Tonight CuteFilmNerd and I will be seeing Terry Gilliam’s latest, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which also opens on Christmas Day. I love Terry Gilliam, so it’s bound to be interesting at least, but I’ll report back about whether it’s worth your Christmas Day dollars.

I don’t recommend The Lovely Bones. While Peter Jackson tries to recapture the melding of stunning fantasy and jolting reality that he did successfully with Heavenly Creatures, it ultimately doesn’t work. Lovely moments do not a movie make.

I’ve seen the trailer for the new movie…meh…haven’t seen the massive marketing tie-ins yet at this juncture, but that may be because we don’t have 7-11 store hereabouts. I suspect the other products will surface here soon enough.

And as I’ll be on my own for Christmas Day this year, a movie might be an option! (depending, as always, on the availability of public transportation on a major holiday)

Also, no quibbles with Holmes and Watson being transplanted to WWII-era England, because the essence of the characters (well, the essence of Holmes – much as I love Nigel Bruce, he was not Watson) and the stories felt relatively intact, despite the conversion into propaganda. Seeing as Holmes was transplanted to contemporary times in earlier incarnations, such as the Arthur Wonter and Clive Brook films, I don’t feel I can really fault Universal for its decision.

So, yeah, it’s not the altness of the movie, or even the character that bugs me (except for the slovenly thing – that’s just wrong). It’s that the bit I’ve seen of Downey as Holmes hasn’t got even a sliver of relationship to the Holmes of the books. Hopefully I’ll be proven wrong.

I haven’t seen any of Ritchie’s interviews regarding the new Holmes movie. I actually don’t want to know any more about the film than I already do, since I developed an aversion to spoilers of any kind a few years ago, thanks to a Buffy episode. But yes, the marketing is bugging the crap out of me too, even though the prevalence of Sherlock Holmes everywhere I turn secretly tickles me just a little.

Hopefully the new movie will have people turning to the books, just as the movie adaptation of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution turned me to the stories when I was young, not realizing at the time that it wasn’t an original Conan Doyle story but not caring once I found out because I fell completely in love with the Canon. And, just as hopefully, the young’uns that check out the stories won’t be disappointed by the singular lack of explosions.

So I can cope with a non-canonical, deconstructed, reconstructed Sherlock Holmes, particularly one in the hands of a talented cast and crew. What’s a bit harder to deal with is Guy Richie, who is a really hit-and-miss director, and who’s come off as a bit clueless in the few interviews about the film I’ve seen. (E.g. he’s been asked about leaving Holmes’ cocaine problem out of the movie; there are good reasons you could leave it out, but Richie’s vague explanation about it being a distraction just doesn’t seem like one fo them.) And the marketing of the movie is just irritating for its generic-ness as much as anything. Does every movie have to have a poster with the main character(s) standing against a blue, cloudy sky pierced by ominous buildings (a la The Dark Knight and a thousand other movies)? And, I know it’s a rhetorical question (because the answer is actually “yes” because of the effed up way the Hollywood economy works these days), but does every big movie have to double as a vehicle for selling sandwiches? It’s now completely possible to be utterly sick of what might be a crommulent or even excellent movie months before it even hits theater screens (don’t even get me started on Avatar, a movie I feel like I’ve already seen six or seven times despite the fact it’s not even out yet).