Friday, December 18, 2009

Recent Articles on Sherlock Holmes, annotated

The Guy Richie/Robert Downey Jr., Jude Law Sherlock Holmes movie has has certainly done much to put The Great Detective back in public view and generate much analysis of Holmes past and present. I thought I would collect many of the the links that have appeared recently into one post.

Robert Downey Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes -- Faithful or Flawed? Holmes experts Leslie S. Klinger and Steven Rothman contributed to the article along with Guy Richie. Wired author Hugh Hart compares Downey's Hat, Pipe, Habits, Sanity, and Physique to Doyle's character.

Sherlock with a six-pack: Forget deerstalkers and piles, Guy Richie's Holmes is a ruthless, brawling superhero. Michael of the Mail Online examines Richie's rebooting of Doyle's iconic detective. Richie is quoted I know a lot of people will find our take on Holmes a bit of a travesty, but I am convinced this is the closest possible interpretation of what was in Conan Doyle’s mind.

Can I be complementary, my dear Watson? We celebrate flashy, insensitive Holmes, but it’s his sidekick’s common sense, bravery and friendship that we should admire Ben Macintire of the TimesOnline says that Dr Watson, MD, may be the most unfairly overshadowed character in English literature. Excellent contrast of Holmes and Watson.

Sherlock Holmes: The detective who wouldn't die. The sub-heading of this TimesOnline article by Simon Callow is: Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t bear the fame of his detective, but he couldn’t kill him off either. This is an excellent look at Holmes, the character, his development, what Doyle thought of Holmes, how our images has been shaped by such aspects as the names Sherlock Holmes and John Watson.

Guy Ritchie casts off the deerstalker to reveal new Sherlock Holmes. The Times Online has certainly done its part to examine the new Sherlock Holmes movie in relation to the stories. Ben Hoyle looks at the past imagining of Holmes and the Holmes we will see in the movie.

Diagnosis - Hidden Clues. In this NY Times Magazine article, Dr. Lisa Sanders looks for clues to explain Holmes' more extreme characteristics.

The Real Sherlock Holmes Alex Knapp, in Heretical Ideas: A Journal of Unorthodox Ideas, believes that Judging by the photos and trailers, the upcoming Sherlock Holmes appears to be truer to the original stories than virtually any other adaptation. He discusses aspects of the film with examples from the canon stories and also says What is NOT true to Doyles’ Holmes is the popular TV and movie portrayals of him–which turned him into a classy, upper-class gentlemen.

Comparing Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes to Conan Doyle's Stories. Robert Davis writing in Paste Magazine has an excellent analysis of the movie backed up with quotes from the stories.

The London of Sherlock Holmes ... Mapped. This isn't an article but it is a fun contribution to the Sherlock Holmes madness the movie has generated. All the London locations mentioned in the stories are mapped. Interesting to look at the distribution.

1 comment:

  1. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.