Sherlock Holmes - 2009

This is another toy film, entertaining, but not something I'd want to watch again and again. 

It starts with Sherlock and Watson stopping a murdering Lord and saving a girl, whose parents had hired Sherlock. Good thing too, the police arrived that it was all over.

After weeks of no interesting cases, Sherlock is not faring well, between drugs and gunshots. Watson insists Sherlock joins him for dinner so to meet his girlfriend Mary, who unwisely insists Sherlock shows his deductive skills on her. He is mostly right, but also very wrong and insulting. She throws wine in his face when he gets one thing wrong ; her previous fiancee died, she didn’t leave him because he didn’t have enough money choosing instead to find herself a doctor…

In what looks like an underground match, Sherlock fights a man much bigger than himself, and wins of course. 

Lord Blackwood is like an evil warlock or something and his last wish is to see Sherlock… both guards and prisoners think that Blackwood can enter their minds, control them. There were five deaths, five women of course, before Sherlock caught him; he believes in his Black Magic or whatever and tells Sherlock that three more will die. He is hanged and Watson declares him dead.

Irene Adler enters his flat while he sleeps. They have a past, he keeps her picture. She gives him a job, and he accepts even if he shouldn’t, since she got the better of him twice already.

Now rumour has it Blackwood walked out of his tomb alive. 

Watson is a gambler. Sherlock doesn’t want him to get married and move out.

Blackwood’s father is some rich man leader of some kind of Order like the Illuminati. Blackwood kills him, taking the lead, and also kills an ambassador who kept opposing him. He wants to rule Britain and retake the United States.

Sherlock is wanted by the law now, and Watson is in a hospital after an explosion.

Sherlock feels bad, but Mary doesn’t blame him, instead encourages him to solve the case. 

They saved Irene from death, and she’d like to go away but the man who hired her won’t let her. 

At first a cop lets Sherlock go but eventually Lestrade arrests him… well, he lets himself get arrested with Lestrade’s help, to learn more.

Sherlock, Watson and Irene go and fight together. She disarms the chemical bomb, because of course it was not magic. 

In the end, Blackwood dies, Irene is still alive and tells him that the man that ordered her around is a professor called Moriarty, a much of a genius as he is.

Moriarty found out her weakness (well, the last time he threatened to kill Sherlock).

The film ends with Holmes and Watson on a new case… or a continuation of the old one… the police tells them that a cop has been killed and that something has been taken, stolen, so they investigate.

Wiki says that Moriarty took a piece of the machine, the bomb, and that that was what he wanted from the start…boh, ok.

Sherlock - Robert Downey Jr

Watson - Jude Law

Irene - Rachel McAdams

Blackwood - Mark Strong

Lestrade - Eddie Marsan

Mary - Kelly Reilly

Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows - 2011

 I’m not too fond of these movies, honestly. It’s not bad though, entertaining, but seeing it once was enough.

Sherlock takes a letter from Irene. She meets Moriarty and he is not pleased and puts something in her tea…I don’t know what because we never hear about it again…

Sherlock “forgot” about Watson’s stag party: he is there for his own reasons and ends up fighting an assassin to save a woman while John drinks and gambles, determined to have his fun.

Then John gets married: despite not being happy about it, Holmes delivers a still passed out Watson to the right place for the wedding.

Holmes meets Moriarty at his college, per invitation, and tells him that Watson is no more part of his adventures but Moriarty refuses to let him go free and safe.

When a man attacks John on the train, Mary helps. Sherlock is on the train too, disguised as a woman. He throws Mary off the train when they’re on a bridge, where Mycroft is down there to get her.

The gypsy woman Simza is in Paris, so Sherlock and John go there.

Moriarty is looking for her brother René, sp he’s in Paris too.

Mary stays at Mycroft’s place, and he walks around naked.

Moriarty is controlling a lot of people, and had them place a bomb. Sherlock thinks it’s at the opera. Moriarty is at the theatre watching, and Sherlock understands he was tricked . The bomb goes off in a hotel, and during the explosion Sebastian Moran, ex British army and now assassin, took an almost impossible shot and killed Meinhard, someone who makes weapons and whose company is no Moriarty’s.

They all move to Berlin.

While John sends a telegram to Mycroft, Sherlock is captured by Moran. Moriarty hurts him while Moran tries to shoot John. Then John saves Sherlock.

The gypsies help them escape, but René is not yet found. They outrun the bullets - heavy luck as always, the gypsies-with-no-name are there for a reason, but our protagonists manage to escape on a train. Sure, Sherlock is sort of dead, but John’s wedding gift saves him. Of course.

To Switzerland, they go to Mycroft’s place. There’s a summit, and it’s too late to cancel it. Moriarty’s plan is for René to kill someone at the summit and then it will be a war, but some doctor changed René’s face to make him look like one of the ambassadors. 

John and Simza look for René and find him, stopping his attempt at murder, but René will not be their evidence against Moriarty because Moran kills him.

Moriarty tells Sherlock: “Didn’t you find it strange that the telegram you sent didn’t inspire any action to stop me? You see, hidden within the unconscious is an insatiable desire for conflict. So you’re not fighting me so much as you are the human condition. All I want to do is own the bullets and the bandages. War on an industrial scale is inevitable. They’ll do it themselves within a few years. All I have to do is wait”.

He has all the time and the money to wait, he thinks, but Sherlock took his little red notebook while he was being tortured, and right now Mary is decoding it and taking his money to give to our orphans. 

Both men know that Moriarty would win in a physical fight because of Sherlock’s injured shoulder, so Sherlock takes him out with him… both are considered dead, there’s even a funeral I think, Mycroft seemed to be mourning… and yet when John receives a package with inside Mycroft’s “private and personal supply of oxygen” that we saw Sherlock toying with when they were at Mycroft’s house, John understands. Now he knows that Sherlock is alive.

Sherlock - Robert Downey Jr

Watson - Jude Law

Simza - Noomi Rapace

Moriarty - Jared Harris

Mary - Kelly Reilly

Mycroft - Stephen Fry

Irene - Rachel McAdams

ITA Sherlock Holmes gioco di ombre

The adventure of the Bruce-Partington plans by Arthur Conan Doyle

This is a short story, and also when Sherlock explains to Watson about how Mycroft IS the British government, not in name by any means, but he put himself in a position as to be indispensable. He knows everything about everything, he’s many specialists in one person. 

It starts with a note by Mycroft saying he’s coming to visit him in regard to a recent death. Watson reads about it in the paper, and Holmes is surprised because it seems to him quite a common death, a very ordinary one, but Mycroft’s note suggests otherwise.

Mycroft here is described as “heavily built and massive”, and it also says that “after the first glance one forgot the gross body and remembered only the dominant mind”. 

The massive body can explain why he came to Sherlock, he likes to have the facts and ponder on them from his comfortable chair, he doesn’t like to move around in search for clues. So he wants Sherlock to investigate the matter of this junior clerk who took some important documents, ten pages of the plans for a new submarine, highly secretive, but on his body only seven pages were found.

Sherlock investigates a little and puts clues together the way he does, and finds the spy that wanted the plans, and through his empty apartment he finds enough clues to lure out the man who actually took the plan, the indebted brother of a government man who took his own life after suspecting his involvement.

The guy is arrested of course, but not before he lures in the spy so he is caught too and the plans rescued.

(The dead young man supposedly fell off the train of was pushed out, but he had no ticket, so Holmes thought he was on the roof and not inside the train, so he asks for a list of spies that could be involved and Mycroft gave him three names, and Holmes chose the one with an apartment with a window slightly above where the train stops, and there was such a thick fog nobody could see anything…

Well, SH stories looked so brilliant at first, of course, but now if you think about it they are quite farfetched. Not all the details fit together, he just says that something is one way and since he’s right nobody questions that, but he really had no way of knowing certain things, like they didn’t explain to me how Holmes knew where - exactly - the thief and the spy used to meet each other… well, that might be considered a common thing in old spy stories, though, where spies always knew things they shouldn’t know. Still, whatever, that’s how these books are.)

In this short story there is also the phrase:

“we must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail,, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

The adventure of the devil's foot by Arthur Conan Doyle

 Another short story. 

For whatever reason, Holmes suggests writing about the Cornish horror case, various years after it happened.

Watson and Holmes had left London in search of peace and quiet, but when there’s a mystery there they are of course called upon to solve it, though not by the police but simply by the local vicar.

A man, Tregennis, says that he had visited his two brothers and his sister the night before, and this morning they were found sitting just like he had left them, only the sister was dead, apparently by fear, and the brothers were out of their sane minds and had to be taken away - I have no idea if they will regain full control of their minds or not, the story doesn’t go that far.

Dr Sterndale, a lion hunter who spends much of his time in Africa, was supposed to leave that morning, but stayed behind as soon as the vicar sent him a telegram with what happened.

Tregennis is later found dead in the same way, in his rooms, scared to death.

Holmes finds a weird powder and tries the experiment himself, lighting a lamp with the powder in, with nearly deadly consequences was it not for Watson who hurried them both out of the house.

Holmes has all the story, but questions Sterndale to learn his motives and decide what to do.

The thing is, Sterndale loved the Tregennis sister, but he couldn’t do anything about it because he was married, although separated, and the law did not permit him to get a divorce. Still, he loved her very much and she loved him. He had met her three brothers and had told Tregennis of that powder among a variety of bizarre things from Africa. He explained in great detail, answering all the other man’s question, with no suspicion (sure, let’s speak of this undetectable, unknown mean of killing people, why not, what could possibly be wrong with that…)

When he heard what happened, he was sure Tregennis did it, so he confronted him and held him at gunpoint leaving him in a locked room with the lighted lamp with powder, until he died.

Knowing now that the man acted out of personal justice, a vendetta for love, or however you want to put it, Holmes lets him go back to Africa. After all, the police never contacted him, so he had no obligations towards them.

(The reason why the sister died while her brothers only went mad, is thus explained: the powder was put in the chimney, so the effect was not as strong, since “the window was shut, but the fire would naturally carry fumes to some extent up the chimney […] only the woman, who had presumably the more sensitive organism, was killed, the others exhibiting that temporary or permanent lunacy which is evidently the first effect of the drug”

The adventure of the cardboard box by Arthur Conan Doyle

 A short story, with Holmes solving the mystery in a few minutes. A macabre story of jealousy and hatred.

A Miss Cushing receives a package by post, and inside there are two ears, human ears. Holmes sees that it was sealed with a sailor’s knot, then Miss Cushing’s ear is the same as the smaller, severed one, indicating one of the victims as one of her sisters.

Her sister Sarah used to live with her, so it’s probable the package was for her. She went to live with her sister Mary and her sailor husband, but they parted in no good terms.

Holmes is sure that the drunk sailor is the murderer, so he has Lestrade arrest him, and the man lets himself be arrested and confesses to everything, saying he’s already punished because he keeps seeing the faces in front of his eyes (the nerve of some people).

Basically, he and Mary were very much in love, then Sarah went to live with them and tried to hit on him but he didn’t reciprocate, so she started turning Mary against him and even introduced another man to her, and the husband became jealous.He forbade her to ever see him again, but when he came back much sooner than expected he saw her with him, talking and laughing, so he killed them both, his wife and that man, and sent the ears to Sarah as if to accuse her of what he had done. Case closed.

At the beginning, we have a bored Watson which had to postpone his holiday because he had no money. At the end, we have Holmes wondering out loud: “what is the meaning of it, Watson? What object is served by this cycle of misery and violence and fear?”

Unfortunately, the world still has no answer to that.

The adventure of the Mazarin Stone by Arthur Conan Doyle

 This must take place well after the usual stories, since it appears that Mr Watson isn’t living with Holmes anymore, and there is a young page called Billy that lives with Holmes and serves him and knows him well by now.

Holmes is not eating, saying that digestion would trouble his brain functions or something, and is following a high profile case, the crown jewels have been stolen, a very precious stone must be found. At the point Watson comes in, Holmes already knows who did it, but doesn’t know where the stone is, so he lets the culprits into his house, then tells them he can have them arrested for a lot of crimes of he can let them go if they tell him where the stone is. He goes into his bedroom to play violin while the others talk about it, but he secretly took the place of a was statue of himself he had placed in the room so he can listen to everything they say. They are quite puzzled by the fact that they can still hear the music after he comes out and takes the stone, so he tells them:

“These modern gramophones are a remarkable invention.”

Watson already called the police, so the two are arrested, and when Lord Cantlemere comes to him, Holmes puts the stone in his pocket as a practical joke since the man never had any faith in his abilities. Strangely enough, while being told of the joke the lord does not get even more angry, but is instead in awe of his powers.