weird Tagged Articles at Cinematical

You'll never hear me say a nasty thing about Robert Downey Jr., as I have a lot of respect for the man and a lot of appreciation for the films he's done ... but having said that, I cannot help but express the following opinion: The trailer for his new movie looks like, well, like no Sherlock Holmes story I've ever seen. Obviously one can never judge an unfinished film by the quality of its promotional materials, but if this clip is what we can expect from the whole of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes, I'm ... well, I'm still interested. But now highly skeptical. And a little shocked.

I guess my main question is this: If your goal is to make a Victorian-era action comedy, and that sounds good to me, why must it be called Sherlock Holmes? (I'd suggest Sherlock Holmes and the Deluge of Weird Changes.) I'll leave it to the experts to pick the specific nits, but I'm betting the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories didn't have quite so many gunfights, boxing matches, explosions, and crotch jokes. At this point the thing looks like Young Sherlock Holmes meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vs. Van Helsing: At World's End ... which, I'll admit, could still be a lot of fun.

[Note: If the video plays slowly for you, feel free to download it straight from Netscape. Also, the running time is just over 10 minutes.]

Cinematical recently attended a screening of What Is It?, which was written and directed by Crispin Glover. He also plays a small role in the film, and has been touring (it also screened at Sundance last year) with a print and his "Big Slide Show", where he reads and shows images from several of the books he has published. He's an extremely interesting guy, very well-spoken, highly intelligent, and couldn't have been nicer. It presents a real conundrum, because on one hand you have a really strange film, but on the other you have an intelligent person telling you why they made the choices they did in making the film. With Crispin Glover, it was like yin and yang / night and day.

Now having said that, What Is It? is without a doubt one of the most disturbing movies I've ever seen. There is a lot of stuff in here that will make you queasy, uncomfortable, and possibly even offended. A word of warning to the wise: if you're offended by people killing live snails in pretty graphic ways, you're going to want to avoid this one. Also, if you're disturbed by scenes of graphic sexuality, you'll want to skip this. Additionally, the use of a cast made up almost entirely of actors with Down's syndrome feels exploitative at times, and that could be bothersome to some people. If you can get through all of that, there's also a fair amount of swastikas on display, nude women wearing animal masks, a character in blackface, a mom forcing her disabled son to inhale smoke from a pipe through a tube, and Shirley Temple as you've never seen her before.