It's Elementary, My Dear Whats-his-face

**Wikipedia Warning: This article is about the detective, Sherlock Holmes. For other uses of "brilliant cokehead" see Robert Downey Jr.**

What comes to mind when I bring up the name of the world famous detective, Sherlock Holmes? Are you the type of person who immediately thinks of the dashing ratiocinator with his pipe and hat, sitting in the back of his room at 221b Baker Street, snorting a line of Colombia Gold like he's Little Wayne on a drug bust and then thoroughly explaining why it's all the butler's fault, or, perhaps, are you the kind of person whose mind immediately flashes to a white Dalmatian wearing a plaid hat and a cape?

If you fall in the latter category, you might be the target audience for Guy Richie's surprising new film revolving around that same titular character. By this, of course, I mean that ever lovable dog, Sherlock Holmes. The only difference between the Wishbone version and this $200 million dollar version is that that except for the dog we get Robert Downey Jr, and except for made-for-PBS kid-friendliness we get Guy Richie's fast-talking, guns-blaring speed material so heavily steeped in contagious style that one might serve it with crumpets and Tarantino.

And a side of raw cocaine, but that's another story.

Don't get me wrong, Sherlock Holmes (2009) isn't bad by any stretch. It promises modern action and delivers. Holmes blares across the screen, karate-chopping and judo-punching his way through hordes of mustashio'd henchmen like some sort of Bruce Willis character who rounds out his beatings with a "Jolly ho, good chap!" and a dramatic correction of his hat. Yes, there are some things to gripe about, like the the villain who is so sinister he looks like a British version of Andy Garcia and acts like Xanatos from the Gargoyles animated television show, but he's scary enough and smart enough to give Holmes a good run for his money, and the dialogue, if you're quick enough to follow it all, makes the whole film worth watching.



But there's something just a little too predictable here. The film forsakes the narrative structure of the source material, and instead picks up the structure of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Just like Indy, Holmes is a period adventurer whose intellect is only matched by his physical prowess. Just like Indy, Holmes matches each impossible intuitive leap with similar physical leaps across London. Finally, Just like Indy, director Guy Richie shows off his prowess just a little too much: he shows us each scene with the wool over our eyes and then relishes jumping back in time to show us exactly how it all really went down through the eyes of Sherlock Holmes, just like Troy Duffy would do if he were, you know, talented.

And that brings me to London. The film does a great job using CGI to recreate the look of 19th century London, but one gets a sense of anacronism in the task. Did you know, for example, that 19th century London was actually designed to look like the rooftop scene in Mary Poppins? The whole city looks like it fell out of an old lady's handbag and then got ran over by a car filled with coke, and I mean the kind made of charcoal, not the kind made out of Robert Downey Jr.

There are hints at the sinister Professor Moriarty, but these hints are actually more distracting than anything else. Is there anything worse than a movie that knows it's going to get a sequel or two? Yes. It's a movie that relies on it's sequel, like this one. If Sherlock Holmes made any more room for it's own follow-ups, it would be just a gaping, two-hour trailer for Sherlock Holmes 2: The Hound of the Baskervilles. Am I looking forward to the sequel? Yes. Does this movie merit one? No.

And with that, I'll leave you with the best Sherlock Holmes movie I've ever seen:

Bonus Flick: Jay and Silent Bob Do Stuff

**Warning. This post contains marijuana.**

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, a 2001 film set in director Kevin Smith's View Askewaverse, is one of those innocent classics that some of us, especially those of us who hail from the Jersey area, picked up in adolescence as a guilty pleasure like some people pick up an addition to heroin or murdering hookers. Smith movies were for boys what Spice World was for girls: low production value star vehicles with extremely low-brow humor and even lower ambitions, mind numbing sight gags, intentionally horrendous acting, and a avid fanbase chomping at the bit for anything with their star's name on it like a team of slobbering rotwilers.

Even though I am years away from The Midnight Movie Child who first watched the Jay and Silent Bob DVD on the floor my bunk long after lights out, re-watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back still brings back those old familiar feelings I first had when I leaned against my camp duffel bag and first pressed the spacebar on my friend's computer.

Those feelings were nausea, boredom, and the incredible, inescapable craving to smoke some serious fatties.

Marijuana has never really done anything for me. Now, of course I've killed a couple of dank bowls in my lifetime because smoking is, after all, the official pastime of Oregon, but I don't get a good buzz off of it. I haven't smoked more than once or twice, and it usually isn't worth the bother. Nevertheless about twenty minutes into this movie, about the time when Jay and Silent Bob started performing cunnilingus on a nun, I had the incredible desire to blaze a bag of dank-ass chronic as if I were casting a poor man's version of Fireball.

As for my non-intoxicated feelings on the film, I'm not sure I can put it better than Peter Griffin.



I found this film difficult to watch, or, at very least, I found it very difficult to keep my attention on the film while watching. There were so many more interesting things to do, like catch up on my college readings, wax my floorboards, or find out why a bear is driving the car.

The movie breaks the 4th wall on numerous occasions in increasingly uncreative and unfunny ways, as if Mr. Smith did not get the Hollywood memo that a metafilmic reference has to be good in order to be funny. For the record, Mr. Smith has made two films: Clerks, and Dogma. Every other film, television show, and cartoon he's made has just been an extension of those two movies, as if he were making a five-hour special DVD Box Set for his crappy black and white stoner comedy.

And also for the record, Any film where a major plot point is the main character beating the crap out of internet film critics is not going to make my top ten list. For all the nostalgia this film may bring, it's just not as witty as Clerks, not as funny as Dogma, and not as well made as Chasing Amy. So in conclusion, I'll leave you with the one good meme to arise from this flick, a meme not so much about the movie itself, but rather about the reviews the film knew it would get: "Fuck Jay and Silent Bob. Fuck them up their stupid asses."

How Many Licks Does It Take? The Core

**Warning--This blog post contains EPIC FAIL. If you are pregnant or sensitive to fail, it is recommended that you feast your peepers on this, baby, because it'll feel like the Bush years. Also, Nicole Kidman is a ghost.**

I have gone to see three movies in the last week, and only one could be called a midnight flick. The midnight movie for this week was the 2003 bomber "The Core," a high-budget disaster about a secret government weapon that (somehow) stopped the millions of gallons of molten iron at the center of the earth from spinning. Yeah. Now, scientists have to DIG INTO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH AND RESTART THE PLANET WITH NUKES.

The science is bad. The acting is bad. The story is bad. And, best of all, it stars that guy from Thank You for Smoking alongside the queen of the jackboots, Hillary Swank. Which is bad.

Some of you may not know who Hillary Swank is, but I'm sure you'll recognize her character, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots. Who is Ms. Mary Sue Jackboots? Let me break it down.

First, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Ms. The title "Ms" in Hollywood means a sexless, emotionless, hate-filled morlock who would be the embodiment of feminism if feminism had anything to do with acting like an emotional robot or spewing more mysandry than a spit-take session with that chick who shot Andy Warhol.

Second, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Mary-Sue. She is not just perfect, but annoyingly, obviously, pull-out-your-hair-I-want-to-smack-this-bitch-with-the-blunt-end-of-a-pool-skimmer perfect. Mary-Sues can do anything, at all times, with no training, BETTER THAN YOU.

Finally, Ms. Mary-Sue Jackboots is a Jackboot. She is a fascist, like the red shirts in Star Trek who are just there to be at the business end of an intergalatic shoop-da-whoop at the appropriate time, except the Jackboot has protagonist powers. These are the people who call you a traitor for singing America, Fuck Yeah! during screenings of Patton. The Jackboot waves more flags than Michael Bay wacking off to glamour shots of The Pentagon between takes.

So, onto the plot. Birds start attacking people in Trafalgar Square, which is apparently in Toronto, and a bunch of guys with pacemakers drop dead in Boston, which is apparently a city where every man, woman and child has one installed at birth. Also, somebody throws a trout.

That Guy from Thank You for Smoking (Who I will just call That Guy), a lonely professor of the textbook-and-tweed variety, figures that all these problems are related. Much hand-waving later, the government finds the earth has stopped and decides to build a ship made of pure Plottanium (a substance that is invincible unless the plot requires it not to be, and can do anything the plot requires it to do unless it dramatically can't) to dig into the center of the earth.

But that's after a space shuttle crashes into Los Angeles.

Randomly. As a form of character development.

They may or may not have flown past the office building Snape and Voldemort were robbing. To borrow a phrase made famous by Cleolinda, this made me facepalm until my palms were bloody and my face was, well, covered by the palms of various people I had co-opted into the task due to it's sheer enormity.

After the whole space shuttle thing, the government finds a guy who can do anything if you provide him enough Xena tapes and Hot Pockets, who promptly does nothing for the rest of the movie except ostensibly sage faggots who talk about the center of the earth on 4chan, while everyone else tries to save the world in a montage. Cause, you know, if you're going to do things that are physically impossible without causing too much nerd rage, you're gonna need a montage.

Twenty agonizing minutes later a crack team of crack-pots on crack are off to the center of the Earth with Mary-Sue Jackboot, Captain Christopher Pike, ye generic Frenchman, That Guy, a pretentious Reedie, and The Black Guy Who Doesn't Die First Because That Would Be Racist in attendance. Here's a hint. Only two people survive, and one of them is not the black guy.

Have I mentioned that the ship is literally piloted with a Logitech Attack 3 game controller? Talk about doing a barrel roll.

Something goes wrong in the core, and therefore the whole mission is scratched because the nukes are no longer powerful enough to restart the core. Nothing, nothing can save the movie! Speaking of, who was the math guy who figured out how to make a perpetual motion machine out of nuke blasts and molten iron? Where's THAT guy?

That Guy and Ms. Jackboots figure it out and survive, riding the nuclear blasts all the way to the surface without drilling. They pop out in the ocean around Hawaii, where they are promptly saved by whales. WHALES. The credits can't roll fast enough.

All in all, this movie is primo, top-rate midnight material. It's entertaining without being good, it's popcorny without being childish, and it's wrong about everything forever without having to apologize for it's wrongness. For example, I didn't even mention the whole scene involving lightning causing the Colosseum to explode as if it were shoop'd by the aliens from ID4. If you haven't seen it, watch it. It's bad, but it's so good.

And, as a farewell gift, I give you this stunning tribute to Jackboots everywhere.

Show all

In other news, my next midnight movie is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra on Thursday. If you read this blog, you have a universal invitation to come watch movies with The Midnight Movie Guy. 12:01 am Friday morning (Thursday night) at The Regal 6 Pioneer Place in Downtown Portland, Oregon.

Bonus Flick: Spice World

*Warning: this post contains spoilers, like how bad this movie actually is. Seriously. Also, that guy who looks looks like Bono from U2 is Keyser Soze.*

Every once and a while, when there's only one movie coming out in a given week, my friends and I get together in my living room and watch a bad midnight movie just to make fun of it. It's a harmless little tradition, often accompanied by fifths of rum and bottles of Pepsi Lime, and many LULZ are often shared at the film's expense. This week was not like that. This week I sat through Spice World.

Or, as it turns out, I failed to sit through Spice World.

I once sat through Lucia, a three and a half hour rambling Cuban art house movie shot on film of the same quality as used public restroom toilet paper, and even though %83 of the audience walked out before credits rolled (I actually counted the number of people who walked out so I could keep from going crazy), I still sat through to the bitter, disappointing end. I spent each minute wishing I could console myself with a fistful of Advil and a baseball bat, but I still manged to get through the whole thing. I NEVER walk out of a movie.

Last night, I walked out of a movie for the first time in my life. I feel like I failed somehow, as if my tolerance for incredibly disgusting dismemberment and insulting political philosophy has somehow been forever trumped by the vomit-inducing existence of Girl Power.

I wish I had something to say about this movie. I wish I could even say it had succeeded at being the worst movie ever made, but it's not. The worst movie ever made is Plan 9 from Outer Space, the brilliantly stupid Ed Wood exploitation film. Spice World was just... unwatchable. No amount of alcohol could make it better. None. And I watched Twilight. Three times.

I sat through an obscure Italian film, banned throughout Europe, called Salo o le 120 Giornate di Sodoma, or just SALO. There is a chapter called "A Banquet of Shit" which is, needless to say, not a metaphor. Other segments involve child sodomy, rape, dismemberment, and a rather uncomfortable pedoerotic scene involving a razorblade and a human eye. This is a film designed to offend, crafted in it's very essence to make the viewer's skin crawl. Of course, I was tricked into watching it one afternoon when a friend of mine invited me over, put the film on, and then went to the bathroom for two hours. I sat through it.

I made it 23.5 minutes into Spice World.

It doesn't even have good opportunities to make fun of it. Anything funny I could say in response to this flick would have already been rendered irrelevant by the film's ultimate stupidity. Additionally, any film that makes me use the pluperfect passive subjective in a review ought to be burned mercilessly. SALO was at least second only to 8 1/2 as the pinnacle of Italian auteur theory.

There is only one redeeming feature, if you can call it that-- the all star supporting cast. The presence of Richard O'Brien, the creator of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, Alan Cumming, the man from Reefer Madness, and MEATLOAF, the best 300+ lbs rock frontman in history, made the first 23.5 minutes of this film barely tolerable. If you don't know Meatloaf, I suggest you go out and buy a A Bat out of Hell right now. Dude can rock. If you don't know Ricard O'Brien, get the hell off my blog.

As a result, I give you Nostalgia Chick, who apparently had a stronger stomach than I:

"Some nights are like nothing I've seen before or will again!" -Meatloaf (I would do Anything for Love)

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Pimp

**WARNING: This review contains spoilers like how Hans Gruber kills Dumbledore at time signature 2:13:55. Consider yourself warned.**

What can I say about the Harry Potter franchise that has not been said before? Most comments are pretty much summed up with this:

Although this Harry Potter film doesn't have nearly as much fake gold or phat rhymes, it is nevertheless quite similar. Harry Potter is rocking a harem of rather demure but foxy British girls, spends a lot of his time dodging the law, and spends even more time brewing potions that will fuck you up faster than an Alabama Speedball. Harry has moved into his sex, drugs and magic weapons phase.

Everybody knew this film would be the biggest hit since George Lucas first masturbated into an old Kurosawa print. Nevertheless, even I was surprised by how HP rocked the house at the midnight showings. In P-town, Harry Potter and the Halfblood Prince had to compete with Dave Chapelle causing a drunken riot in Pioneer Square, but HP still managed to sell out all six midnight shows downtown and two theaters had to resort to 3 am showings to stem the mob. Due to the aforementioned drunken rioting, I was in those later shows.

It is first worth a note that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is basically a three-hour drug odyssey... with magic! Harry finds a book allowing him to brew potent psychoactive beverages, so he brews up a batch of primo black tar heroin for professor Slughorn. Slughorn gives Harry a large vial of meth which comes in use way later, because soon after Ron accidentally overdoses on Harry's stash of Ecstasy. Slughorn tries to calm the tweaker down with barbiturates and alcohol, which turns out to be a bad idea because Ron almost dies, forcing Harry to save him with adrenaline shot. The first half of the movie is like the children's version of Requiem for a Dream, and the soundtrack is just as annoying and repetitive. Despite the fact that there is no White Castle, the filmmakers got one thing right: magical or not, boarding school is pretty much a sex-fueled drug binge filled with crazy professors, magical beasts and many, many sugary foods. (There are so many cakes, cookies, and bowls of ice cream in this movie that you'll swear the director had the munchies.)

But then if you wait until the second hour, there are Zombies. Zombies, Zombies, Zombies.

Harry and Dumbledore go to a hidden cave in order to destroy a lich box-- anybody who has read the book already knows that there is a whole army of deadites under the water and neither Harry or Dumble have the proper spell to turn their arms into chainsaws, so the anticipation before the undead mayhem is palpable. Before the Romero hordes make their move, Dumbledore drinks a lot of poison and is down for the count (we all know wizards can't succeed fortitude saves). The zombies finally attack when Harry gets an evil shell full of water so Dumbledore can chaise the poison (yeah, that ocean water is really going to help). Harry's boom stick soon runs out of ammo and things look grim, but Dumbledore apparently forgot to add in his level bonuses the first time, because he casts a fiery spell affectionately dubbed the "Maximus Pimpus" whose verbal component is ostensibly screaming "you shall not pass!" as if Ian McKellen owed you money.

Meanwhile in the faraway land of plot, nothing much really happens. Everybody seems to know that Draco needs to kill Dumbledore, and nobody really does anything to stop it. Harry spends most of the year desperately searching for plot only to find out that Dumbledore really knew most of the information Harry could have provided already and had been doing the cool stuff off-screen. The whole "destroy the lich boxes" thing doesn't come until almost 2 hours into the film. Harry and Ginnie have less screen chemistry than Edward and Bella, and Nevile and Lovegood are apparently only in the movie for contractual reasons-- their presence serves no point other than fan service. 

All in all, HP and the HP was terrifically enjoyable, if just for the hordes of screaming fans, opportunities for theater snark, and great-but-overused visual effects. Highly suggested.