Sherlock Holmes—The Guy Ritchie film that I enjoyed the most remains the first one I saw: Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Ritchie consistently delivers films with high-energy action, sardonic humor, violence, and a generous helping of profanity. He would seem to be an unconventional choice for a film about Arthur Conan Doyle’s intellectual and urbane detective hero. Clearly, this was an attempt to seize Holmes from the PBS Mystery and Masterpiece Theatre crowd and have Ritchie transform this nineteenth-century fictional character into a twenty-first century film hero. There are some pluses for Ritchie’s effort: (1) Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) and Watson (Jude Law) get to do more, and the action is exciting. (2) Watson is portrayed more as an intellectual equal to Holmes instead of as a sycophantic lapdog with an IQ only a point or two north of the typical village idiot. (3) Ritchie’s portrayal of London is a vibrant city teeming with people from every station of life instead of a series of drawing rooms and parlors. The downside is: (1) Ritchie’s jump-cut techniques and Holmes’s voice-overs never let the audience settle into believing they are witnessing the nineteenth-century world of Sherlock Holmes. (2) The story is so exotic and so farfetched that it seems to exceed the limits of any mere human criminal enterprise and to have jumped directly from the comic-book world of superheroes and supervillains. I guess I would have to say I am not averse to giving Holmes the musculature to match his intellect, but I want him to still be of the world into which he was originally written. I do not want Holmes and his adversaries pumped up on steroids and the story to seem like a trippy cartoon adventure.

The Lovely Bones—Whether one appreciates Peter Jackson’s adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel may depend on whether one has read the novel or not. Criticism has often focused on how it fails to deliver what the book did. The premise of the story is that fourteen-year-old Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan) is murdered by her neighborhood serial killer (Stanley Tucci) and then narrates her lingering witness of the world in which she lived, observing her family and her killer. She is hovering in between the life she had known and a more permanent destination for the dead. One appreciates Sebold’s and then Jackson’s imagination in trying to show what might await us at that profound barrier between life and death. As a filmgoer who had not read the book, I found the film fascinating in portraying permeability in that barrier. The film introduces us to her bewildered and suffering family, which includes her obsessed father (Mark Wahlberg), who can not move beyond his daughter’s loss; her mother (Rachel Weisz), who seeks to escape from the family trauma; her eccentric grandmother (Susan Sarandon), who is always ready to apply alcohol to address any situation; her younger sister Lindsey (Rose McIver), who slowly unravels the secret of her sister’s disappearance; and her younger brother Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale), who matter-of-factly announces that he still sees Susie. We see the family cope over a few years from Susie’s murder. We see what goes on in the field where Susie died. Susie is intrigued by how the lives have progressed for Ray (Reece Ritchie), with whom she was falling in love for the first time, and the mysterious loner Ruth (Carolyn Dando), with whom she feels connected. Meanwhile, the killer continues to live his every day “normal” life, shielding his secret trail of villainy from everyone else. The film is eminently watchable and is certainly intriguing enough to pull along most film viewers, but it does tend to leave the viewer wanting more. The process of taking this book and making it into a film has meant—my wife who has read the book tells me—that much of the story has been shortened or left out entirely. The story is extended over a longer period and the lives described enriched by greater detail. The characters are not just introduced to go through their paces on the screen, but the reader will get to know these characters. Some events in the film seem to come from left field but proceed logically in the book. A fairly significant difference is that the family has a much greater sense of Susie’s lingering presence instead of her in-between existence being shown just through her witness of what is happening to those she cared about after she has died. This film has clearly suffered in comparison to its source material and that should probably be encouragement to read more. Still it deserves to be seen even if that means waiting to rent the DVD for seeing it on the small screen.

The Book of Eli—As if the world didn’t already seem a very dangerous place, filmgoers have been taken to the apocalypse and then beyond in three recent films. The Book of Eli is the third of these similarly themed but unrelated films. It features typically strong performances from Denzel Washington as the heroic Eli and Gary Oldman as his villainous adversary. Eli’s book is the King James version of the Holy Bible, scriptures sacred to Christians. Typical of postapocalyptic films, the how and why of what trauma has befallen our world is glossed over, but there are echoes of the religiosity in our current conflicts in this film to the extent that religious texts have been blamed for whatever happened, and the Holy Bible, one of today’s most widely owned publications, has been almost totally eradicated—that is except for Eli’s copy. Eli is intent on taking his Bible west on a cryptic pilgrimage. Gary Oldman’s Carnegie remembers the power in these now forgotten scriptures and wants to use them to buttress his authority in his own dusty, dry gulch fiefdom. The Hughes brothers are good at atmosphere and have created a barren, stricken environment that is as credible as The Road (one of the other recent postapocalyptic films) or The Road Warrior. The film has the look and feel of an Old West shoot ’em up, and Washington’s character has the demeanor and discipline of a samurai. Unfortunately, the lack of backstory for what these people have lived through and what they want from their lives makes the story thin. Questions begin to bubble up, and then these show the plot holes that begin to seem glaring, undermining the film’s credibility. A cataclysmic event has happened, but following this the surviving society was sufficiently well organized to wipe out one of the most ubiquitous books of all time?  Thirty years after this event, the scattered remnant humans still seem to be cannibalizing anything, everything, and anyone from the preapocalyptic world and seemingly have not found more productive ways to adapt? The film also seems to have missed an opportunity to make faith and religious teachings a more central part of the story. This is not a bad film, but I was looking for more than atmospherics and a few big fight scenes.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus—Terry Gilliam’s film will probably forever be known as the trivia answer to the question: What was Heath Ledger’s final film? This film—so conjured from fantasy—is unique in its ability to withstand and incorporate the loss of its star—the talented Heath Ledger who untimely overdosed during filming—into the film’s story. Many films would never be finished, and most directors would have to recast and then reshoot the entire film. Ledger’s Tony was replaced by Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell, who played three versions of Tony within Doctor Parnassus’s (Christopher Plummer) imaginarium—a carnival sideshow that offered fantastic flights of fancy behind its stage. Tony is an apparent would-be suicide rescued by Parnassus’s daughter Valentina (Lily Cole) and Parnassus’s loyal assistant and his daughter’s ardent admirer Anton (Andrew Garfield). Amnesiac Tony has not just been dropped into a struggling carnival sideshow—he finds himself a witness to a long-running Faustian bargain between the devil Mr. Nick (Tom Waits) and Parnassus that sets Valentina as the coveted prize. Two story threads play out: (1) Who is Tony, and how did he end up swinging at the end of a rope from a bridge, and (2) how can Valentina be saved from Mr. Nick? Gilliam’s film is wildly imaginative and never settles into a predictable routine. This is a film that made me wonder who needs drugs when you have Terry Gilliam, making it strangely ironic that its star died from drug overindulgence. This is definitely not for everyone, but if one is willing to simply sit back and enjoy the wild ride, it will hold your attention and deliver its own unique pleasures.