sex. But I suppose, now that Meredith is a father, she should know, so it'll be best if I just hold onto this link.

Thank you internet!

...and right afterwards he flew over a shark

Haiku of the Day

Heaters turned to full

Trying to fight winter chill -

A losing battle.

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