Distracted by the Shiny

Apologies to Steven Moffat

Posted on July 7, 2011 by C. Patrick

[The following contains spoilers about the first episode of the BBC television series Sherlock. Don’t read any further if you don’t want to know ’em. But if you’ve read, and remember, the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle novel the episode is based on — A Study in Scarlet — then this won’t be too spoiler-y]

BBCs modernization of the Sherlock Holmes stories

I have to apologize to Steven Moffat. Mind you, he probably doesn’t know he needs to be apologized to. Or, rather, as a writer for the new Doctor Who series on BBC, there are probably lots of people he thinks should apologize to him (such as fans who aren’t happy with the direction he’s taken the character and who aren’t shy about saying so, or providing hate mail), but he doesn’t know that I’m one of them. Not like I went out and sent an angry e-mail or wrote a scathing blog about it or posted a YouTube video rant.

By the way, though, this isn’t about Doctor Who. This is about the BBCs Sherlock, another show helmed and written by Moffat. I’m coming to this show a bit late, since it started in July of 2010, but I watch most of my tv on DVD or Netflix, so I’m a little slow on the uptake on some programs worth mentioning. And Sherlock is worth mentioning, since after I watched the first of the three currently-available episodes I was minded to say, “Despite a few flaws, that was quite entertaining.”

What were the flaws? Well, primarily I was annoyed with writer Moffat for having gone with the Princess Bride gambit for the big reveal on how the murderer got his victims to commit suicide.

What is the Princess Bride gambit? Does this line ring a bell: “My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to …”? — Oh, wait, that’s not it. That’ s the other famous bit that everyone quotes from the movie. The one I’m referring to is the one that ends, “I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder.”

That scene.

This comes when our hero, Westley, as the Man in Black, has been forced into a combat of wits with the Sicilian, who has placed two glass of wine on a table in front of himself and Westley. One of the glasses contains deadly iocane powder; the other does not. Westley must choose one to drink while the Sicilian will drink the other.

So, when the climactic moment comes in Sherlock’s A Study in Pink and it’s essentially the murderer putting two pills on the table in front of himself and Sherlock Holmes, one poison and the other not, I groaned and said, “That’s cheesy; they went with the Princess Bride gambit. I expected more from the man who brought us BBC’s Jekyll and the excellent Doctor Who episodes “Blink”, “Silence in the Library,” “The Beast Below” and many others.

Rather disappointing, it was.

Except I was wrong.

I should mention here that I have read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel A Study in Scarlet, which is the first story to feature his most famous literary creation, Sherlock Holmes. It’s the story where Watson meets Holmes and moves into 221b Baker Street with the detective. It’s the story where Watson and Holmes first collaborate on an investigation.

Apparently, despite reading it, possibly twice, I didn’t remember how the murder victim was killed, which was … drumroll puhlease … by the murderer offering his victim one of two pills, one of which was poison and the other of which was not.

That’s right, Steven Moffat didn’t borrow from The Princess Bride to give umph to his modernization of the Sherlock Holmes stories; rather, The Princess Bride borrowed from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create their famous iocane powder scene.

Shocking.

I would still complain that Moffat made his scene a little too much like the staging in Princess Bride, but then again it’s quite possible that he did it on purpose, to make the letter-writers and the bloggers and the YouTubers make themselves look silly by complaining about it.

Like I was going to.

So, wait a minute, that’s a really tricksey way of going about things. I’m not going to apologize for almost being tricked into making myself look silly. Nope, I’m going to write a nasty letter to Steven Moffat demanding that he apologize to me.

Or maybe I’ll just go watch another episode of Sherlock.

Posted in Reviews and Rants | Tagged Princess Bride, Sherlock Holmes, Steven Moffat | Leave a comment

Paris Hilton is Batman

Posted on June 4, 2011 by C. Patrick

Bear with me on this one.

Check this out: here’s Paris Hilton and she’s insanely, fabulously, ridiculously wealthy and yet half the time we’re hearing about her because she’s gotten herself into trouble again. Maybe she got into a fight with Lindsey Lohan or somebody like Lindsey Lohan at a club, or maybe she lost her dog and is putting up flyers all over New York or L.A. looking for him, or maybe she’s getting out of a stretch limo wearing nothing underneath her very short dress but air, so that when the paparazzi snap pictures, they get some very revealing shots, if you know what I mean, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, or, on that note, maybe a sex tape of her gets out onto the internet and is watched by millions, or maybe she’s buying something silly like a shopping mall or Norway — not that Norway is silly, but why would anyone want to buy it? — or maybe she’s trying to trademark the words, “That’s hot!” or maybe … well, you get the idea.

But that’s only half the time. What is she doing the other half of the time? Sleeping? Unlikely, not with access to that many amphetamines.

Remind you of anyone?

Exactly! Bruce Wayne.

Half the time, there he is: a hedonistic, egotistical, billionaire playboy — although when writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane first came up with the idea for Batman back in 1939 for DC comics, Bruce Wayne was only a millionaire, or possibly even just a thousand-aire, since in 1939 a few thousand bucks would buy a lot of batarangs.

Anyway, there he is prancing about with starlets, getting drunk, buying stuff he doesn’t need, possibly even Norway, and generally acting like the spoiled, rich-kid brat that everyone expects him to be because spoiled and brattish is what always happens to the sons and daughters of the rich, or at least that’s our beloved stereotype of the rich kid, even when the rich kid’s parents are killed by some random mugger in a back alley behind the local opera house, this latter being as good an argument as I’ve ever heard on why not to go to the opera.

Not the point.

Anyway, that’s half the time.

The other half of the time, of course, he’s The Batman, a caped and cowled superhero without superpowers, who relies solely upon his brilliant intellect, his highly-trained physical prowess, and the gadgets and gizmos that his fortune can buy to fight the ne’er do wells of the city’s criminal underbelly.

Come on, think about it!

Yup, uh huh! Paris Hilton!

The key to my argument, of course, is that if you compile all the things that we know about Paris Hilton, we come to realize one startling fact: no one — no one — can be that ditzy, that foolish, that scandal-prone (with the possible exception of Britney Spears). Not even Marilyn Monroe, and she made a real try of it. Therefore, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, if she isn’t that ditzy, that foolish, that scandal-prone by nature, then it must be by choice, and the only reason someone would do that by choice is because they’re hiding something … else. Something worth ruining their reputation and their life over. Something worth being branded a ‘get’ over.

It's not in pink, but _could_ it be?

Paris Hilton is Batman!

Someone should finance a study to see if crime goes down in neighborhoods near the clubs Paris Hilton has been known to frequent, and see, too, if there have been any sightings in those same places of mysterious, leather-wearing vigilantes — said leather probably in pink — who, once a criminal has been subdued by being hit over the head with a designer Louis Vuitton purse or spiked in the face with a six-inch heel, leaves behind only four daring words as her calling card: “Fighting crime: that’s hot!”

I think the world might be surprised at what that report might conclude.

Oh, oh! And Britney Spears could be Robin.
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This column is a work of satire and is therefore, hopefully, not prosecutable as libel. The author has no wish to annoy any superheroes, as they tend to be able to beat him up. If you’re not an angry superhero, you can leave a comment, below.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Batman, Paris Hilton | Leave a comment

Warbling

Posted on June 2, 2011 by C. Patrick

First, they invented bison hunting. We know this because there are pictures of it painted on cave walls in France. Also on bathroom stalls in Detroit. Right after the invention of bison-hunting, though, the boys were milling around the fire, bellies full of bison steaks, when they realized that they had a problem: they had no idea what to do to unwind after a long day of chasing bison with long sticks.

That’s when they invented karaoke.

Actually, the invention of karaoke went something like this (Picture a smoky bar. Somewhere in the background someone drops a whole tray of glasses, but that’s not important to the story. What is important is that someone else has just started to sing. We join our heroes, already deep in discussion):

“Awww, man, what is that, somebody singing “Danny Boy” again?”

“Yeah, man, somebody’s always singing that song in this bar. Brings me down, man.”

It was the 70s, so you’ll have to excuse the speech patterns of our heros.

“Yeah, man, me too. If they’re going to sing, man, they should sing something different, man.”

“Yeah, man. You know what’d be cool? Man, like, some kind of tv that showed the lyrics to songs so you could sing along with ’em without having to remember the lines. Man.”

“Oh, man! Man! Yeah, man! That’s cool, man! Man, let’s do it. Let’s make that!”

“Man!”

Actually-actually (this time I really mean it), karaoke was a creation of the ever ingenious Japanese, who did indeed invent it back in the 70s. According to all the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica that I’ve shoved into my computer, it all started in Kobe, Japan. Japanese businessmen, in between watching episodes of “Hello Kitty” on bar televisions and watching scantily-clad Taiwanese girls lip-synching renditions of “Purple Haze,” liked to get up on stage themselves and belt out their own interpretations of various popular songs of the day.

Eventually, the Japanese decided to make a machine so that the businessmen might at least have the option of reading along with the lyrics, even if they chose not to. Said machine would come with a little video monitor that would display the lyrics of the clientele’s mostest favoritist songs. The machine would also come with a microphone and an amplifier.

Some might argue that the amplifier was not, strictly, necessary.

Because, let’s face it, most people who get up in front of a karaoke machine to sing aren’t the ones who would win “American Idol” competitions … or even talent shows at the local high school. The word “karaoke” does, after all, mean “empty orchestra.” If you’ve cleared the orchestra out, the audience probably isn’t that far behind.

The obligatory karaoke duet.

This is not to say that there aren’t a few particularly good karaoke singers. Not long ago, I went to karaoke night at a bar with a group of friends. There wasn’t a stage, but the dance floor had been cleared so that the karaoke machine and all of its attendant wiring could be set up (such a small machine; so much wiring). Pretty soon (getting the first karaokers revved up for karaoke-ing usually requires a pitcher or two of something frothy), there were a few singers. As it turned out, one of them was really good and could very easily have been on “American Idol.”

Then again, Clay Aiken won on “American Idol,” so I might not be using the most accurate means of measurement.

Anyway, during the rest of the evening, we were able to determine that most of the rest of us sucked. Had I tried my rendition of Julio Iglesias’ “To All the Girls I’ve Loved Before” (wherein I replace the word “girls” with “sheep” — just for fun, mind you, not because I was born in sheep country … though I was), I’m pretty sure that windows would have shattered and someone would have had to dial 911.

Despite this, and surprisingly, we had a great deal of fun.

Also surprisingly, no one sang “Danny Boy.” Thanks to the Japanese, we now finally have something to do after a hard day of hunting bison.
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The author would like to note that the singers in the photos accompanying this column did not cause serious harm to any of the other patrons with their singing skills. Everyone survived and there was only minor hearing loss.