FILM: Mr. Holmes
DIRECTOR: Bill Condon
ACTORS: Ian McKellen, Laura Linney, Hiroyuki Sanada

With Robert Downey Jr. making him a skull-cracking action hero on the big screen and Benedict Cumberbatch making him a high-functioning sociopath on TV, what sort of Sherlock Holmes yarn can add fresh story material? How about Ian McKellen playing the immortal character as we’ve never seen him before?
The Sherlock we meet in Mr. Holmes is a man of growing frailties, gently portrayed. Well into the dusk of his life at 93, his recollection has declined worryingly. The long-retired consulting detective also dislikes the fame thrust upon him by Dr Watson, whose largely unreal stories, he said, “made me into a fiction.” He never occupied 221B Baker St. (a myth “to mislead the curious”), disdains the famous deerstalker cap and didn’t own a curved pipe (he smokes cigars).
“If I ever write a story myself,” McKellen’s true Sherlock complains, “it will be to correct millions of misconceptions created by his imaginative license.”
He lives far from London in a rustic home on the cliffs above the English Channel. He devotes his reclusive days to beekeeping, negotiating with his irascible housekeeper Mrs. Munro (Laura Linney) and entertaining her young son Roger (delightful child actor Milo Parker). Now, in 1947, he has outlived his own life story.
When the inquisitive Holmes visits a movie theatre to catch a cloak-and-dagger Sherlock film, the melodrama annoys him. Sherlock (played by Nicholas Rowe, who in 1985 had the lead in Young Sherlock Holmes) receives a hokey portrayal that prompts a sigh from Mr. Holmes. When he leaves he does not encounter a single city street covered in fog.
Directed by Bill Condon (Gods and Monsters, Kinsey and Dreamgirls) from a script by Minneapolis writer Jeffrey Hatcher, Mr. Holmes recalls an earlier film about the downward spiral of memory loss, last year’s Oscar-winning Still Alice. The aging Holmes, no longer so skilful at solving puzzles, works to re-evaluate secrets within his own life and his place in the world.
The mystery most on his mind is an investigation dating back 30 years, a vexing case that moved him into retirement. Ann Kelmot (Hattie Morahan) was considered by her husband to be wandering far and wide following repeated miscarriages. Was she led away by woe, malice or illicit love?
Holmes recalls shadowing Ann, interviewing her and learning the truth, a solution that troubles him decades afterward. “I must have done something terribly wrong,” he frowns, studying his memory-lapsed diary and imagining himself back on the case.
The film takes place in three eras. In flashbacks to 1917, Holmes is open-eyed and authoritative at 60, sleek in his top hat and walking with a sure-footed gate. Directly after the conclusion of World War II, he visits bomb-ravaged Japan, where he was invited to sample a rare plant that helps rejuvenate memory loss. In late 1940s England, he is awkward intellectually and physically, moving clumsily with a cane, wearing liver-spot makeup on his skin and a prominent false nose. At 76, the actor looks almost 100.
McKellen, who gets under the skin of every character he plays, takes Sherlock in new directions. The Holmes he creates is brusquely direct, but not the icy logical thinker we’ve met often before. The detective’s gentle bond with the inquisitive young Roger is a charming mentor and protégé relationship. When it is threatened, you ache for both.
McKellen also delivers the role’s humour with a sly wink to the audience, grumbling after he tumbles out of bed and cuts himself, “I look like I’ve been attacked by the hound of the Baskervilles.” I can’t remember another time when a faltering character has been played with such complete authority. —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Streep’s no rock-and-roll mama

By Steven Rea


FILM: Ricki and the Flash
DIRECTOR: Jonathan Demme
ACTORS: Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Mamie Gummer

It’s a question that has haunted humankind for decades: Is there anything Meryl Streep can’t do?
Polish, Danish, English, Irish. A nun, a witch, a prime minister, a chef, a fashion diva.
The most Academy Award nominations of any actor, ever. She’s the superhero of thespians, with the power to transform, transcend, entrance. She could read the phone book and make it compelling.
Not so fast, buddy.
Finally — and the news should really come as a relief — here is a role Streep should not have tried, in a movie that should not have been made. As the title character in the Diablo Cody-scripted, Jonathan Demme-directed Ricki and the Flash, Streep is a career rock-and-roller who long ago had an album and a glimpse of stardom, but is now left fronting a cover band at a Tarzana, Calif., bar. During the day, Ricki Rendazzo works as a cashier at a Whole Foods-like market. At night, she’s working her Fender electric through hits by Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Lady Gaga, flanked by her lead guitarist and boyfriend, Greg (Jessie’s Girl’s Rick Springfield). Sometimes they harmonise onstage. Sometimes they bicker.
In pursuit of her dreams, Ricki had left her husband and children behind in Indianapolis and never looked back. But one day, her ex-mild-mannered businessman Pete Brummel, played by a mild-mannered Kevin Kline — calls with news: Their daughter, Julie (Streep’s real-life daughter Mamie Gummer), has attempted suicide. Ricki better come home.
Which she does, lugging her guitar case with her. She doesn’t even have money for the cab from the airport to Pete’s gated-community manse.
What follows is the worst kind of serio-comic dysfunctional family melodrama — as if August: Osage County had been turned into a TV sitcom. Julie is in pieces over the discovery that her boyfriend has been cheating on her. And she still hasn’t gotten over the fact that her mother had abandoned her. There’s lots of yelling and crying to be done, before Mom and her kid bond over trips to the doughnut shop and the nail salon.
Pete has a new wife, the down-to-earth and conveniently out of town (for the first act) Maureen, played with graceful acquiescence by Audra McDonald. Because Ricki doesn’t have money for a hotel, she’s staying chez Brummels, which creates a little awkwardness when Maureen does return home.
There are two grown sons, too — one of whom (Sebastian Stan) is getting married and one of whom (Nick Westrate) is gay. Neither welcomes the reappearance of the tattooed and trash-mouthed woman who brought them into the world.
Much of the latter part of Ricki and the Flash is turned over to the wedding ceremony, which serves as a reminder that 1) Streep, although she can carry a tune, cannot convincingly carry off the part of a gritty, rock-and-rolling mama, and that 2) director Demme has already made a messed-up family matrimonial get-together way better than this, with a way better screenplay than the one Juno writer Cody has tossed off.
For some seriously good acting — and seriously good musical accompaniment, for that matter — check out Rachel Getting Married. —The Philadelphia Inquirer

Your typical man-eating shark movie

FILM: Shark Lake
DIRECTOR: Jerry Dugan
ACTORS: Dolph Lundgren, Sara Malakul Lane, Lily Brooks O’Briant

Fiercely protective single-mom Meredith Hendricks happens to also be the best cop in her quiet town on Lake Tahoe. When a black-market exotic species dealer named Clint, is paroled from prison, something he let loose begins to make its presence known.
Swimmers and land-lovers alike begin to become part of the food chain at an unbelievable rate. Meredith and the new man in her life, a biologist named Peter, begin to investigate these brutal attacks and discover that they’re not just hunting one eating machine, but a whole family of them.
After a documentary crew is devoured when they don’t take the threat seriously, it’s up to Meredith, Peter, and the unlikely hero, Clint, to stop the most dangerous thing on the planet: A mother protecting its young. Not everyone will make it out alive, but those who do will never forget this summer at Shark Lake.

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha