AVATAR vs. SHERLOCK HOLMES - Is it elementary my dear Watson?
Ok, I will finally admit it. I am terrified of seeing Avatar.
There's only so many days I can use the snow as my excuse for not seeing Avatar, and I know I need to get my ass in gear soon before the advent of the New Year will make any kind of review obsolete. That's if it isn't already too late. If nothing else, my Top Ten List of 2009 will be redundant without a mention of such a widely acclaimed movie with a $300 million budget from James Cameron, right? I should see it for that reason alone, even if "the must see" factor couldn't persuade me to hand over my hard-earned money for another Harry Potter borefest, this year's Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich spectacles and the ludcricous looking Twilight: New Moon.
AVATAR (161 minutes) SHERLOCK HOLMES (128 minutes)"Two tickets for the Sherlock Holmes movie please". It will happen, no matter how much I try and convince myself to see Avatar. Am I a failure? And do I not learn from my own mistakes? Jeez. I really don't know what to do. Here's what the critics are saying for Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, out today...
Of course intelligence has never ranked high among either Mr. Ritchies interests or his attributes as a filmmaker. His primary desire, most successfully realized early in his directing career, in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, has always been to be cool: to make cool movies about cool guys with cool stuff. Yes, Sherlock Holmes is kind of cool. But thats not really a compliment. The visual style a smoky, greasy, steam-punk rendering of Victorian London, full of soot and guts and bad teeth and period clothes shows some undeniable flair. And so do the kinetic chases and scrapes that lead us through the city, as Holmes and his pal Watson (Jude Law) scramble to unravel a conspiracy so diabolical that it fails to be interesting. Best of all is the banter between Mr. Downey and Mr. Law, who is looser and more mischievous than hes allowed himself to be in quite some time. The mustache suits him.The new, modernized Holmes/Watson relationship is brought up in just about every review of the picture and it's become a fascinating talking point. Empire's William Thomas calls it a Butch/Sundance dynamic, Kenneth Turan in The L.A. Times calls them "The Odd Couple";
As opposed to the bumbler of previous film versions, Watson's been made into a handsome man of action, but he's also been placed in a relationship with Holmes that feels too much like "The Odd Couple." With their connection damaged by Watson's decision to move out and get married, the two men bicker almost ceaselessly over who left the stove on and who should be wearing what.AICN's Capone calls Sherlock Holmes...
SHERLOCK HOLMES is Guy Ritchie's superhero movie, with Holmes (Robert Downey Jr. absolutely devours Arthur Conan Doyle's creation) as a version of Batman that uses his brains as his primary weapon (followed closely with some fairly formidable fists). It also seems to help that both Holmes and Batman are mentally unstable creatures. And not that the plot of the film isn't impressive on a mass-destruction scope, but it's almost secondary compared to watching Holmes and his heterosexual life partner Dr. John Watson (Jude Law, in what might be his best work to date) outfit and outfight their enemies and those who appear to be friends but are actually just more enemies. I also love how the plot fully embraces the time period and place. The idea of a device that can wirelessly trigger a bomb nearly confounds our heroes. The final battle takes place on an in-progress bridge construction of a structure that usually acts as nothing but background in other London-set films.Roger Ebert and Todd McCarthy both liked it the less they related to it as a Sherlock Holmes picture but Drew McWeeney, who should know having played Moriarty for 12 years over at AICN, said it was more familiar to the pulp action roots of Holmes than you might immediately realise. Michael Phillips, calls it a "drag" to see Holmes Watson turn "into a couple of garden-variety thugs". His is the biggest pan of the movie online closely followed by Kirk Honeycutt at The Hollywood Reporter.