It certainly took me long enough to get around to seeing Sherlock Holmes, for which I apologize.  I promised frequent reader and real-life pal Dara I’d write about the movie, which at long last I have.  I should preface this entry by saying that I’m a bit of mental Holmes fan.  One of the nicest gifts I ever received was the Leslie Klinger edition of the short stories, and I was once drawn into a shouting matching in college over Holmes and the role of depravity in Victorian society.  So that dedication will, by necessity, inform some of what I write here.


First, the plot is sheer and utter rot.  Really, just utter nonsense.  The movie relies heavily on speculations of the occult, which feature but rarely in Holmes stories and for good reason.  They always come across as nonsensical, and while they give Guy Ritchie an excuse to show off some special effects, it means the whole movie is a bit silly.  The filmmakers were always going to have to invent an original plot for a full-length Holmes movie, I think.  They’re short stories for a reason: most of these cases absorb Holmes for several days or a week, and then not fully.  It takes a much more complex mystery to fully absorb Holmes intensely and fully for a significant period of time.  There are some Holmes stories that could be plausibly adapted into a full-length movies, but some of them, most particularly A Study in Scarlet, aka Sherlock Holmes Fights the Mormons, are probably unsaleable for political reasons, or are too tame for today’s tastes, like The Hound of the Baskervilles.  The Final Problem, which has Holmes and Watson journeying across Europe in flight from Professor Moriarty, and Holmes working for months to catch a criminal mastermind, has the scope and drama for a full movie, but it requires substantial setup of Moriarty as a criminal mastermind, something this movie does only intermittently effectively.  The Final Problem could make a marvelous conclusion to a franchise, but only if a) Brad Pitt is not cast as Moriarty and b) the story can be done with the appropriate tension and drama.


My complaints about the plot aside, I actually think the movie does quite a nice job of interpreting Holmes.  There’s a lovely scene towards the beginning of the movie that I think does very well at explaining Holmes’ isolation.  He’s meeting Watson and Watson’s fiancee for dinner, and as Alex Remington and I discussed after watching the movie together, as the movie shows Holmes hearing and noticing everything going on in the restaurant, it’s clear how inescapable and even unbearable his powers of observation make the world for him.  But the scene also ends with a wonderful note: Holmes offends Watson’s fiancee, and they leave, but as they depart, Holmes’ dinner is served.  He ordered early, well-aware that the dinner party wouldn’t make it through the evening, or even to the meal, intact, so there was no reason to wait.  It’s a poignant, subtle self-aware moment.


That said, the film’s great tragedy is in its utter misunderstanding of Irene Adler.  In the movie, she’s an old fiancee of Holmes’, and a master criminal.  She never, however, actually seems exceptionally competent, except in a scene where she handily dispatches and robs a pair of footpads in an alley–Holmes tracks her easily, for example.  And there’s not a lot to her life of crime.  Adler’s just a sassy super-criminal.  She apparently cares about Holmes a lot.  But she’s eye candy, and it’s a waste of time for Rachel McAdams.  It’s particularly unfortunate given what a marvelous character Adler is in the Holmes canon.  In the stories, she’s a genuine adventuress, someone who lives by her own highly articulated moral code.  She’s not a criminal, per se, though she is suspected of being a blackmailer at one point.  The wonderful thing about that suspicion is not that she’s an unrepentant criminal, but that Holmes and others are wrong about her.  They underestimate her both as a survivor, who can elude a great detective, and as a moral being.  Making her a master criminal and nothing else in the movie debases her, and ruins an excellent plot device.

Like many folks, including the crew over at Jezebel, who have a bunch of suggestion for revitalizing the fondly-remembered megaseries, I’m excited about the impending resurrection of the Baby-Sitters Club.  As a little girl, they were the second franchise series I was really into, the first being the fantastically bland World of Barbie novels (Barbie spends a summer interning at a fashion company in the Bay areas!  As a model in New York!  Meets a guy with whom she has a summer romance, but of course she and Ken are kind of on break so it’s not, you know sketchy or anything).  The members of the Baby-Sitters Club were far more accessible, of course.  They had strict parents, and divorced parents, and diabetes, and exceedingly chaste boyfriends, and big families that they felt a little bit lost in.  They were younger than Barbie was, and while some of them were pretty, they weren’t out of reach, in part because they were so young, a few years away from the point when the gap between truly bodacious girls and the rest of us opens up.  They were an oasis between childhood and true teendom, and easy to like as a result.

But I’ve been thinking a lot about the books I read when I was young recently, both for this piece I did about Twilight and for a couple of other reasons.  And I have to admit that as I’ve pulled together the lists of books that influenced me and stuck with me longest, it didn’t even occur for me to put any of the Baby-Sitters Club books on any of those lists.  I’m not entirely sure why.  It’s not like there isn’t other genial trash on there, like Star Wars extended universe novels.

I think it’s possible that the Baby-Sitters Club characters were actually too well-engineered to be truly memorable.  Each of the girls really functions like an aspect of a single personality, rather than a full human being.  It’s easy to find one of them to relate to, at least for however long it takes to polish one of the novels enough.  But none of them are quite pungent enough to stick with you.  A real heroine has to be at least slightly unlikeable some of the time, whether it’s Lizzy Bennet smacking down Mr. Darcy mistakenly, Jo ruining her chance of happiness with Laurie, Maud Bailey pinning up her hair and being cold to Roland Michell because she’s been so badly hurt in the past.  I have a hard time recognizing myself in any character without a serious and obvious flaw, and without any effort to overcome it, and it’s been that way as long as I could remember.  You can have diverting trash with those kinds of characters in it.

Y’all know my feelings about the usefulness, or lack thereof, of Top 10 lists.  But friend and colleague Ross Gianfortune’s Top 10 albums of the decade has the virtue of being pretty different from most I’ve seen.  And his meditation on the record he puts in the number one slot, Isis’s Panopticon is well worth reading:

In a post-9/11 world (that is a phrase I never thought I’d put on this site), Panopticon is a letter of warning, a letter of reflection and a recitation of apology. Indeed, Isis accomplishes this all while maintaining a minimal lyric sheet. I’m not sure I’ve everheard a record say so much with so little in the way of lyrics. No, it’s not instrumental, but Aaron Turner uses simple lines (“Backlit” features a lovely “Always on you” line to build the song’s structure). Similarly, the guitar work is measured and phrased in such a way that the band is almost writing a concise story. The “Syndic Calls” guitar breaks are rhytmic and heavy, repeating and building. Like the best post-rock, Panopticon is not afraid of slowly constructing musical phrases.

Every time I listen to Panopticon, I marvel at how layered and beautiful it is, as an album. Relying on anticipation more than anything, the album has an unparalelled tension. Even with the cookie monster growl and a reminder of our fucked up existence, it’s the album of the decade. Both gorgeous and reflective, it’s brilliant.

I’m not a huge metal person, with the exception of some Rammstein Tony got me into in high school.  But a while back, Ross lent me a bunch of quality metal albums at my request, and I can definitely say Panopticon has stuck with me.  It’s less squashed-cat-yowly than a lot of metal, and that’s a great thing.  The record sounds to me like an angry ocean, the roar of a tide that’s pulling you under.  If you’re intimidated by metal but want an entry album that’s uncompromising and strong, I’d definitely reccomend Panopticon, and Isis more generally.

I was at a New Year’s Day reception on Friday, where one of the attendees told a truly hilarious story about meeting Bruce Springsteen.  He was working a show the Boss was playing, and Bruce, wandering by, noticed his snazzy digital recorder, and proceeded to ask this guy about it.  They chatted about technology for a few minutes, when this dude found himself blurting out “I really liked the Nebraska album.”  The Boss’s response?  ”A lot of people just like that album.”


The lesson of that story, of course, is that you want to have a meaningful interaction with a star when you meet them, you’d better game out what you’re going to say to them well in advance.  My friend Tony is set, at least when it comes to John Malkovich:

Because of Mutant Chronicles, I will always be ready for John Malkovich. I won’t even yell lines from the movie, because honestly he doesn’t have a single memorable line. It’s the performance I’m interested in: a singularly wretched mail-in that really has to be seen to be believed. I’d ask him, “At what point did you realize this movie was beyond your help? If the deal was for three scenes as opposed to one, would you have still done it? Were the odd looks you and your co-stars exchanged in that one scene ‘Holy shit we need to get out of this project ASAP’ looks?” It’s hard to really criticize Malkovich for being bad in one scene when Tom Jane and Ron Perlman shit it up for two hours, but this guy was inBurn After Reading! I’m supposed to believe his “pauses in dialogue = acting” farce? When I finally come face-to-face with Jon Malkovich on Judgment Day, I will talk Mutant Chronicles and only Mutant Chronicles. Honestly, unless he’s going to put the blood back into my ears and eyes–that works, right? If blood comes out of somewhere, you can just pour it back in?–he owes me.

Sadly, the only time I’ve ever run into a genuine Famous Person was sitting next to David Schwimmer at  Barney Greengrass in New York City.  And I blew that opportunity not because I said something incredibly stupid, but because my father didn’t know who he was, and by the time I was done explaining, Schwimmer was looking at us a little funny.