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When I heard that Robert Downey Jr. was to play Sherlock Holmes I was immediately excited. The prospect of Downey (who brought a mercurial energy to Iron Man—imagine how dead-eyed Tony Stark would’ve been had Tom Cruise landed the role as long rumored) really brought interest to the new movie. With Guy Ritchie directing, I figured the movie was guaranteed to be great.
I guess I was wrong.
Don’t get me wrong. It was okay but it fell short of the fine interpretation of Holmes that we’ve had on television for the last six years. House M.D.
It wasn’t until 2008 that I realized that the Bryan Singer-Hugh Laurie TV series was based on Sherlock Holmes (thanks, Dusty) but it certainly is. While the cast and basic premise is different the characters of Holmes and Watson are portrayed in a medical setting by House and Wilson. House is gifted with Holmes’s brilliance and cursed with his faults.
Trying to compare a two hour movie to a TV series in its sixth season seems unfair but Laurie’s portrayal of a self-tortured genius is what drives the show each week. Sharp writing doesn’t hurt either but the show is a vehicle for Laurie and we watch it already knowing the outcome of the episode. House will solve the mystery, piss off his co-workers and shuffle ever closer to discovering his own humanity.
It seems that House has co-opted the conversation but that’s because there isn’t a lot to say about the movie itself. Downey and Law are fairly strong in their interpretations of Holmes and the good Doctor Watson but there is lacking a drive in the film. Any well-paced, interesting movie carries the viewer from start to finish as a ferry carries its passenger from shore to shore. I felt that I had to drudge alongside the movie as it made its paces from start to finish. The plot was standard-fare, the cinematography fine and the general backdrop acceptable but given the movie’s pedigree, I expected more.
Hopefully the movie will earn enough money to warrant a sequel as the Moriarty bits added in after the primary filming all but mandate a sequel be made. I’m fairly confident that a second stab at the Conan Doyle-inspired world will be more fully realized than this one.
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Walk through the door and this is what you see…
Note the Sega Master System cartridges given to Brian by his friend Dusty. Thanks Dusty! Also is a signed Steranko Captain America print. Just because.
Brian mixes the microphones using the Yamaha Audiogram 6. You’ll also see two microphones. The M Audio Soundcheck and the Samson C01U. That’s a homemade pop filter on the Samson.
More toys. NES games, etc.
Ron Paul. Yeah. He’s nutty but so’s Brian. That’s Duncan MacLeod’s sword there to the left, also from Brian’s friend Dusty.
More toys, games, DVD. Notice the Sacred Heart print. It’s nearly 100 years old. Brian’s not Catholic, he just thought it was kind of creepy looking.
Let’s pan right a little for a tighter shot…
A little more… notice the Goldwater 64 bumper sticker. That is vintage, was printed in 1964. Also, check out the awesome Bumblebee Easter basket.
Noticed the X-Arcade stick and the Star Convoy down there on the bottom right of the screen. Believe it or not, this Brian’s office AFTER purging.
All in all, Brian is a happy, unrepentant nerd. Unfortunately, most of the toys are in storage. Maybe if he gets a bigger house down the road…
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Supreme Animated Optimus Prime for $19.99 at Ollie’s.
Also found the Spider-Man, Punisher, Ghost Rider and Electra four pack for $6.99 at Ollie’s as well.
I was initially a huge skeptic of Windows Vista but Service Pack 1 remedied most of my complaints. Throttling back UAC also helped matters quite a bit and allowed me to really enjoy the interface. All-in-all Vista itself is an exceptional operating system and a real leap forward from Windows XP. Windows 7, for all its bells, whistles and shiny things is not the same leap.
But this post isn’t about Windows 7, per se but instead my implementation of it. I have two environments running on my PC. Windows Vista 64 Home Premium and Windows 7 64 Home Premium.
Vista will be my business environment. I will use it to conduct business and manage my projects such as the blog, web design and podcasts. All of my productivity applications (Expression Web, Photoshop, Illustrator, Soundbooth, etc.) will be installed on Windows Vista. Windows 7 will be my personal hub. It will be the media player, my gaming environment, etc. My Windows 7 environment will not feature any productivity applications. I have lived a split life for the last few years. I have been managing documents in both Microsoft Office 2007 and in Google Docs. Experimentally, I will take this even further. On Windows 7 I will live entirely within the cloud. I already develop my website in the cloud, manage my photos within the cloud, manage half of my documents within the cloud. Unless this proves disastrous, I will not install productivity software of any kind on Windows 7 and instead rely on my Vista environment for the must to/have tos.
We’ll see how this goes.
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