Regular readers of my comments know that I am obsessive about films made from Holmes and Christie material. That's because a cornerstone of film narrative is the game between the filmmaker and viewer, conventions from the detective story.
So it rankles me when good stuff in the source material gets bleached out in a movie version because someone somewhere didn't understand what they had. The Granada Holmes project is a huge offender in this regard. They follow TeeVee convention which says that the characters are the thing, that situations consist not of logical ambiguities, but of attractive places.
And then when a "solution" is reached it is just fine to surprise the viewer, that there is no connection between the detection and the conclusion.
These Granada projects follow the BBC production technique of assigning a different creative team to each project. So within the approach of "faces and places" you get different styles.
I've given all that background to say that one of the episodes in this collection breaks the rules and actually produces a very fine experience. Just this one; the rest is amusing trash.
The episode in question is "The Abbey Grange," which has the happy coincidence of an adapter who understands what mystery narrative is all about and a director who understood his writer. So we get a quite effective translation of Conan Doyle. We have images early in the episode that we see that don't make sense, we experience comprehension bit by bit as images emerge from that darkness.
These two techniques seem trite, but they work amazingly well. And they accommodate Brett's translation of the character. His Holmes is tightly wound as is the written Holmes. But Brett insists on some explosive theatrics to make the point; it shows he trusts our intelligence little when he does it so frequently. Brooding and mechanical and deeply selfish would be harder to portray, but would be so much more effective.
The sweet spot of the stories came from the fact that Holmes was inhuman in most respects. And that to the consternation of the reader, he repeatedly demonstrates that people are more machines than human, that they can be sussed out every time excepting the few evil geniuses. The TeeVee guys need to create someone with charm and appeal. A mistake, I think.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.
So it rankles me when good stuff in the source material gets bleached out in a movie version because someone somewhere didn't understand what they had. The Granada Holmes project is a huge offender in this regard. They follow TeeVee convention which says that the characters are the thing, that situations consist not of logical ambiguities, but of attractive places.
And then when a "solution" is reached it is just fine to surprise the viewer, that there is no connection between the detection and the conclusion.
These Granada projects follow the BBC production technique of assigning a different creative team to each project. So within the approach of "faces and places" you get different styles.
I've given all that background to say that one of the episodes in this collection breaks the rules and actually produces a very fine experience. Just this one; the rest is amusing trash.
The episode in question is "The Abbey Grange," which has the happy coincidence of an adapter who understands what mystery narrative is all about and a director who understood his writer. So we get a quite effective translation of Conan Doyle. We have images early in the episode that we see that don't make sense, we experience comprehension bit by bit as images emerge from that darkness.
These two techniques seem trite, but they work amazingly well. And they accommodate Brett's translation of the character. His Holmes is tightly wound as is the written Holmes. But Brett insists on some explosive theatrics to make the point; it shows he trusts our intelligence little when he does it so frequently. Brooding and mechanical and deeply selfish would be harder to portray, but would be so much more effective.
The sweet spot of the stories came from the fact that Holmes was inhuman in most respects. And that to the consternation of the reader, he repeatedly demonstrates that people are more machines than human, that they can be sussed out every time excepting the few evil geniuses. The TeeVee guys need to create someone with charm and appeal. A mistake, I think.
Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.