"Dr. Toffee" breaks in to say a few words about actors and directors who can't keep their bloody mouths shut!

Just got back from a high-speed trip to Walmart to get the DVD. I raced back home, made a cup of tea, and popped the disc in the machine, starting the making-of featurette, “Reinventing Sherlock Holmes.” It has to be said: Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr., and Jude Law are a bunch of WRETCHED GITS!!! Here I’ve been going along nicely, having my fictional student work on an argument of their film’s validity as an adaptation, AND THEY DECIDE THAT THEY HAVE TO MOUNT A DEFENSE THEMSELVES! Just who the hell do they think they are?



I’m sorry to tell you this, gentlemen, but when you create a work of art and send it out into the world, it IS your statement of its validity. Moreover, it’s a big hit, so why do you care that it’s being criticized for the very thing that’s making it fresh and exciting? You have probably sent a number of filmgoers running off to bookstores and libraries to read the original stories, for which I applaud you (not to mention your READ poster for the American Library Association), and they will all discover, as Rhonda has, that you are not “reinventing” the characters so much as you are giving them their full context to a depth that has not previously been imagined. And having done that so successfully, why did you feel the need to make trouble for Rhonda (and me)? Now I have to advise her on her revision, and I’m especially glad that she is not a real student, because I’ve had any number of them who, when advised that they needed to do a global revision thanks to a piece of material that was unavailable to them during their research, had hysterics and/or dropped the class only a few weeks before the end of term. You wretched, wretched men.

Back to Rhonda.

A QHQ?

Image via Wikipedia

I got a little behind this week (from what I heard in class yesterday, I'm not the only one, and our first checkpoint is next Friday!), so I'm doing two entries in one day.  This one is supposed to be a Question-Hypothesis-Question, and (according to the assignment page) "the first question should be whatever initial research question you've formulated. The hypothesis is what you think the answer is and why you think that. Once you have your hypothesis, you should be able to tell what the next question you have about the topic is."  I'm not sure how this will work out.
My first question was "is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?"  Now, my hypothesis.  From what I've read so far, the R/D SH actually fits ACD's SH in a lot of ways.  The big difference I'm seeing has to do with the presentation of SH as a man of action, and a really quirky one at that.  Is that a distortion?  Maybe, maybe not.  I've been reading "The Six Napoleons," and in it Holmes and Watson are constantly on the move, going all over London (from the best to the worst and back again) to ask questions.  So, there's a lot of that kind of action.  I'm also thinking that SH -- or Conan Doyle -- is always secretive about his background.  We never find out much about how he came to be a detective or where he grew up.  His brother Mycroft doesn't turn up in the early stories (I think, but I'll have to check that), and when he does, he's kind of mysterious, too.  In the stories, the focus is always on the mystery at hand, and description of SH is doled out in small details here and there as they occur to Watson (who is usually the narrator).  The film can't help but provide lots of information, since the audience is seeing everything (well, almost everything) of Holmes, and all the visuals suggest many things about SH.  For example, the way he dresses is obvious in a film, but in the stories, his clothing is described most often when he is in disguise.  I also think that the Holmes of the stories is of a higher class than in the film, but I'll think more about that later.  So, I guess that the film is not a serious distortion, but it does have a point of view that is different from a very conservative reading of the stories.

And that leads me to the last question:  Is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?  I ask this because that is the thrust of the film and it appears that the stories support that idea.  Now I suppose I need to begin thinking about what an action hero really is.