Mr. Holmes

From the moment I first saw the trailer for this story of an aging, retired Sherlock Holmes, I knew I had to go see it.  From the instant Ian McKellen appeared on the screen, I was captivated.  Though the shape of its plot was obvious, I remained entranced until the credits rolled.  I loved this movie.

Which is not to say that Mr. Holmes is always an easy film to watch.  Witnessing the mental decay of a character I've loved since early childhood was frequently painful.  The thoughts of mortality the story inevitably summoned were not pleasant to contemplate.  Even though I expected everything to work out in the end, because that's what usually happens in movies these days, the film did a good job of raising my concern and keeping me tense.

I still loved it.

McKellen's performance was, of course, one of the biggest causes of my affection.  He can say more with minute facial movements than many actors can manage with five-minute monologues.  After the movie ended, I felt privileged to have witnessed his performance.  The rest of the cast was uniformly strong, though as fitted a film about the great Holmes, all of the other characters took a back seat to him.

The story also delivered all that it should:  a nicely intertwined main plot of Holmes grappling with his loss of mental acuity, and the mystery he is seeking to resolve--if only he could remember.

The less background you bring to this film, the better; just settle in and let it work its magic.  In a summer of big, loud movies--movies I generally love--this is a small, quiet film that grabbed a big place in my heart.

Do not miss this one.

The Hobbit

Second alphabetically in the big four films I saw over the holidays is Peter Jackson's sprawling rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien's relatively small novel, The Hobbit.  As Jackson has publicly said, this first film, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, is the beginning of a trilogy, each member of which will run nearly three hours.  To provide the material for so many hours of film, Jackson is weaving in bits from other Tolkien material. 

This first installment clocked in at 169 minutes, just 11 minutes short of three hours.  I can honestly say that I was never bored and always entertained.  At the same time, long scene after long scene after long scene felt too long, as if Jackson was so enthralled by his material that he lost sight of any notion of telling his story in the most compelling manner and instead just indulged himself.  By making a dozen or more two- to three-minute cuts all through the movie, he could have made a much more effective story--and none of us would have felt the lack of the cut bits. 

Such plot as Jackson gives us is more than a bit weak. After taking entirely too long to get our intrepid band on the road, they then follow a winding path that seems to exist entirely at Gandalf's whim.  By the end of the film, when giant birds literally fly in out of the blue and save our gang, it's hard not to feel that Gandalf could have just called in the birds at the beginning, put the team on them, and in a few hours had our boys right where they were when the movie ended. 

Having said all that, I have to also say that I enjoyed the movie, had a good time in the theater, will go see the next one, and recommend it to fantasy fans.  It was fun, though it never achieved the sense of soaring greatness that Jackson so clearly wanted. 

As a side note, I should address the much-discussed issue of the 48 frames-per-second technology Jackson used to make The Hobbit, but I can't. The only way to catch a 48-fps version in my area was to watch it in 3D, and none of us wanted to suffer through nearly three hours of wearing 3D glasses.