Random Movie Thoughts

Avatar

I think Avatar sums up quite nicely why I seem to be unable to fully enjoy “blockbusters” lately: I’m numb to good visuals and overthink.

Visuals – Avatar really did have top-notch CGI. You couldn’t tell the whole movie was probably filmed in front of a bluescreen. You might say I’m spoiled but to me, that’s par for the course these days. Probably due to having played to many computer games where everything is CGI anyway. And I simply didn’t like that the protagonist was dumb and basically muddled through everything, the classic “rebel with a good heart”.

My “overthink” went into overdrive too when the Na’vi first showed up – in evolutionary terms  the odds that an alien race would be so freaking similar to our own (basically taller body, bigger nose, and a USB port) is so astronomical it kind of broke the illusion for me. I guess one has to let that pass since it’s the whole point of the movie though.

But probably the biggest issue I had with it was the storyline – not so much how it resembled Pocahontas in space, but the portrayal of the “bad guys” in the movie was rather too much for me. I strongly believe that by the time humankind is ready to send people into space, the sheer wonder of encountering an intelligent alien species would far outweigh any quest for some rare mineral. It was just too much of a caricature for me. I guess it has to with my belief that any encounter with intelligent aliens would be the greatest moment ever for the human race, and I have faith that we would never squander such an opportunity.

That said, I can fully understand why Avatar has such mass appeal, it’s not a movie you should miss.

Sherlock Holmes

I’ve read all the Sherlock Holmes novels and short stories multiple times (only the canon by A.C. Doyle) so suffice to say that this was a movie I had to watch.

I guess it was a case where being a fan has its disadvantages. There are some movie adaptations like Harry Potter and Twilight where the casting is meant to be as faithful to the books as possible, and indeed is so good that the movie cast replaces the mental image you have of the book’s characters completely (Hermionie wasn’t meant to be such a babe IMO).

And you have movies that need to soup-up, modernize, and have the actors “make the characters their own”, which is always going to leave fans with mixed feelings.

To get the good bits out of the way first: I thought the plot was excellent – on par with  Doyle’s most famous novel Hound of the Baskervilles. The most important thing is that Holmes should never solve a case by sheer accident! Jude Law’s adaptation of Watson was great, losing the dimness of the book version, replacing it with a constant air of exasperation, but still never eclipsing Holmes’ intellect.

Robert Downey Jr only did a fair job as Holmes. There’s a fine line between dry wit and wisecracking, between eccentricity and mere gags and RDJ (or in his defense, maybe the scriptwriters) didn’t see it. Couldn’t shake mental image of him in Iron Man, which is a bad thing. It was also a conscious decision not to have him look at all like the classic Sidney Paget illustrations of Holmes (high forehead, impeccable posture), which I  had a lot of difficulty adjusting to.

I completely understand how there needed to be some liberties with the classic Holmes stories – those have no romance and very little action. But  I found Irene Adler completely unnecessary and the blatant sideplot to set up the sequel was very distracting. Some of the action scenes suited the flow of the movie, but some of the others seemed tacked on, for the sake of having more fight scenes in it.

That said, I did enjoy the movie and will watch any sequel(s) that come out. It paid enough homage to the books that it takes its place in Sherlockian lore, bringing to mind what Vincent Starett once penned:

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears–
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

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