Sherlock Holmes, the character, has been around for over a century, and plenty of fans have an idea of what Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous creation should be like.
That’s what makes director Bill Condon’s take on the character so refreshing: Mr. Holmes actually treats the famous detective as a human being. SPOILER-FREE review after the cut.
Gabbing Geek reported a while back that Sir Ian McKellan was playing Sherlock Holmes in a new movie due this summer, Mr. Holmes. Now a trailer has been released and a little more is known. It appears the movie deals with Sherlock Holmes suffering from memory loss due to his old age. As a man who has always relied on his sharp mind, this is an interesting development. So, while it may not be the sort of mystery Holmes is used to solving, it could lead to an interesting story all the same. Also, it explains why my dream casting of Patrick Stewart as Dr. Watson may not be happening, unless its a fan service cameo…and given the film’s pedigree, that seems like an unlikely scenario.
Trailer below the cut.
The entire geek portion of the Internet was united recently by the death of Leonard Nimoy. It was enough to get a lot of stupid talk about a dress off my Facebook feed, so even if it wasn’t enough Nimoy was one of the people who led me to science fiction, he has my gratitude for that one final favor.
And while I am a little saddened by the death of a man who I honestly never met, I am also not as shocked as I was by some past deaths. Nimoy’s health has been rather bad for a while now. There’s a reason even when he did some acting work, that it was done to keep his actual appearance to a bare minimum. But there’s something else to consider: Nimoy was 83 years old. As timeless as performances captured on camera can be, Spock got old, and he died. He wasn’t the first, he won’t be the last, and its something we will all do ourselves. What do we do when people we have never met, but have touched us in some way as we became the adults we are, die?
Most geeks first experienced seeing Patrick Stewart in the role of the very un-Kirkish Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Stewart had been an actor for years at this point, having been trained as a Shakespearean actor who played the London stage in tights that looked every sillier than the spandex uniforms he was asked to don for the first two years as Picard (Gene Roddenberry’s death allowed the producers to switch to more comfortable wool uniforms later in the series run). Later on, he played a character that sheer dumb luck was designed to look exactly like him, Professor Charles Xavier. Ask a number of geek fans if they know any other role he’s done, and they might be hard-pressed to name something.
Geek Love is not misplaced in this instance. We should love Patrick Stewart if for no other reason than he seems to be having fun most of the time, and he may very well be up for anything.
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