One item checked off the to-do list!

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I can't believe it myself, but my annotated bibliography is finished.  Fifteen entries, and as far as I can tell, all correctly MLA in format.  I'm not really happy with my working thesis, but hey, it's just a working thesis, right?  It's not supposed to be perfect yet.  I went with "Although much has been made of the action in Sherlock Holmes, the film actually adheres to the characterization of Holmes and the level of action found in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."  Kinda wordy, isn't it?  It's not a breathtakingly argumentative thesis either.  Maybe Dr. Toffee will have some idea how I can spice it up. 

My plan for the next stage -- the draft of the "documented argument essay" (i.e., the research paper) -- is to argue against the article below, from Slate.com.  We'll see how that goes over.


 

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• Guy Richie is hardly the first director to get Sherlock Holmes wrong. (slate.com)

The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

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Believe it or not, I just read an enormous biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I really didn't have to!  I was just looking it over -- checking out the introduction, the table of contents, and the index, just like Dr. Toffee said to do -- and I thought I would read a few pages, and then suddenly it was an hour later and I'd gone through a few chapters.  I was hooked.

The book is The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes:  The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Andrew Lycett, who has also written biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, and Dylan Thomas.  Dr. Toffee pointed out to me that Lycett is an historian, which she seems to think is unfortunate, although she liked the book, too (turns out she's into 19th century Brit-Lit).  The problem, as she explained it to me, is that when a non-lit person writes a biography of an author, there is less about the individual works of the author, and I'd have to say that's true about this book.  He mentions most of them, but he doesn't do any literary criticism, beyond a kind of review.  I mean, he says whether a story or novel is good work or not, but he doesn't do any real analysis.  On the other hand, I learned a lot about life in Conan Doyle's era, especially about "spiritualism," which was an obsession with him from early adulthood (this fascinated my dad, who has borrowed the book to read himself.  He thought that the spiritualism was something Conan Doyle got into in his old age).  

I discovered something that disappointed me, though.  You remember that I'm a big movie buff?  Well, when I was a kid, my dad rented a movie and made me watch it with him.  It was Fairy Tale: A True Story, about the incident of the Cottingley fairies (two girls who lived in the country took photographs of "fairies," or so it seemed); in the movie, ACD (played by Peter O'Toole.  A great actor -- he should have played Dumbledore) and Harry Houdini (played by Harvey Keitel!) meet them and try to get at the truth, which in the film is that there really are fairies.  Thanks to Lycett, I now know the "true story," which is that neither man met the girls (one of whom was 16-- in the movie, they're both around age 10 or so), and they faked the pictures with cutouts from a book.  When you see the pictures, you can't believe anybody bought them as being real.  

   

See what I mean?  Anyway, I loved that movie (hey, I wasn't even 10 years old myself, I don't think).  The sad reality is that ACD believed the photos were real BEFORE HE EVER SAW THEM! 
Another sad reality is that most of what I just spent a couple of days reading is not going to find its way into my research paper, but I'm not sorry I read it.

Body Talk

I've been working my way through the Tasker book (Tasker, Yvonne, Ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004.), and it's really interesting.  I can already see that there are ideas I can apply to my project, even though -- of course -- they are writing about different movies.  One of those ideas has to do with bodies.  Apparently Tasker previously wrote a book about what she calls "muscular cinema" (she's a Brit), talking about the action films of the 1980s, when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the big stars.  It's easy to see where she's coming from; just think of Rambo, and you can see a picture of Stallone where he's all sweaty and bulging with muscles.  Things changed when Die Hard was released, since Bruce Willis is obviously not of the same physical type.  
About half the authors of the articles in this book refer to the body issue.  One of the articles I like so far is by Steve Neale, titled "Maximus Melodramaticus:  Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema."
Unfortunately, Neale writes in a pretty dense style, from my point of view, at least.  Here's an example:
"This distinctly fetishistic adulation surrounding Maximus/Crowe's quasi-bestial masculine persona belies a return of the repressed:  a nostalgic longing for a mythic masculine essence, a phallic presence  rather than a bricolage of 'decorative' and commodified signifiers.  Of course, this is exacerbated by the generic throwback to the 1950s epic and the national masculine certitude it worked to represent" (Neale 244).
See what I mean?  Quasi-bestial?   Bricolage?
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out where Robert Downey Jr. fits in the grand scheme of things in the action hero timeline.  My problem has to do with a movie of his that I saw a long time ago, Restoration.  There's a scene in that film where RD is naked -- with feathers -- and at one point he is walking away from the camera.  Far from being a hard body (even as hard as Willis), he's pretty flabby.  Not fat, but completely untoned, if you know what I mean.  And every time I see him in a film nowadays, I have that mental picture.  I wish I'd never seen it.