marissas75

This new "Sherlock Holmes" is an attempt to make the iconic Victorian sleuth cool for the blockbuster generation by punching up the story with fights, explosions, and steampunk style. And, while I'm not morally opposed to the idea of an action-hero Holmes, it makes the movie kind of a strange hybrid. Action movies work best when they are "dumb" (that is, when they have a relatively simple story), but Sherlock Holmes movies work best when they are "smart," with a twisty mystery that requires Holmes' intelligence to solve. Therefore, the plot of "Sherlock Holmes" is way too convoluted and contrived for what should be a simple action movie. But it's not really satisfying as a mystery story, either, because the constant onslaught of action scenes means that the audience never has time to stop and think about the clues.

Additionally, the story, about an evil lord and his secret mystical society plotting to take over the world, seems like the Victorian equivalent of a Dan Brown novel. It's a lot of hokum, in short, and I couldn't get myself to really care about it.

So this movie would really be terrible if it didn't star Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson. Their presence proves that even in a silly blockbuster, it's worthwhile to cast people who know how to act and entertain an audience. Because Downey always comes across as the smartest guy in the room, as well as a total eccentric, he was an inspired choice for the role of Holmes. The best scenes in the movie are the ones where he and Jude Law's Watson bicker like an old married couple; they make a great buddy-movie pairing.

Rachel McAdams doesn't have much to do in the role of Irene Adler, the designated love-interest, but she still seems miscast. Irene is supposed to be an international woman of mystery, but McAdams comes off as too young and too contemporary.

So the intelligence in this movie comes from Downey's performance as Holmes, which I guess is as it should be; I had just hoped for more intelligence in the writing and direction as well.

Any time you put the lovely Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz in a film directed by Wong Kar-Wai, you're guaranteed to get a beautiful-looking movie. Unfortunately, visual beauty is just about the only thing that "My Blueberry Nights" has to recommend it.

The movie is set in kind of a fantasy version of the United States--a place depicted mostly at nighttime, with neon lights and rain-slicked streets. There are no fast-food restaurants, only homey cafes and juke joints seen near closing time. The citizens are either remarkably beautiful, or else they're crusty character actors like David Strathairn. Everybody enjoys making ponderous pronouncements about love. Nobody has a sense of humor.

The main character of "My Blueberry Nights," Elizabeth (Jones), is poorly conceived. A New Yorker who is suffering from a bad breakup, she decides to leave town and travel cross-country working as a waitress. (This is not how most women behave when broken-hearted. Especially not when a guy who looks like Jude Law is pining away for them back in NYC.) Because we don't sufficiently understand what compelled Elizabeth to go on her road trip, we also don't understand what specific lessons she is supposed to be learning from the people that we see her encounter along the way. And when a character is this hard to understand, it seems unfair to entrust her to an amateur actress like Jones.

Portman has an intriguing role as a young cardsharp that Elizabeth meets in Nevada; and Strathairn finds real pathos in his somewhat stereotypical role, an alcoholic cop in Memphis. Weisz plays Strathairn's unfaithful wife and gets to deliver a long, teary monologue in one take. But this is just another example of the self-indulgence of "My Blueberry Nights": it becomes more about Weisz's acting technique than about her character's predicament.

"My Blueberry Nights" is not a painful viewing experience, and at certain moments, it's even seductive. Still, it's appropriate that its title refers to a dessert, because it's a piece of art-house fluff.

"A Shot in the Dark" is the first Inspector Clouseau movie I've seen, and I'm rather confused as to why everyone has anointed it a classic. After seeing "Dr Strangelove" I was ready to declare Peter Sellers one of the greatest comic geniuses of all time, but this signature role of his left me very disappointed. Well, perhaps the bumbling French detective could be a truly great comic figure if he were the center of a really good movie--which "A Shot in the Dark" is not.

I think that a lot of problems with the movie lie with the direction. The opening scenes, especially, are taken at a ridiculously slow pace--I expected a fast and farcical comedy, but I got a lot of awkward pauses and stagy long takes. The whole movie would be much funnier if it were tightened up and edited with a snappier rhythm.

Other aspects of "A Shot in the Dark" are equally lazy. For most of the movie Sellers employs a light French accent, until in the final scene he suddenly acquires a much heavier and more ridiculous accent, saying "beump" instead of "bump" and other such Clouseau-isms. Did no one notice the inconsistency of this? Meanwhile, the jokes get predictable: by the halfway point of the movie, you just know that when Clouseau is asked to put a billiard cue away, he'll end up knocking over the whole cue rack, and when he tries to do a Cossack dance, he'll rip his trousers.

I did think that the sequence where Sellers and Elke Sommer go on a date and narrowly escape being murdered several times was rather well done--then again, ANYTHING would have to be better than the embarrassingly dated scene that takes place in a nudist colony. This is an example of the worst kind of 1960s wink-wink nudge-nudge sleaziness--the type of scene that "Austin Powers" mocked.

The plot of "A Shot in the Dark" is standard-issue Agatha Christie stuff, with Clouseau attempting to prove that a beautiful housemaid (Sommer) is innocent of a string of murders, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. But though the early part of the movie is weighed down by a lot of tedious examination of the murders, the filmmakers forget the plot as the movie goes on. In the final scene, they basically throw up their hands, admit they're bored with the story and characters, and tack on an arbitrary conclusion. So in the absence of an interesting story, skillful direction, and a sense of good taste, what are we left with? Peter Sellers doing pratfalls and talking in spoonerisms. Which isn't enough for me, thank you.