I went and saw the new Sherlock Holmes movie with jai_dit, teshiron, tiferet, and jamoche, on the 26th. We had a great deal of fun.

I reviewed the movie (spoilers ahoy) for bechdel_test (which it does not pass). Despite that, I enjoyed it for what it was.

OMG SO MARRIED. So there's no deerstalker cap. That was a bit of a disappointment, but the HAIR, the WILD AND CRAZY HAIR, that made up for it. And Watson. OMG WATSON.

I liked the way Holmes's fighting was handled. It wasn't just smack-smack-smack-punch-here-is-a-brawl-with-fists-sticking-out-of-the-scribble, it was calculated beforehand in a way you could see, and then there-it-goes-almost-faster-than-you-can-see. I'm glad they took that particular storytelling risk.

I mentioned that I am very bad with faces, right? Enough so that it was perfectly reasonable to me to see two pretty, regular-featured, slim young women of a height and to wonder if they weren't the same person, given that there's master-of-disguise stuff going on in the movie. I eventually realized that they had to be different actresses (their noses were different).

I maintain that Irene totally could have been playing Mary as well as doing all her other international dirty deeds. It would have taken coordination, planning, the cooperation of other parties, and no small amount of good luck to pull off (well-timed "trips to the country" when Irene needed to appear elsewhere, strictly avoiding Holmes as much as possible, never agreeing to meet), but it could have been done.

Crossposted. comments.