My big complaint is the totally unnecessary addition of the female love interest/triangle but thank goodness they didn’t spend too much time on her! Rachel McAdams was definatley – in character and acting chops – the weakest link in the whole film and had the potential to bring it all crashing down if she was given any more screen time. Ugh, probably Joel Silver’s idea.

There was a little Steampunk addition at the end which wasn’t required to make this film appealing to anyone who enjoys the aesthetic or just the Victorian without that additional flair.

Y’know. Don’t worry kids, we’ll just portray Holmes as both a brilliant mind AND a substance abuser (alcohol in the 2009 movie, tobacco and coke in the book & TV show), which is sure to give you a clear idea about mental health, but God forbid there be any mention of homosexuality! Needless to say, I think people are sort of missing the point with the gay thing.

And also, the movie took plenty of liberties with the canon anyway- I felt it was more about playing around with the characters than anything else, so I think we can afford to take it a little more tongue-in-cheek than, say, a Brett version of Holmes. Besides, if they were going to take the gay-spin in the next movies, they’d have a lot of explaining to do with all that Watson-has-a-wife and Holmes-digs-Adler expose in this one.

At the end of the day, Plunket’s getting way too hyped up about an amusing fan-created concept which isn’t really part of Doyle’s original creation. You want gay? Go read Oscar Wilde.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/19/books/19sherlock.html?pagewanted=1

And Sued.

And Sued some more, and apparently has won herself the rights to the franchise as far as the United States is concerned after some decades in litigation.

As for Holmes and Watson having a gay relationship, I suspect, vaguely, that the compulsion to make Holmes gay may have something to do with the idea that Victorians were effete. I frown at this, Sir. I frown.

I’m a big fan of making everybody queer just to annoy people — but to make Holmes and Watson gay would actually kind of be insulting to the concept of male-male friendship and love. As it’s shown in the original stories, I see their relationship as being at least as complex as a romantic male-male relationship, and introducing sex into it would be…interesting, but not really true to the characters. I would consider this an application of filmmaker’s hubris, not genuinely inspired re-imagining. Such a thing seems potentially to be little divorced from Sadaam and Satan on South Park.

As of 1996 UK is a Life + 70 country, and Doyle died in 1930, I assume the claim of copyright for Holmes derives from derivations of later revisions.

If the woman in question owned the copyright to something authorized anew after Doyle’s death but while the original works were still under the life + 70 copyright, she might argue that the new movie took character material or details from the newer works that were still under copyright.

But I’d think that would be a REALLY hard sell.

The Sherlock-Watson gay thing: well, it’d depend on how it was done.

CHris

Waterbug: I was also a bit confused about how old Tower Bridge was supposed to be, but it made for an awesome-looking end scene, so I guess it’s all good? haha.