So I just finished watching the unaired pilot of the serial “Sherlock”. I’m impressed. Not because a fool has taken awful liberties, infact committed sacrilege by even thinking of taking a classic by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and giving it his own, shall we say “modernized view”? you see there are some things that aren’t meant to be changed in any way shape or form whatsoever. William Shakespeare is one of those things. You can have a girl in jeans and a blazer playing Juliet or a man in a tweed coat re-enacting Macbeth, but you cannot have that man insert even a sentence of his own in even a single one of Macbeth’s speeches. Modernizing a classic should be done keeping the story, the dialog and the punctuation right down to the last full stop in place.
Call me a purist. There’s no need to actually, because I AM a purist. While I was watching the episode the purist in me wanted to scream blue murder and there was one point where I considered shutting it off and deleting the rest of it from my PC. But I was curious to see it to the end, give it a chance. Now maybe I have forgotten my Holmes, as I read it a long time ago (and will read it again soon) but I do not recall Dr. Watson having a limp, nor do I remember his brother being alive. Last I checked, his brother was an alcoholic who had died a bachelor. Here however, he has a sister. In the book, Sherlock Holmes figures out these facts by looking at a key. Here the phone suffices. Watson was outraged in the book. He is impressed here.
That’s where I realized what this guy had done. He didn’t intend to modernize Sherlock Holmes at all. What I was seeing was in no way shape or form connected to the detective who sat with a needle jabbed in his arm in a room full of books talking about detection to Watson. What I was seeing was a man, a genius no doubt with superb detecting skills, solving cases. We ALL know that Sherlock Holmes was much much more than just that.
Benedict Cumerbatch’s Holmes comes across as a cynical egotist who is primarily a loner, and is dubbed a psychopath by those of the police force who work (or rather refuse to work) with him. Yes if you want to argue, the modern things are there. Watson has a blog instead of a planner, he has a modern 9mm gun, he uses cabs and an iPhone, while “Sherlock Holmes” uses the Internet, texts, is up to date with technology as it is today. But that’s it.
What this director seems to have forgotten is that the techniques that Conan Doyle wrote about were breakthroughs in his time, that are used by police today. In that context, the question of comparing the Holmes in the books to the one brought to life by Cumerbatch doesn’t arise. This serial is in no way a modern take on Sherlock Holmes. If it was intended to be, it has failed superbly. However, it is an interesting crime series and one that’s worth a watch. It’s just that there are so many of them out there, that I doubt this one will stay with you for very long.
The Bilge Master
Call me a purist. There’s no need to actually, because I AM a purist. While I was watching the episode the purist in me wanted to scream blue murder and there was one point where I considered shutting it off and deleting the rest of it from my PC. But I was curious to see it to the end, give it a chance. Now maybe I have forgotten my Holmes, as I read it a long time ago (and will read it again soon) but I do not recall Dr. Watson having a limp, nor do I remember his brother being alive. Last I checked, his brother was an alcoholic who had died a bachelor. Here however, he has a sister. In the book, Sherlock Holmes figures out these facts by looking at a key. Here the phone suffices. Watson was outraged in the book. He is impressed here.
That’s where I realized what this guy had done. He didn’t intend to modernize Sherlock Holmes at all. What I was seeing was in no way shape or form connected to the detective who sat with a needle jabbed in his arm in a room full of books talking about detection to Watson. What I was seeing was a man, a genius no doubt with superb detecting skills, solving cases. We ALL know that Sherlock Holmes was much much more than just that.
Benedict Cumerbatch’s Holmes comes across as a cynical egotist who is primarily a loner, and is dubbed a psychopath by those of the police force who work (or rather refuse to work) with him. Yes if you want to argue, the modern things are there. Watson has a blog instead of a planner, he has a modern 9mm gun, he uses cabs and an iPhone, while “Sherlock Holmes” uses the Internet, texts, is up to date with technology as it is today. But that’s it.
What this director seems to have forgotten is that the techniques that Conan Doyle wrote about were breakthroughs in his time, that are used by police today. In that context, the question of comparing the Holmes in the books to the one brought to life by Cumerbatch doesn’t arise. This serial is in no way a modern take on Sherlock Holmes. If it was intended to be, it has failed superbly. However, it is an interesting crime series and one that’s worth a watch. It’s just that there are so many of them out there, that I doubt this one will stay with you for very long.
The Bilge Master
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