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agilebrit- Wed, 13:55: I hate this fight scene. Hate. It. Still missing something but I can't put my finger on WHAT. #amediting #tearingmyhairout
- Wed, 17:10: Happy Valentine's Day! Have a rejection in your inbox! *sigh* Well. Guess I'll just have to send them something so good they MUST buy it.
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Date: 2013-02-15 07:50 am (UTC)I Am the Trailing Edge.
Just wanted to tell you that I am enjoying Sherlock Holmes (2009), with Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law, Rachel McAdams &c., bought during post-Thanksgiving sales but not heretofore watched. Seeing R D Jr hold his own against Jude Law's native English accent is marvelous. This is considerably more difficult than it appears.
[I've heard Englishmen attempt an American accent. Wince. Yet Kate Maberly in The Langoliers won the ultimate accolade: I did not know she was English. She even imitated a British accent at one point - not her own. That, again, is harder than it seems.]
On with the show…
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Date: 2013-02-15 09:17 am (UTC)Fanfic is spontaneously boiling out of me. I keep re-writing these scenes in my head. The Angrezi Raj, the “industrious Empire,” is under attack, and Sherlock Holmes has an unexpected ally in the New Jerseyite Irene Adler, who unbeknownst to him is an agent of the Instrumentality of Mankind…
Julie, I'm enjoying this. Do you know how long it's been, since I've enjoyed anything?
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Date: 2013-02-15 10:21 am (UTC)If you have this movie handy, look at the 25:50 mark, where Lord Blackwood stops Holmes - from the moment when he whoomps up to the bars and says, “Mr Holmes, you must widen your gaze,” R D Jr is frozen - he literally never so much as blinks his eyes. (You see RDJr fighting it - “… on a journey…”.) Then again, when he says, “Pay attention!” Holmes again is stopped.
Like, wow, man.
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Date: 2013-02-15 02:13 pm (UTC)...you realize that Sherlock Holmes is now public domain and if you write fiction in that universe you're allowed to sell it, right? It's probably a hard sell, but you don't need permission.
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Date: 2013-02-15 05:45 pm (UTC)Well – I’m glad to hear that the second movie is better (the trailer looked good), because frankly, after the slaughterhouse explosion scene this screenplay just fell apart. I found my attention waning as the plot holes and wrenching disconnects accumulated, and I finally turned it off and went to bed. I may watch the rest of it, but knowing me it might be a while, if ever.
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• The illegitimate and unacknowledged son of “Sir Thomas” isn’t going to be “Lord” anything. And having the magic of that secret society actually work, so functionally that it can be used for revolution and to maintain rule thereafter – what is this, Harry Potter? Some crossover with the Anglo-French Empire of Lord Darcy? This just tosses out the window the whole Victorian worldview these stories are based upon.
Plus, a white coat and glasses aren’t enough to pretend to be the attending physician at a real hospital; plus, if Inspector Lestrade was who he claimed, the Order would know that, wouldn’t they? If Lord Coward (what a name) “has influence with the police,” surely he knows through whom – and not…
And turning Irene Adler – whose name they don’t even pronounce right; it’s eye-REE-nie – into an action figure is simply absurd. She pulled strings, manipulated, had friends in high places, that was her deal. [Not Sir Thomas but she, would have had S Holmes’ bail posted by a dear friend whose name mustn’t get into the papers…]
Speaking of names, to the best of my knowledge Miss Morstan’s last name is never spoken. She’s simply “Mary” throughout, and the ‘history’ Holmes deduces is - if you’ve read The Sign of Four - wrong in nearly every detail, as Holmes himself would know… [She was a governess.]
No, this needed a re-write. Twins they were, born of Sir Thomas’s mistress, but because it was all hushed up no one today knows this. Yet it proved very useful, as the self-styled “Lord” Blackwood appeared to possess the power of bilocation: He was never convicted of crimes because he always had an unshakable alibi. Even after his death he “rose from the dead,” vengeful – yet now, of course, only in one place at a time… His “powers” are chemistry, theatre and magic, “Mr Wizard” as Batman, with a heavy dash of Dr Fu Manchu and his Oriental Yellow Peril Weird Science. [The sun never set on that Empire, you know, which meant that anything in the world could show up in London and usually did. Imagine a macaw trained to say, “Open this door, you idiot,” in Lieutenant-General Sir Dalrymple Fanshawe's very voice.]
[There was a TV show in the 70s starring twins I think were named Hager, who’d appeared on Hee Haw: They played detectives who posed as just one guy with this peculiar ability to be seen in two places at once. The screenwriters couldn’t do much with it and it folded after one season.]
p.s. Holmes' meeting with Lord Coward ended with him swan-diving out the window into… an open septic tank. Go ahead, take a deep dive and a nice swim in the Thames circa AD 1890. With the medical knowledge of the day - no antibiotics. O my gawd…
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Date: 2013-02-15 11:51 pm (UTC)