Kickass Sherlock

The idea of turning Sherlock Holmes into a bare-chested ultimate-fighting asskicker seems like the kind of spoof you would briefly glimpse on screen in a scathing satire of Hollywood or at the start of an episode of The Critic.

Yet in 2009 that’s what we got, and truth be told it wasn’t all that terrible. Now that the trailer for the sequel has landed and Nathaniel from The Film Experience has asked me to thrown on my deerstalker and pull out my magnifying glass to see if I spot any reason to get excited for this second go-round with Downey and Law. Check it out.

Visions of the Future

"We are all interested in the future for that is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friends, future events such as these will affect you in the future..."

So spoke Criswell at the start of Ed Wood's opus, Plan 9 From Outer Space. In terms of accuracy of prediction most science fiction/fantasy stories don't fare much better than Ed Wood's story of grave robbers from outer space. For this week's Unsung Heroes I salute an exception to the rule of wildly inaccurate predictions, Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. I get into the intellectual A-Team Spielberg assembled to bring Minority Report's  eerily plausible vision of the future to the screen.

Check it out.

Back to Work

A variety of personal and professional obligations have kept me away from the blog recently but that is over and done with and now it's back to the screening room!

I'm ready and raring to go, so keep checking back in the coming weeks. I've got a mess of new recurring features I want to try out as well as an overflowing stockpile of opinions on everything from Tree of Life to Cars 2 to what on Earth Al Pacino is thinking with that new Adam Sandler movie.

Line Reading Hall of Fame #7

"...so it'd be quite a coincidence if they weren't, ya know, connected."

The Man Behind the Arrows

Everyone has those few movies that slip past are the roadblocks of your rational, adult mind and take you instantly back to that sense of childhood wonder at the movies. For me that movie is 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, directed in turn by William Keighley and the great Michael Curtiz. It is so impossibly dashing and thrilling. So much fun. So exactly what a movie should be. My critical faculties don't stand a chance against it.

For this episode of Unsung Heroes I single out a man whose contributions were indispensable in making Robin Hood a film that still towers over imitators nearly 75 years later: the legendary archer Howard Hill.

Take a look.

Deny Me and Be Doomed

So difficult in this day and age to find the genuinely cool instead of the manufactured cool. The real rock and roll and not the MTV.

In that spirit, this episode of Unsung Heroes raises a glass to the artist behind the animated sequence from the last genuinely kickass rock and roll musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I could easily name a dozen CGI talking animal movies that combined don’t have the impact of these 3 rough, hand-drawn minutes. Give it a read.