Great Expectations

Did I already give a blog entry this title? I could swear I did. I could probably go through the archives and check, but that would be Letting the Terrorists Win.

(Also, for those of you picking this up on Facebook, I’d just like to maintain that I really do update this every Sunday. Facebook is just weird and sporadic about the timing of importing entries from my RSS feed…)

So I just got back from a trip to the Stratford Festival (fun courtesy of my AWESOME friends and sister), where I noticed something sobering: the more I was looking forward to a play, the less I actually enjoyed it. More on the actual trip next week, but my point is, I wonder if I’ve been remiss in not identifying my expectations when I ramble on about movies, TV shows, plays, and/or books that catch my interest.

In other words… Great Expectations, Robots (Moderately) Short Reviews In Disguise!

Work: Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)
Expectation: Awesomest film ever! My Facebook page was awash in stellar reviews, plans to see it a second time, and minds purporting to be blown.
Reality: … yawn?

I like movies that keep you guessing, and I like media that meddle with layers of time, space, and reality. 12 Monkeys (or La Jetée)? Donnie Darko? Paprika? (Braid? Portal?) Sign me up. But it seemed to me like Inception did none of it very well.

I know exposition is one of those things where people’s mileage may vary drastically. For me, this movie seemed to indulge in hand-holding. The first five minutes or so make utterly no sense, and the intention seems to be to intrigue the viewer to find out what’s going on — well and good. However, the next hour or so is dedicated to slowly and carefully spelling out how this conceit works, not only having a character tell us, but demonstrating each fact as it is said at least once, if not several times one after the other. Look, either let me figure details out for myself, or don’t depend on the mystery to hook me.

Ellen Page and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are great but underused. Ken Watanabe and Tom Hardy likewise. Leonardo DiCaprio seems to be doing the best he can with a character who’s predictable (my sister and I guessed the various climactic “revelations” about a quarter into the film) and just not that interesting, which, in a movie about literally delving deeper and deeper into his subconscious, is weak sauce. Is Leo (aka Cobb) telling the truth? Does he know the truth? Is this reality? Is it fake? Do I care? No. And this could have been so easily fixed for me — make me like the lady who’s so important to him as a character in her own right by showing her to me before all the craziness.

Work: Verdigris Deep (Frances Hardinge, 2007)
Expectation: an LJ user posted on a Diana Wynne Jones fansite asking for books like DWJ’s to tide her over after finishing the main corpus. This was one of the few recurrent responses that I hadn’t read.
Reality: Picking this book up while thinking “Diana Wynne Jones” was a mistake. Because of that, it took me a long time to get into what was otherwise a fantastic read.

I see where the LJ recommendations came from: Hardinge’s style is similar to DWJ’s in that her fantasy plots are complex; her characters are well rounded; there are tons of those “oh, I see a new side to this person!” moments I love; and she fills her prose with exciting and vivid metaphors that bring the world to life. And by the time I reached about halfway through the book, these features had gripped me.

Now, most of the time, when I say that I had a problem with a book or movie, I don’t really believe it. I mean, I believe intellectually that other people can have different opinions and that those opinions are just as valid as my own, but at the same time, I can’t fathom emotionally how anyone could perceive, say, Harry Potter or House differently from the way I do.  This time, however, I give a full-fledged mea culpa. I went into this book awaiting some sort of intriguing mystery-hook — something I didn’t even realize I expected from Diana Wynne Jones until now. Who wants Quentin’s words and why? (Archer’s Goon) Who are “They” and why do they care about Jamie? (The Homeward Bounders) Why is evil pervading the moor? (The Power of Three).

Verdigris Deep has tension and intrigue, but this sense of mystery I thought I’d get is lacking. It’s reasonably obvious what’s going on at the base of everything from the beginning: three kids steal coins from a wishing well, and run into trouble with its magical inhabitant as a consequence. There’s no shadowy figure behind the strange goings-on with impenetrable motives — the questions are of clarification, not “Who?” (the being!) and “Why?” (because they stole the coins!) but “Who, exactly?” (what rules does this being work by?) and “Why, specifically?” (why are the coins and granting wishes so important to it in the particular way they are?).

All told, this is an excellent book, and I’m sorry I didn’t pick it up with a completely blank slate.

Work: Sherlock
Expectation: I sought out this new BBC series because I read an article about it in The Ottawa Citizen. Thinking back, the article wasn’t memorable — it had nice things to say, but all in all its focus was on how funny it was that a modern Holmes and Watson have to spend a lot of time making jokes about how they’re not gay.
Reality: Sweeeeeeeeet!

There really are a lot of jokes about how Holmes and Watson are/aren’t gay in this miniseries that sets Sherlock and his BFF in 21st-century London, where the Master is as comfortable with text messaging and computer passwords as with traces of soil and dogs that don’t bark in the night. And I can see why the reviewer rather neglected to talk about the plot — in the pilot, there are in-jokes for those familiar with the original A Study in Scarlet (the adaptation is remarkably faithful, considering the story is one of the least exciting Holmes cases), but the plot is ultimately lacklustre and boils down to a disappointing revelation that leaves anyone who’s seen The Princess Bride feeling smarter than Holmes. (“You idiot! It could be both!”)

But this is one of the most intriguing adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories I’ve seen. In a way, it’s the bravest: at least in the first episode, Sherlock really is an honest-to-goodness high-functioning sociopath, as he himself claims. The conceit with a lot of Holmeses and nods-to-Holmes (a conceit I love, don’t get me wrong) is that they secretly feel everything very deeply — the Holmes of the late Jeremy Brett, the recent take by Robert Downey Jr., and (of course I’m going to mention) Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House all follow this pattern. In contrast, it’s easy to believe that Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock really does lack a heart. Even Dexter Morgan of Dexter, a character who is supposed to have literally no feelings outside of self-interest*, is shown forming more emotional attachments than this Sherlock seems to.

Now, I’ve been a little disingenuous about my expectations, because really the important ones I had for this miniseries are encompassed by the words “Sherlock Holmes in the 21st century”. The joy I had watching this show came from the fact that I already know and love Sherlock Holmes of the 19th century. I knew the core of what to expect but not how it was going to appear, and I got to think things like, “Oooh… is that Moriarty? Mycroft? Lestrade? Mrs. Hudson?” and, “Rache! Ha ha ha!” Better than that, it shed new light for me on the original Sherlock Holmes stories — because, as I’ve mentioned before, it can be difficult for contemporary people to see what Holmes’s actions mean in the context of the Victorian era. In some ways, we think of the nineteenth century like it’s as much a crazy fantasyland as Narnia or Middle Earth, and so when Holmes dresses weird or says something outrageous, we think nothing more of it than we do of Dumbledore twinkling his eyes at Minister Fudge at Hogwarts. But the implications of Holmes’s actions are unmistakeable when he’s borrowing a cell phone or crossing a police line today, here, now.

* At least, in the books, this is the case, and very well accomplished.