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What's in a name?
Yesterday, my husband and I saw Sherlock Holmes in the theatre. We enjoyed the film a great deal and rather look forward to the next one; in fact, as ![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jpsorrow said in his review posted yesterday, we would have immediately watched the sequel then had it been available.
However, this post is not to be my review of the film. I do believe such a post is brewing, or at least one concerning how our idea of Holmes and Watson in popular culture has diverged sometimes significantly from the source material. I'm just not quite ready yet to condense my thoughts into an essay.
No, this post is about why (until yesterday) I only referred to this 2009 film as Steampunk Holmes.
I have this penchant, you see, for renaming films that I don't feel match up to their source material. Sometimes I mean the new titles as a scornful appellation, sometimes I mean them indifferently, and sometimes I mean them as an amused celebration of the film. I also only engage in this practice if I care enough to do so; otherwise, if I renamed every film that didn't wholly match its roots, I'd have way too many different titles to remember. I began this practice in 2002, when a certain vampire movie was released.
Queen of the Darned
Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, is one of my very favorite vampire novels. Or at least it was in the late 90's; I'd have to re-read it now to see how it has stood up in my memory. Anyway, when the 2002 film starring Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah was released, I was rather excited. I was there in the theatre, nervous about a few things but willing to go with it. What I got was emphatically not Queen of the Damned. The movie wasn't horrifically awful, I seem to recall that I enjoyed it in a guilty pleasure sort of way, and it has a killer soundtrack. But it in no way deserved to bear the same title as the book. It became Queen of the Darned in my head as the credits began to roll and it's stayed that way ever since.
Will Smith: Action Robot Movie (WS:ARM for short)
I've never actually read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, but even I know that the Will Smith film had pretty much nothing in common with Asimov's stories. My husband, who has read Asimov, has endlessly confirmed this. I started calling this film WS:ARM on the basis of the previews alone, and seeing the film in theatres did nothing to alter my opinion.
FRANKENSTEIN X-TREME!!!
My husband actually came up with this one, as we were watching the 1994 film starring Kenneth Branagh as Victor Frankenstein. He screamed it out in parodic ecstasy inspired by the orgy of on-screen explosions and it stuck, because not even the film invoking Mary Shelley's name in the title can make it match the tenor of the novel.
Dracula's Horror Bordello
Which brings us to our next film, since Francis Ford Coppola also attached the author's name - in this case Bram Stoker - to his film. Now, I love this film: the mix of Victoriana with very sexual vampires and the doomed love story very much appeal to me. However, it's just not Bram Stoker's Dracula. And it was so over the top, a feast of horror and as garishly painted as a bordello. Thus the only title you'll hear it given in my house!
This brings us up to Steampunk Holmes, which I'd renamed based on the trailers alone. As I mentioned above, like many, I most of the time find myself with an ideal of Holmes and Watson that has been refined by decades of popular culture; I haven't yet read enough of the source material to have a well-entrenched touchstone defining Doyle's vision of the characters. Thus, to me, the trailers seemed to capture Holmes in a steampunkish light, casting him and Watson as scrappers. Much of the film with its black magic rituals and its alchemy and its welded-together future-is-beginning technology did nothing to dispel my asserted steampunk element. However, the entire film, along with my scraps of knowledge of Doyle's work and talking with my husband (who has read quite a bit), convinced me that this film was actually quite true to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the end. So it can keep its name, with my blessing.
Anyone else out there do this with titles?
Originally posted at Livejournal. You can comment here or there.
jpsorrow said in his review posted yesterday, we would have immediately watched the sequel then had it been available. However, this post is not to be my review of the film. I do believe such a post is brewing, or at least one concerning how our idea of Holmes and Watson in popular culture has diverged sometimes significantly from the source material. I'm just not quite ready yet to condense my thoughts into an essay.
No, this post is about why (until yesterday) I only referred to this 2009 film as Steampunk Holmes.
I have this penchant, you see, for renaming films that I don't feel match up to their source material. Sometimes I mean the new titles as a scornful appellation, sometimes I mean them indifferently, and sometimes I mean them as an amused celebration of the film. I also only engage in this practice if I care enough to do so; otherwise, if I renamed every film that didn't wholly match its roots, I'd have way too many different titles to remember. I began this practice in 2002, when a certain vampire movie was released.
Queen of the Darned
Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, is one of my very favorite vampire novels. Or at least it was in the late 90's; I'd have to re-read it now to see how it has stood up in my memory. Anyway, when the 2002 film starring Stuart Townsend and Aaliyah was released, I was rather excited. I was there in the theatre, nervous about a few things but willing to go with it. What I got was emphatically not Queen of the Damned. The movie wasn't horrifically awful, I seem to recall that I enjoyed it in a guilty pleasure sort of way, and it has a killer soundtrack. But it in no way deserved to bear the same title as the book. It became Queen of the Darned in my head as the credits began to roll and it's stayed that way ever since.
Will Smith: Action Robot Movie (WS:ARM for short)
I've never actually read Isaac Asimov's I, Robot, but even I know that the Will Smith film had pretty much nothing in common with Asimov's stories. My husband, who has read Asimov, has endlessly confirmed this. I started calling this film WS:ARM on the basis of the previews alone, and seeing the film in theatres did nothing to alter my opinion.
FRANKENSTEIN X-TREME!!!
My husband actually came up with this one, as we were watching the 1994 film starring Kenneth Branagh as Victor Frankenstein. He screamed it out in parodic ecstasy inspired by the orgy of on-screen explosions and it stuck, because not even the film invoking Mary Shelley's name in the title can make it match the tenor of the novel.
Dracula's Horror Bordello
Which brings us to our next film, since Francis Ford Coppola also attached the author's name - in this case Bram Stoker - to his film. Now, I love this film: the mix of Victoriana with very sexual vampires and the doomed love story very much appeal to me. However, it's just not Bram Stoker's Dracula. And it was so over the top, a feast of horror and as garishly painted as a bordello. Thus the only title you'll hear it given in my house!
This brings us up to Steampunk Holmes, which I'd renamed based on the trailers alone. As I mentioned above, like many, I most of the time find myself with an ideal of Holmes and Watson that has been refined by decades of popular culture; I haven't yet read enough of the source material to have a well-entrenched touchstone defining Doyle's vision of the characters. Thus, to me, the trailers seemed to capture Holmes in a steampunkish light, casting him and Watson as scrappers. Much of the film with its black magic rituals and its alchemy and its welded-together future-is-beginning technology did nothing to dispel my asserted steampunk element. However, the entire film, along with my scraps of knowledge of Doyle's work and talking with my husband (who has read quite a bit), convinced me that this film was actually quite true to Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in the end. So it can keep its name, with my blessing.
Anyone else out there do this with titles?
Originally posted at Livejournal. You can comment here or there.