Sherlock Holmes is everywhere these days, but the eccentric sleuth has been around for a long time. Check out my review of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson in 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, or click here to watch the movie.
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Watson: “That’s a fine way to treat me, I must say!”
Holmes: “Sit down, Watson, do sit down. Perhaps a little supper will help you
to get over your huff.”
Watson (roaring): “Huff? I’m in no huff!”
— Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in The Hound of the Baskervilles, their first pairing as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson
Sherlock Holmes is everywhere in 2012: a BBC series, a CBS series and, with Robert Downey, Jr. as the celebrated sleuth, once again on the silver screen. And wherever Holmes goes, so goes Watson (although in the CBS version, Watson goes there in high heels).
Arthur Conan Doyle purists tend to get huffy about Nigel Bruce’s rendition of Watson, which is often as a blithering, dithering oaf, but after re-watching 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, I have to disagree with them. True, Bruce’s interpretation of the good doctor is not faithful to Doyle’s creation, but there’s good reason that his teaming with Rathbone was movie magic. Holmes, brilliant and intense though he is, is also a pompous know-it-all; with comic foil Watson at his side, Holmes’s genius is a lot easier to take. And in Hollywood, no one did genial companions better than Bruce.
This Hound also strays from Doyle in some of its plot elements, and there’s no escaping the fact that it’s a stretch to describe it (or any 73-year-old thriller) as “scary,” but the 20th Century Fox production is still a treat. The sets, constructed in a gigantic Fox sound studio, are beyond cool. Surreal, murky, rocky and in black-and-white, the outdoor scenes do look artificial — but in a gothic fantasyland manner, teeming with ominous shadows and phantom-like mists.
The story, for any eight-year-olds reading this, finds Holmes and Watson investigating the curse of Baskerville Hall, in which Baskerville descendants are said to fall prey to a devilish hound roaming the moors of Devon. The Hound of the Baskervilles is atypical Doyle because Holmes himself is absent for nearly a third of the story, leaving Watson to document and puzzle over spooky goings-on at the hall. But I love to watch Bruce’s Watson, so I have no problem with that. Grade: B+
Director: Sidney Lanfield Cast: Richard Greene, Basil Rathbone, Wendy Barrie, Nigel Bruce, Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Barlowe Borland, Beryl Mercer, Morton Lowry Release: 1939
Watch the Full Movie (click here)
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Don Rickles was on Jimmy Kimmel’s show the other night. Don Rickles, at 86, is still one of the funniest guys on the planet. Below, Rickles in 1976 with Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson.
*****
Early-season TV report card
Elementary Not bad, although Jonny Lee Miller (above) as Sherlock Holmes isn’t all that captivating. Holmes should always, always seem bigger than life, and Miller simply doesn’t.
666 Park Avenue and Last Resort Mediocre stuff, the kind of shows you might watch while clipping your toenails, or gaining insight and wisdom at The Grouchy Editor.
American Horror Story: Asylum So far, so good. The season premiere was better than anything from last year’s series. And how about Jessica Lange (below) — ain’t she something?
*****
The Week in Headlines
The Feds are lucky that so many of these would-be bombers resemble The Three Stooges.
There’s a lot of squawking on Fox News about “who knew what” in regard to the attack on our diplomatic mission in Libya. I’d be more inclined to pay attention if Fox had been equally concerned about “who knew what” leading up to the war in Iraq.
Guess I won’t need to vote next month. From what I’m hearing, soccer moms and the good people of Ohio and Florida will decide this year’s election.
*****
Whoever coined the phrase, “There is no such thing as a stupid question,” was an idiot. I know, because I have lots of stupid questions. For example:
In movies about space travel, NASA capsules are often in danger of burning up in Earth’s atmosphere upon re-entry. So why wasn’t the dude who just made that record space jump in danger of burning up?
*****
Meanwhile, on Survivor ….
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Orson Welles directs himself as a war criminal in hiding in a Connecticut college town, with Edward G. Robinson as the Nazi hunter on his trail. Watch it for free by clicking here.
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I give up trying to gauge the impact of these presidential debates. Back in the 2000s, I thought I watched as tongue-tied George Bush got his lunch handed to him in debates, but look how that turned out.
*****
This is a publicity shot from NBC’s upcoming reboot of The Munsters, something they are calling Mockingbird Lane. That’s “Herman” on the left. What is wrong with this picture? If you’re going to redo The Munsters, Herman must, must look like Frankenstein’s monster. Herman Munster without makeup is like Lily without sex appeal — sacrilege.
*****
I’m bored. The presidential election is just weeks away, the baseball playoffs are in full swing, Argo is opening in cinemas, and my reaction to our national frenzy is … I want to take a nap.
I need more excitement in my personal life. I need to discover that my upstairs neighbor is preparing stew — with human body parts. I need to look out my front window and behold two twisters lowering themselves to the ground, their sights set on my apartment complex. I need Kristen Stewart to stop playing games with me and declare her undying love.
I need a cold shower.
*****
Apparently, this man has no balls.
*****
Meanwhile, on Survivor ….
Later, more cheeky fun on Survivor ….
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by Dorothy Cannell
What a bloody mess. Cannell adopts a 1930s, Agatha Christie-like style for her debut novel, which is a pleasant enough mystery for about two-thirds of its length. But then the author loses all sense of reality.
The heroine-narrator, an interior decorator obsessed with food, utters howler after howler (“I desired a roast beef sandwich with horse-radish and pickled onions with a wanton savagery that I had never felt for any man”), and her romance with an oddball male escort almost – but not quite – plunges the book into “so bad it’s good” territory:
Ben: “This is how it could have been if only I had confessed my love before you went and got so skinny.”
Ellie: “Part of me will always hunger for the wrong foods but I have to tell you that I am not prepared to eat myself back to my old proportions so you can prove the integrity of your love.”
The biggest head-scratcher of all is that, somehow, this amateurish junk food was included by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association as one of its “100 Favorite Mysteries of the 20th Century.”
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Hitchcock is back in vogue (is he ever “out”?), and I could say a few words about this thriller from his early output, but why bother when I can lift a quote from the Feb. 27, 1937 edition of the New York Times? “Alfred Hitchcock … has whittled a pitilessly melodramatic segment from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and, calling it [Sabotage], has placed it on exhibition at the Roxy as a masterly exercise in suspense.” So there. Watch it for free by clicking here.
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There is an explanation for this picture. It’s a perfectly newsworthy photograph. Seriously. See below.
*****
When I was a kid, I once asked my father what he thought of the comedian Red Skelton. My dad said that he didn’t care for Skelton because he laughed at his own jokes.
I’m reminded of that every time I watch the spawn of Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect: The Five and Red Eye on Fox News, and The Cycle on MSNBC (above). All three shows feature segments in which a host reads from a prepared “humor” piece.
Problem is, these monologues are rarely laugh-out-loud funny, yet they are greeted with howls of forced laughter from the other panelists. About the only time something genuinely humorous occurs in the world of politics, it’s spontaneous or accidental — like the angry Iraqi man hurling his shoes at a ducking George Bush.
*****
Ann Coulter and activist Kevin Powell engaged in a polite debate on Joy Behar’s show:
Powell: “You’re clearly a racist.”
Coulter: “You’re clearly a moron.”
Now that’s funny.
*****
In that same spirit of civil discourse, here is my take on that fat lady singing the blues in Wisconsin:
Stop whining and go home, Miss Piggy. Your 15 minutes are up, and the only “bully” we’re seeing is you.
*****
Geez, Arnold, I watched you hem and haw on 60 Minutes and I almost felt sorry for you. At times, you resembled a … girlie man?
*****
“Television is where it’s at … and I don’t disagree.” — Entertainment Weekly movie critic Lisa Schwarzbaum.
You have to feel a bit sorry for long-time film critics like Schwarzbaum and Roger Ebert, who are often reduced to two choices at today’s cinema: small, independent movies that no one will see, or the latest brain-dead superhero/comic book/special-effects extravaganza, which is made for and marketed to teenagers. Meanwhile, all of the best writers have migrated to cable channels like FX, AMC, Showtime, and HBO.
*****
That does it. If Romney wins, I’m moving to Brazil.
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Frozen River Hollywood was delinquent when it finally gave an Oscar to Melissa Leo for 2010’s The Fighter; she should have won two years earlier for her role in this dramatic thriller, in which she plays a hard-bitten mother of two boys who gets involved in human smuggling on the New York-Canadian border. The movie, from first-time writer-director Courtney Hunt, has atmosphere up the wazoo, with a near-perfect mixture of blue-collar pathos and nail-biting suspense. The connection is Leo, who manages to garner empathy for a “trailer trash” mom who’s alternately heartless and heartbreaking. Release: 2008 Grade: B+
*****
The Snowtown Murders Snowtown is a two-hour journey into hell that — assuming you don’t leave the room — grabs you and doesn’t let go. It’s the story of Australia’s most notorious serial killer, John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), whose sinister charisma sucked in disciples and ultimately led to a rented building filled with bodies soaking in acid. Everything and everyone in this film is depressing — not just the killings, but also the joyless, blue-collar lifestyle of suburban Adelaide. Unpleasant stuff, to be sure, but also powerful, and Henshall is unforgettable. Release: 2011 Grade: B+
*****
Cortex This nifty little French thriller is notable for its unusual hero (old) and setting (a home for people with Alzheimer’s). Andre Dussollier plays a retired detective who doesn’t remember his own son, but whose cop instincts tell him that fellow patients are dying under suspicious circumstances. Dussollier is magnetic, but Cortex’s pedestrian plot has a few too many holes. Release: 2008 Grade: B-
*****
Carnage Near the beginning of Carnage, after meeting the liberal Longstreets (John C. Reilly and Jodie Foster) and the conservative Cowans (Christoph Waltz and Kate Winslet), Brooklyn parents meeting to discuss a playground scuffle between their sons, my feeling was, “I don’t want to spend an entire movie with these people. They are all smug and annoying.” I changed my mind thanks to some terrific actors and a bottle of Scotch that loosened their tongues and stripped away their social armor. Director Roman Polanski simply sets up shots and lets his actors roll. The result is Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with a wicked sense of humor. Release: 2011 Grade: B+
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by Suetonius
Complain all you want about our current leaders, but their flaws are chicken feed compared to those of the power-crazed, toga-clad rulers of ancient Rome. For proof, we have this series of short biographies of the Roman emperors, written by someone who was actually there, the Roman scholar Suetonius.
As I read, I would sometimes begin to cut a given ruler some slack, deciding that – at least compared to the others – he wasn’t so bad. And then I’d learn that he tortured and executed some unfortunate peasant for a trivial offense. And that he helped himself to a senator’s comely wife. And that he did worse. Much, much worse.
But I’ll give the emperors this: They didn’t discriminate with their atrocities. Most of them were apparently bisexual, using men, women, relatives, and children as sex toys, and they were just as likely to decapitate a general as a fruit seller.
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