Whilst I have very much enjoyed bringing you all the news in the world of Holmes and Watson alas I am unable to continue, having a young family including a newborn I find myself somewhat  limited time.

I will leave the blog open for a couple of weeks but for now my friends I bid you a regrettable yet fond farewell.

So Long may Holmes and Watson continue to fill our books and screens with their wonderful adventures.

kindest regards

Marc

from oregonlive.com by Bob Hicks

Waiting for Black Friday is for slackers. And free is a very good price.

Those are the lessons of Friday’s theater openings, when Artists Repertory Theatre and Jane, a Theater Company get a week’s jump on the frenzy of the day-after-Thanksgiving holiday sales. Let the big-box outlets bide their time. Why wait when holiday junkies are champing at the bit?

“Hey, when theaters are available, we put on shows,” says Kim Bogus, artistic director of Jane.

Jane is opening “The Hullabaloo! Frankenstein the Little Monster” in the Belmont District’s Theater! Theatre! space, and maybe the most remarkable thing about the company’s eighth annual British panto-style show is that it comes gift-wrapped: All performances are free.

Artists Rep, looking for the right blend of tradition and novelty, has turned to Seattle playwright John Longenbaugh and his “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol,” a theatrical mash-up of popular Victoriana. The play premiered a year ago at Seattle’s Taproot Theatre, and this is just its second production.

The Portland production has a solid ensemble gathered by director Jon Kretzu, including company regulars Michael Mendelson (Holmes), Todd Van Voris (Watson), Vana O’Brien, Gary Powell and Tobias Anderson, an actor fully capable of putting the “arch” in arch nemesis Professor Moriarty.

Holmes as Scrooge 

Holmes, in a misanthropic mood, takes on the Scrooge role in Longenbaugh’s conflation, denouncing everything Christmas along with pretty much everything else about life. Moriarty, who has shuffled off this mortal coil, assumes the role of Marley’s ghost — and from there things spin out, comically but also darkly, even with intimations of World War I to come.

Misha Berson, reviewing last year’s premiere in the Seattle Times, praised Longenbaugh’s “nifty conceit” and added that, while the script could use a little buttressing, the show was “smart, witty and fun,” with “the makings of an annual event.”

“Holmes fans can cheer,” she wrote, “at how nimbly Longenbaugh has captured the master detective’s uncanny powers of deduction.”

In “The Hullabaloo! Frankenstein the Little Monster,” the whole family will enjoy the British pantos, which rose from the vaudeville/music hall tradition. They are fractured fairy tales with cross-dressing, clowning, ridiculous storylines, plenty of songs and dances, and a barrage of jokes sent out at several levels — some aimed straight for the kids, and others, more racy, are shot well over the kids’ heads.

Most pantos take off from classic fairy tales — “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Aladdin” and the like. Jane’s “Frankenstein,” based extremely loosely on Mary Shelley’s novel, is a little different, but the idea’s the same. Bogus wrote the musical’s book, and then in rehearsal people came up with bits to add, jokes to extend, even a few cuts to make. It’s all held together by a clutch of new songs by Greg Paul, the real-deal Portland guitarist and songwriter.

A young Frankenstein 

Frankie, in this version, is 8 years old, and, yes, he’s a bit of a monster. You can blame his parents for that. They’re both therapists who, Bogus says, “spout these great parenting tips but don’t live them.” Emily Post, the doyenne of manners, even swoops in to try to save the day.

“The two things that float my boat are, it’s free, and Greg Paul has written these amazing songs for us,” Bogus says.

About that free thing: It isn’t easy, but the company wanted to offer a gift. “When the economy tanked a few years ago, it really hit a lot of the people we work with hard,” Bogus says. Donations, sponsorships, grants, and profits from other productions, along with a lot of donated work by the people creating the show, make it possible to give this one away.

Ebenezer Scrooge could learn something from a spirit like that. He sure won’t find a better deal on Black Friday.

from http://uk.movies.ign.com by IGN

At the tail-end of 2010, IGN headed to a Hertfordshire country pile to visit the set of Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Guy Ritchie’s eagerly anticipated sequel to his 2009 smash-hit.

We’ve already written a preview piece of that visit, but since that time the following synopsis and trailer have hit the wires…

Sherlock Holmes has always been the smartest man in the room… until now. There is a new criminal mastermind at large – Professor Moriarty – and not only is he Holmes’ intellectual equal, but his capacity for evil, coupled with a complete lack of conscience, may actually give him an advantage over the renowned detective. When the Crown Prince of Austria is found dead, the evidence, as construed by Inspector Lestrade, points to suicide. But Sherlock Holmes deduces that the prince has been the victim of murder – a murder that is only one piece of a larger and much more portentous puzzle, designed by one Professor Moriarty. Mixing business with pleasure, Holmes tracks the clues to an underground gentlemen’s club, where he and his brother, Mycroft Holmes, are toasting Dr. Watson on his last night of bachelorhood. It is there that Holmes encounters Sim, a Gypsy fortune teller, who sees more than she is telling and whose unwitting involvement in the prince’s murder makes her the killer’s next target. Holmes barely manages to save her life and, in return, she reluctantly agrees to help him. The investigation becomes ever more dangerous as it leads Holmes, Watson and Sim across the continent, from England to France to Germany and finally to Switzerland. But the cunning Moriarty is always one step ahead as he spins a web of death and destruction – all part of a greater plan that, if he succeeds, will change the course of history. 

So far, so intriguing, and now we can bring you the rest of our coverage, featuring interviews with Robert Downey Jr, Jude Law, Noomi Rapace, Jared Harris and producers Lionel Wigram and Susan Downey, discussing everything from bringing Moriarty to life to staying true to author Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories.

But first up, here’s writer-director Guy Ritchie to set the scene and explain why he thought it would be a good time to re-visit the world of Holmes and Watson. 

Why make a Sherlock sequel?

Guy Ritchie: We enjoyed the last one so much it would seem churlish not to return and do another one… We’ve pretty much reached the end of this one, and it’s been great. I like filming in the UK – I’ll sleep in my own bed, which I’m really happy about. It’s been a pleasure doing this one.

What are you doing differently this time? 

Ritchie: Just trying to make a better film than we did last time. I’d like to be more eloquent than that, but that’s essentially our goal. We found the identity of the relationship in the last one and we’d like to big that up so to speak. We’d like to try to improve the action a bit, and their relationship a bit, and the significance of the plot.

What about Moriarty? 

Ritchie: It’s nice to have Moriarty. He’s arguably the most infamous, intellectual villain ever, so that’s been a bit of a challenge. But it’s great to have Jared [Harris]. As I keep telling him every day, he is significantly evil, and he finds that most flattering.

What’s Moriarty doing? 

Ritchie: It’s very bad. It’s very bad. I’m not going to tell you, but it’s very bad.

What does Noomi Rapace bring to the mix? 

Ritchie: Well I’m a big fan of Noomi and she’s mucked on in with the best of them. She fits in really well. And she’s tough.

Are you trying to do things differently this time around or keep things the same? 

Ritchie: I think a bit of both. We’ve tried to maintain and hold onto the identity of the relationship of the last one, but at the same time take it on and evolve that relationship. In part my main priority was the interaction between those two [Holmes and Watson]. And that’s still what I really care about. So we’ve tried to hold onto that and we’ve tried to augment it and improve it.

We also grabbed some time with the stars of the film, Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law, to talk romance, villains, and the brilliance of Stephen Fry...

What’s it like being involved in these movies? 

Jude Law: Every so often you get to play wonderful characters maybe at the wrong time in your life. Sometimes, you get to play terrible characters at a really great time in your life. Sometimes, the right character comes along at the right time. I think we both felt that happened. So it wasn’t just happening individually. It was also watching someone else have that experience… we are working hard, but we are also enjoying it tremendously. It’s a perfect balance.

Robert Downey Jr: To me, Sherlock being as successful as it was and being received as well as it was by people is probably the single greatest feeling I’ve ever had about something because…

…Because you weren’t expecting it to be received so well? 

Downey Jr: No. Half of my problem – if I do have a problem that I can speak about half of – I would say is that every time I swing I think it’s going out of the park. I still try to keep that attitude, but I knew that we had a real winning combination. I knew that something clicked with us. I never had someone say, “Oh my god. You have such great screen chemistry with him!” It’s what made the movie work. Everything else is kind of answerable and attributable to that and then us triangulating and the synergy we found with Guy. It’s a tough thing – how do you recreate having caught lightning in a bottle? I’m not used to… well, maybe a little bit more lately than before. I’m not used to studios being ecstatic about we did and saying, “Please go do that again.”

Law: It was a relief too, right? I remember on the first one we were coming up with so many ideas or digging out little details from the books. It was part of that process where we were riffing. We would come up with stuff that we just knew couldn’t fit in the first one. That carried on throughout the whole press tour. We would go, “Wouldn’t it be great if…?” So when it was a success and when we knew that it was pretty likely that the second one was going to happen – it was also like a relief. It was like, “Oh! We can use all of that stuff! Thank Goodness! Thank you!” It felt like something that was going to be home for all of this other creative outpouring that had already occurred.

Downey Jr: Yeah, and reintroducing it to an audience. Well, introducing it to certain audiences for the first time. Their initial context of Sherlock Holmes was seeing Jude and I do this movie. The nice thing this time around is that we are able to honour Doyle even more by pretty much making this a story. A very thrilling story. Not unlike one of the Conan Doyle stories that Watson is retelling. So you get back to the subjectivity of “here is this ordinary person in these extraordinary circumstances with his friend.”

What is different for the two characters this time around? 

Law: Not a lot of time has elapsed. I am nearly married. I’m a couple of days away from getting married. I’ve moved out and I’m getting very comfortable with Mary.

Downey Jr: As indicated by the end of the last film – Holmes is definitively obsessed with the first super-villain in literature, Moriarty, for whom we have the astonishingly fantastic Jared Harris.

What should we expect from his performance? 

Law: Jared is a fantastically experienced and quality actor, which was the most important thing. You wanted someone who could pull the job off. What I got immediately when they mentioned his name is that this guy has got a fantastic range. He can in equal proportions terrify, amuse, entertain, and threaten. You just need all of those on your palette if you are going to play this guy who is meant to be as brilliant, evil, and mysterious as Moriarty is.

Downey Jr: Yeah, and he asked all of the right questions that really put us to task too. He’s built a sort of reputation for himself and it would be a shame to expose him to a vast audience in not the best possible light. So he really put it to us “Hey, let’s not make this mistake. I think we can be better than this.” We were like, “Absolutely. That is how we feel.” He basically led the charge in this particular incarnation of Moriarty. It’s even better than what we hoped it would’ve been. I think people are going to be not surprised, but I think a lot of people are going to really recognize him for who he is for maybe the first time in a big scenario like this. We are proud, but we earned it for sure.

Sequels tend to go darker these days, so how will this one play out?

Law: I don’t know about you, but I find it kind of hard. I don’t know yet. We all said, “It’s going to be darker this time. It’s going to be really nasty and gritty.” I don’t know why there is that trend, but you’re right, it does seem to be so. We went in with that in mind. Certainly the threat of Moriarty and the presence of such an evil mind certainly leads it that way, but we tend to have been coming up with more lighter stuff. Don’t you think?

Downey Jr: Yeah. I honestly think that it’s both a little tidy bit broader and it’s a little bit darker just because of the fellow and situation we are up against. He reaches out and touches us quite a bit. We are in pretty bad shape almost all of the time.

You said that you went back to Doyle for this film. The introduction of Moriarty would suggest that this is a little bit more like The Final Problem. 

Downey Jr: It is a little more like The Final Problem. Having said that, as with the other one, there are hints at other books that are laced in. There are also areas that are completely original. But it is closer to a book, being The Final Problem, than the first film.

What’s your relationship like with Stephen Fry/Mycroft? 

Law: I don’t have any contact with him. Seriously, we’re not allowed to touch him.

Downey Jr: He’s allowed to touch Mycroft. Stephen, we’ve all had our way. His character is arguably the most enigmatic of all the characters in the lexicon, and so what better person? It’s so funny too that he’s literally just hitting this super stride. Just as we are here we went to go see him at Albert Hall and then he is at a rehearsal with us just basically thinking and phrasing circles around us. We were just kind of left wondering what happened when he left, but he had to go because he has some other hip thing that he has to do.

Law: And he was the youngest member of the Sherlock Holmes Appreciation Society when he was a boy!

What about your character’s relationship with Noomi’s character? 

Law: She comes on board because she is a link early on.

Downey Jr: She’s a lead.

Law: She then becomes a kind of partner because she is incredibly handy in different ways. She is also emotionally involved. By the time we meet her on her home turf she is emotionally involved in what we are trying to work out. So she kind of comes along for the whole journey.

Downey Jr: We have a common goal.

What do you think Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would have thought of your Sherlock and Watson? 

Downey Jr: Well, I’m sure he might have had a complaint or two. I can’t speak for the strength of transcripts of stage productions, but we’ve definitely put the most of his words in our mouths. If anything, he might be happy that we brought Watson back to how he was originally described. Last time around, there was, for some reason or other, that wave of bromance in the air. I think this time we are attempting to transcend that a little bit by making these two guys go up against something that is bigger than both of them. If I have learned anything it is that comparison is a dangerous place to go because nothing is ever like anything else. So I always think that a sequel you assume is a logical continuation of something that you already understand, but I don’t understand how we did it the first time.

Law: I think when you’ve got source material, whether it’s a play or a book – a great writer often appreciates being adapted and developed. It’s like when you go see a production of a great play and they are always different. There is always room for interpretation, and this is our interpretation. I don’t think we drifted as far away from the source material as people expected, but I equally think that we were original enough to keep it fresh and our own. So I think he would have been very appreciative.

How does the chemistry between the pair of you play out in this film? Will you be downplaying it? 

Downey Jr: I don’t think when you see this you will feel that we have restrained ourselves at all. Truth be told, the bottom line with these stories is that they are about this one man’s observation of this other man who tells him that he is the only true friend he has and him realizing that he is the only person that he is actually very close to besides his wife. I think that is just a great theme. The bottom line is that we are in this love together.

Law: The brother thing is really strong in this one actually. That is when Noomi gets involved too. There is a thing later on in this film where it questions one’s reliance on someone else and can you really trust someone?

Downey Jr: Is anybody ever really what they put themselves forth to be? Including us, our nemesis, and pretty much every character in this movie. That is what I think is so interesting. It really is a lot about the shadow elements of everybody.

Lionel Wigram and Susan Downey produced the first film and were the driving force behind getting Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows made. Here they talk about there resons for shooting a sequel…

Susan Downey: Not the very next day but pretty much. What did we say? About six months or so. It’s non-specific. It’s a bit of time.

Because the first movie ends and he’s on the Moriarty case. 

Downey: And he stays on it. It picks up in the sense that we sort of account for the passage of time in between what’s happening after the first one ended and when this one begins, but things that we left – like him on the scent of Moriarty and Watson with Mary – those things have progressed a little bit. We sort of pick things up and take it from there.

Is it based on any of the books? 

Downey: No, like always, we take influence from the canon. So people who know the short stories and the novels well are going to find things from the novels that we kind of pay homage to. Obviously, Moriarty is in The Final Problem. We don’t follow that story exactly, but there are bits from it that we take so we are true to the characters. But, like the first movie, it’s its own story. We pick up with Holmes and Watson and Watson is intending to get married to Mary and, as you might assume, Holmes gets in the way, not necessarily intentionally. Then there’s sort of a question of how that’s going to be resolved. He has been obsessed since the first movie with the scent of Moriarty and believing that he’s on to something much bigger. This movie is essentially following him, figuring that out. But there are smaller mysteries along the way that are adding up to a bigger thing that’s happening. Then, obviously, new to this one is Stephen Fry, who plays Mycroft and Noomi Rapace who plays this fantastic gypsy girl who finds her way into one of these mysteries and winds up kind of along for the ride.

How did you go about casting Moriarty? There were a lot of rumours online as to who he would be. 

Downey: It’s a tough one. We did talk about a lot of different names. Ultimately, what we decided we wanted to do was to have whoever we cast stand out as the character and not necessarily as the actor. So we decided to go with a really great British actor and that was who we ended up landing on. There were a lot of rumours and names of people that we didn’t actually ever talk to tossed about and speculated online. There was speculation in the room. But Jared Harris was really the only guy that we actually went after.

There are pretty persistent rumours about who provided the voice of Moriarty at the end of the first film. Can you say who that was? 

Downey: It’s not a big mystery. It was one of the crew guys. That was it. There’s no great mystery to that. We decided that we wanted more a texture of voice than to worry about it being a person and having to worry about whether or not we were even going to be able to do a second movie. We hoped and we had ideas on what we wanted to explore, but it was really up to the audience as to whether they were going to go and see it in a big enough way that Warner was going to let us go and do another one. So it’s quite presumptuous for us to bring someone on just for that, but we loved watching the rumours fly.

Did you have a favourite rumour? 

Downey: Robert was trying to start one that he was going to be Moriarty. But that never caught on.

Can you talk about the addition of Stephen Fry and Noomi Rapace? 

Downey: Stephen was the only choice. It was Mycroft… Stephen Fry! And, fortunately, he wanted to do it. He was just so perfect. The description of Mycroft being his brother who is potentially even smarter than he is but far lazier. Noomi was interesting. I kind of heard Lionel say it nicely the other day.

Lionel Wigram: I can’t remember what I said. But we wanted an interesting, fresh face. We wanted a strong European actress. She was such an amazing actress in Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Guy and I and Susan met with her in America and she had such a great intelligence to her. Her whole approach was just very inspiring and exciting. She has turned out to be an amazing part of the team and has held her own with the boys in an amazing way.

Will we see a third movie? 

Wigram: I always had an idea, when we started this, of more or less where the first three movies should take place and what I wanted to see. A general direction for them. We’ve sort of followed that on the second one, though it was just a tiny concept and, collectively, we’ve come up with a much stronger story for it. So yeah, we do have an idea of where we want it to go. We’ve discussed ideas for the third one with Susan and Robert and Guy and we all sort of agree that we like the idea. If we’re lucky enough to make a third, we’ll probably go there. But beyond that, no we don’t have very specific plans.

Downey: There’s things that we still want to explore if we get to do a third one, but the thing that – if we’re laying down any foundation – is that we need to continue to build upon the characters. That’s what’s going to be able to let us do another one. Not necessarily clever plot things.

Wigram: And there are things in the books we’d love to explore and, if we get the opportunity, we’re going to do it.

Was there any particular element from the first film that you weren’t completely satisfied with that you want to improve or top in this one? 

Wigram: Well, you always think you can do better. No question about that. In a way, you want to try and do every aspect better. We’ve certainly tried to improve on the things we loved about the first movie and make them even better. But sure, you always try to make it better, absolutely.

Is there more comedy and action in this one? 

Wigram: Both. It’s both. I think it’s much funnier. I think it’s much more emotional and I think it’s definitely much more action-packed. I think it has a better bad guy plot. It has bigger scope. We feel, at this point, that we’ve made a better movie than the last one.

Can you talk about some of the places that the characters visit on this one? 

Wigram: Yeah, we can say. We go to Paris. As you know, today’s scene takes place in Paris. We go to Germany. Sort of industrial Germany. And we go to the Alps.

The Swiss Alps? 

Wigram: (laughs) Yes.

Could this mean that Holmes will be drawn into Conan Doyle’s famous deadly showdown in this film? Unfortunately the cast and crew were stating tight-lipped on this front, but don’t rule it out!

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star Noomi Rapace was cast as tough-talking and tough-fighting gypsy Sim, and we grilled her about what it was like to join such a huge production.

Was it hard coming onto a film where Robert and Jude had already built a strong relationship? 

Noomi Rapace: It’s kind of being the new girl in the class or something. But you can feel that the whole team has something really good, so it’s like stepping into something where somebody else has done the hard work so you can just fly. So it’s been a great, fantastic journey. It’s been so much fun and every day – well maybe not this day – but we’ve been working on the characters and the scenes and trying to find the best way to tell the story every day. So it’s very searching, exploring work.

How does your character fit in? 

Rapace: She meets Holmes for the first time in London and then they meet later on in France. She has a personal reason to go with him on this journey?

What has the experience of working on a Hollywood film been like compared to what you thought it would be? 

Rapace: I’m quite surprised that it’s so flexible. That we are searching and exploring and there’s curiosity and passion that are the things that everybody is going back to all the time. I thought it would be much more that the head of the studio would say that you have to do exactly this way and this script in this way. It’s much more creative than I expected. That’s really an outsider’s point-of-view, but I thought it would be much more controlled in a way. It feels like an independent film because it feels like we are together, working as a team, to tell this story in the most exciting and entertaining way.

Is there anything specific that you brought to the character? 

Rapace: Oh yes. I’ve done a lot of research on gypsies and their culture, so for example I’ve added in that I actually talk some Romany, their language. So we’ve added in some lines based on how they actually talk. So they will probably need to do subtitles in some scenes. I’m learning to do some dances and stuff like that. That’s something that I like. And Guy – he loves gypsies.

Is she an action girl? Do you get to fight with the boys? 

Rapace: Yes, but she’s not a… I think it’s really important to find a way to do things realistic and credible so that it’s possible. She’s not a fighter. She’s a street-fighter, so she can use a fork or a knife or she can bite somebody or throw a stone. I think she’s a survivor… I think most gypsies all over the world are used to being not very welcome and always on the run. Expecting people to not like them and being critical, so I think she is used to taking care of herself and fighting back. We have many explosive situations.

What’s your criteria for choosing projects? 

Rapace: I think it’s always been about the people. The actors, the director and the script. That’s everything. I don’t care if it’s a big studio production or a small independent project, it’s all about… I think I’m obsessed with the human psyche. I want to understand. I want to ask myself if I have it inside me, is it possible? I want to explore humanity and human kind. I think that what’s in common between all of the things that I’ve done and all the things that I want to do is that they are connected to some deeper things in our souls.

What’s it like to work with Robert and Jude? 

Rapace: Fantastic. They are amazing actors, both of them. But also very brave. I think they are everyday trying to find the best solution. And it doesn’t matter if it comes from me or Robert or Jude or Guy or one of the producers – it’s like everybody is working together for the same goal, and that’s the best team you can be part of. So it’s been fantastic.

Following months of speculation, Mad Men star Jared Harris was the surprise choice to play Moriarty. Here he discusses taking on one of literature’s greatest villains.

When you saw the first film, did you think you’d be the one standing in the shadows? 

Jared Harris: No. Of course not. It never entered my mind.

What was it like landing this part? 

Harris: It was a great surprise. It was very last minute. They were entertaining a lot of other big name options, so they were going all through that part that they go through. I probably know about as much about it as you do, because I read what you did. So I didn’t know how that was panning out. Then it was back in the end of September – I happened to be in Switzerland visiting a friend, and I flew to London to meet Guy. And they started shooting a week or 10 days later.

Did you do much research? 

Harris: I’d read all the Sherlock Holmes before so I knew it really well. There isn’t really a hell of a lot in terms of Moriarty research that you can do from the books. He only actually appears in two stories. He’s talked about a lot. But in terms of information that would really inform the character, there was only really two stories, so there wasn’t a lot of catching up to do in that sense, but there was a lot of catching up in terms of it being a giant machine, and the machine was… the train was definitely leaving the station and you had to catch up very quickly.

There have been many different versions of Moriarty – was it important for you to cast them aside or was there something you want to use or retain? 

Harris: There have been lots of them that have been really good ones. That’s what interesting about them – it’s quite open. The main thing that has been great about Moriarty is this sense of mystery, of who this person is, because you don’t know a lot about him. So that for example allowed them in The Seven Percent Solution to create the idea that Moriarty was Sherlock Holmes’ teacher, who was having the affair with his mother, and so that’s where the obsession with Moriarty comes from, so it was a sort of psychological one. And you have lots of other different ones.

So it really allowed us to be able to not feel like we were totally stuck in terms of having to fulfil whatever expectations that there were, because he’s more of a mysterious character. So whatever choices that you do make about it, you still have to honour that air of mystery, which means you can’t say too much even within the body of the story. It’s nice if you really still don’t know a hell of a lot about him. There were earlier versions of the script where there was all this back story going on, and William Goldman talks about that in his book ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’ – he talks about the more you explain a character, the weaker you make him. You have to leave an area where the audience is able to fill it in with their imagination.

Will this be a funny version of Moriarty? 

Harris: No, not really. We’ve sorted of batted around some of the stuff to do with this, but the trouble with the villain is that it’s really easy – especially in light of the Austin Powers films – to pastiche the villain. And you can really quickly tip into not just comedy, but also satire. So there’s not a lot [of humour] – we keep him on-point. And a lot of the humour that Robert and Jude had was a kind of banter that they had between the two of them, and most of my scenes are with Robert and there isn’t a lot of good-natured banter that goes on between those two characters.

Following the end of the first film, your appearance is as heavily hyped as Orson Welles’ in The Third Man. What’s it like taking on a role like that? 

Harris: I thought they did a bloody good job. Sherlock Holmes did such a good job of creating an impression of who Moriarty was and the threat that he posed that you don’t want to f**k that up when you meet the character. He gives a tremendous impression of who he is.

Did you feel much pressure coming in like that? 

Harris: Given how little he appears in the books, he’s such a famous character, he’s such a famous villain, and he really was the very first literary super-villain. But he might be that idea – the first super-villain of all-time. And from there super-villains have become this thing where they have become so pastiched that you want to do something that honours that title without it being you stroking a cat.

Was it tough having to hit the ground running like you did? 

Harris: I personally love as much time as possible, but the reality of that is that actors in my position – which is that you don’t have three or four projects lined up – you’re always coming in late. So you very rarely have the opportunity to have that kind of time, you’re just not brought on board at that point. But I love having that kind of time and being able to do that kind of research. Does it help? I don’t know. At the end of the day you look at it and you don’t know if the performance was better or worse. I don’t know. Specifically with something like this – it is actually an imaginative process. You can’t really do a lot of research for being a mass-manipulating, murdering super-villain. I ran a small black market in sweets at school when I was seven. Other than that I don’t have a great deal of experience, so you can’t do it, you know? You can go and talk to villains and stuff like that, but even that isn’t necessarily going to help you because the guy’s working at such a completely different level of manipulation. So it has to be an imaginative exercise. I’m sure Anthony Hopkins didn’t go around murdering people and chopping them up to see what they taste like.

Do you have any good weapons or gadgets in this one? 

Harris: One of the things that I was interested in about Moriarty was – he’s so manipulative that he doesn’t need to commit violence himself or kill people – he can get everyone to do what he needs to do. And sometimes they don’t even know that they are being manipulated by him. They aren’t even aware that they are caught in a stratagem that he has. In that sense, you don’t know which parts of the story he is manipulating and which parts he isn’t until you get to the very end. I just thought that was a more interesting approach rather than have him be someone who is dressed up in some black superhero costume running around because there’s a lot of that. If you can convey the same sense of menace. For example, I thought, going back to a very famous villain lately, that Hannibal Lecter was much more effective when he was confined to prison. When you let the character out and he was roaming the streets of Florence, he wasn’t as threatening. Everything that he was able to do, he was doing through his understanding of psychology and personality and what people wanted. That’s quite chilling – to have someone that understands people that well – that he can have a letter arrive on the wrong day and it’s going to be enough that it will set somebody off or whatever it is. That doesn’t happen in our movie though.

In the original film there are visual cues to show Sherlock deducting. Does Moriarty get anything like that? 

Harris: No. Not really. Because again that’s… that would mean that you’d enter into the mind of the character, and your perception of the character is Sherlock Holmes’ perception… I’m trying to think. I don’t think there are any scenes where you see him by himself just doing his thing. There might be one. But it’s very much from Sherlock’s point-of-view, so no. Well maybe right at the very end there might be something. But I’m not telling you what it is.

So will we see examples of your villainy? 

Harris: Yes, you’re going to see examples. The whole story is a plan or plot that he has set in motion quite a long time before the story starts. There’s a tremendous sense of motion to the story and Sherlock Holmes is arriving in the end stages of this plan that Moriarty set in motion quite a long time ago, and he’s catching up to it to thwart it. All the events that you see, there’s a grand design that has been set up.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, in UK and US cinemas 16th December.

From MTV Movies Blog by Kevin P. Sullivan

In the new Sherlock Holmes film, “A Game of Shadows,” the world’s most famous detective meets up with his arch-nemesis from the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories, Professor Moriarty. But what will become of the only person to have ever out-witted Holmes, the infamous Irene Adler?

Rachel McAdams portrayed the iconic character in the first film, but until recently, a potential appearance in the sequel was still up in the air. Eventually, it was announced that McAdams would reprise her role, but only in a small capacity.

But now a new Korean promotional character poster depicts McAdams by herself as Adler, with no other players to be found. Does this mean we may see a bigger presence from Irene Adler than we had thought?

It’s impossible to say until “A Game of Shadows” hits theaters on December 16. All signs thus far have pointed to a small role for Adler and McAdams, so what’s most likely the case is that Warner Bros. is simply looking to capitalize off of the actresses profile. Adding McAdams to promotional material, even for a small role, adds to the film’s overall star power.

A murder is to take place on Christmas Eve, and only the audience and a famous sleuth can stop it.  Whodunnit Murder Mystery Theatre will present Sherlock Holmes and Twas the Murder Before Christmas beginning on Saturday.

Sherlock Holmes and Twas the Murder Before Christmas performances will take place on Saturdays from Nov. 19 until Dec. 17 as well as Fridays on Dec. 2, 9, and 16.  All evening shows begin at 7 p.m.  A Sunday brunch show will also take place on Dec. 4 beginning at 1 p.m.  All performances will take place at the Hyatt Regency downtown, located at 320 W. Jefferson Street in Louisville.

Tickets for each show are $43.95 per person.  Tickets include the show, tax, gratuity, and a meal choice of roast turkey with stuffing, glazed pork loin, or tortellini primavera.  Reservations are strongly recommended as the show does sell out.  All reservations can be made by calling 502-426-7100.

Sherlock Holmes and Twas the Murder Before Christmas features the famous sleuth and his sidekick, Watson, as they attempt to find a suspect who always kills his victims on Christmas Eve.

The audience will have the opportunity to help out in solving the case.  During the show, suspects will move about the audience.  The audience, in turn, will be able to ask the suspects questions in order to gain clues.  Suspects have the option of either answering truthfully or evading the question.

Keep in mind if an audience member asks if the suspect is the killer, the suspects will answer no.

Sherlock Holmes and Twas the Murder Before Christmas is double cast, with Craig Nolan Highley and A.J. Green performing the title character on separate nights.  A.S. Waterman directed and created the show.

More information on the show and possible booking for private events can be found at the Whodunnit Murder Mystery Theaterwebsite or by calling 502-426-7100.

Garrison Players presents “The Hound of the Baskervilles” on Nov. 18-20 and Dec. 2-4 at the Garrison Players Arts Center, Route 4 in Rollinsford. Please note there are no performances on Thanksgiving weekend. Evening shows are at 8 p.m., with Sunday matinees at 3 p.m. The mystery has been adapted for the stage by Tim Kelly of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic novel. Audience members are asked to bring a new, unwrapped toy to place in the Dover Fire Department’s Toy Bank box at the theater. Tickets, at $18 for adults and $12 for students, are available online at www.garrisonplayers.org, or by calling 750-4ART

From monstersandcritics.com By Kim Newman

In the popular imagination, Professor Moriarty is Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis the way Lex Luthor, the Joker and Blofeld are the enemies of Superman, Batman and Bond.  Somehow, we think of a career-long struggle – with many draws, near-misses and return engagements, leading up to a final face-off from which only the hero will walk away.

Indeed, that’s how it’s been with many characters created in avowed imitation of Moriarty, like Bulldog Drummond’s arch-enemy Carl Peterson, the insidious Dr Fu-Manchu (opposed by the Holmesian copper Nayland Smith) or Dr Who’s fellow renegade Time Lord the Master.

However, Arthur Conan Doyle only uses Moriarty the once, in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) – where a pre-existing rivalry is established, and resolved in that titanic struggle atop the Reichenbach Falls – though the Prof’s shadow falls on the novel The Valley of Fear and he scores a couple of mentions in later stories.

Doyle, of course, was making it up as he went along – whereas authors now take a lesson from TV series and comic books and tend to have a long-term plan when they start writing a series with a continuing protagonist.  The makers of the Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch TV series, for instance, build up to bringing on their versions of Moriarty by establishing that the Napoleon of Crime takes a behind-the-scenes role in several of Holmes’s earlier cases.

This is actually so effective that it’s a shame Doyle didn’t think of it too. Other Victorians who did that thing of assembling magazine-published short stories into books which sit somewhere between novel and short story collection (Grant Allen’s An African Millionaire) did use conventions like story arcs, foreshadowing and season-closing payoffs that resemble exactly current TV formats.

It’s possible that Moriarty might not have attained his current prominence as Holmes’s arch-nemesis if it weren’t for American actor-author William Gillette – whose 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, designed as a vehicle for himself, became the first huge spinoff hit associated with the Holmes franchise.  Gillette coined the catch-phrase ‘elementary, my dear Watson’, added a love interest for the detective which had him marry at the end of the play and used Moriarty as the villain.

Though a German serial of the 1910s made Stapleton, the trainer of the Hound of the Bakservilles, into a continuing villain, most early Holmes films derived from the play, so there were a run of silent and early talkie Moriarty performances.  The screen’s first Moriarty seems to have been Gustave Lund in the 1908 Danish Sherlock Holmes – which is one of several silents to play with the crossover notion of the gentleman thief Raffles (created by Doyle’s brother-in-law E.W. Hornung) as Holmes’ regular sparring partner.

Other silent Moriarty’s include Booth Conway (The Valley of Fear, 1916), Ernest Maupain (Sherlock Holmes, 1916) and Percy Darrell Standing – the movies’ second Frankenstein Monster, from Life Without Soul, 1915 – (The Final Problem, 1923).
In Sherlock Holmes (1922), the first Holmesian superproduction, the Great Profile, John Barrymore, played Holmes and cast his frequent co-star Gustav von Seyffertitz – who looks a little like Barrymore in his famous role as Mr Hyde, suggesting the star might have liked to play a dual role – as the Professor.

Von Seyffertitz has a splendidly sinister long nose and hawk eyes, and plays up the spider-in-his-web aspect of the part.  Harry T. Morey (The Return of Sherlock Holmes, 1929) and Norman McKinnel (The Sleeping Cardinal, 1931), the first talkie Moriartys, were upstaged by Ernest Torrance (Sherlock Holmes, 1922), who plays the Professor as a leering, educated brute, importing American gangster rackets to London, and relishing high-tech weaponry like grenades and machine-guns.

Lyn Harding is Moriarty opposite Arthur Wontner’s Holmes in The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935) and Silver Blaze (aka Murder at the Baskervilles, 1937) but the actor was associated with another Doyle baddie, Dr Grimesby Roylott of ‘The Speckled Band’ – a role he’d played many times on stage and in a brisk 1932 film – and essentially reprised his evil medico act as the master crook.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) redefined the screen image of the sleuth – it introduced Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson and was (odd as it may now seem) the first Holmes movie not to have a contemporary setting.  All earlier films had the sage of Baker St keep up with the times, travel in motor-cars, use the telephone and keep up to date – The Adventures brought back hansom cabs, fog and gaslight, the ulster and deerstalker and the Victorian clutter of 221B.

Doyle, who wrote Holmes stories well into the 1920s but established that they mostly took place in the 1890s, saw early on that Holmes’s period was part of his charm, but the movies took a while to catch up.  George Zucco, neon-eyed and verminously civil, makes for a wonderful Moriarty, and is given one of his most satisfying schemes – tempting Holmes with a bizarre case involving a club-footed gaucho killer to keep the detective distracted while he steals the crown jewels from the Tower of London. 

In later Rathbone films, which reverted to a contemporary setting, practiced screen fiends Lionel Atwill (Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, 1943) and Henry Daniell (The Woman in Green, 1945) took over – but, though Atwill’s Moriarty works with the Nazis, the schemes they are given by the screenwriters don’t match the luminous evil of the performances.

Subsequent Moriartys have been legion – the worst must be Richard Roxburgh in the feeble League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), though Anthony Andrews was off his game in Hands of a Murderer (1990).

Far better have been Leo McKern (The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, 1975), John Huston (Sherlock Holmes in New York, 1976) and Andrew Scott (Sherlock, 2010), who all (logically, given the name) play the Professor as a sinister Irishman (will Jared Harris go that route in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?), Eric Porter (perhaps closest to Doyle’s version) and Viktor Yevgrafov (a bearlike brute with luminous eyes) in the UK and Russian Holmes series of the 1980s, ratty Colin Jeavons (The Baker Street Boys, 1983), Anthony Higgins as Young Professor Moriarty (though you had to sit through the end credits to find this out) in Young Sherlock Holmes (1986), Paul Freeman (very good and straight as a sociopathic Moriarty in the weak spoof Without a Clue, 1988) and Vincent d’Onofrio (doing a perfect James Mason accent and credited with inventing heroin in Sherlock, 2002).

Heroes tend to need a ‘best enemy’ – note how recent TV shows like House, The Mentalist, Monk and Law and Order: Criminal Intent come up with Moriarty-like nemeses for their deduction-spouting leads, and the way that Hannibal Lecter takes on Napoleonic genius levels in Thomas Harris’s books and the films based on them.  If too successful, there’s a plot problem down the line – why don’t either of these antagonists succeed in killing or permanently defeating their doppelgangers (seriously, Batman, just drop the green-haired freak off a skyscraper and say it was an accident) and thus ending the series?

Most of Holmes’s enemies – including Moriarty – are brought to book at the end of the story, and even those who aren’t (like Irene Adler) are never heard from again.  But, as the stories are told and retold, the great detectives need a great challenge.

With more Holmes around on screen (and the page) than ever before, it seems likely that the Napoleon of Crime will never be out of work.

In the book, the reader is asked to imagine the twisted evil twins of Holmes and Watson and you have the dangerous duo of Prof. James Moriarty – wily, snake-like, fiercely intelligent, unpredictable – and Colonel Sebastian ‘Basher’ Moran – violent, politically incorrect, debauched. Together they run London crime, owning police and criminals alike. Unravelling mysteries – all for their own gain.

From longIsland.com by

There’s good news for fans of Sherlock Holmes and “Downton Abbey”: They’re both coming back to PBS next year.

A two-part examination of Bill Clinton’s presidency, a look at some celebrity family trees by Louis Gates and a series on American infrastructure hosted by a former “Survivor” contestant are all part of PBS’ new spring schedule, the public broadcasting service said Wednesday.

An abrupt season ending to “Downton Abbey” with several unanswered questions – including whether the show was even going to return – led to angry phone calls from many fans, said Paula Kerger, PBS president. The first season was only four episodes. The second season, set during World War I, contains seven episodes and starts Jan. 8.

The “Masterplace Mystery!” presentation of “Sherlock, Series 2″ is set in 21st century London and will air in three episodes in May, PBS said.

The “American Experience” documentary on Clinton premieres on President’s Day and features fresh interviews with many in the administration and some of the president’s adversaries. It does not include a new interview with Clinton, Kerger said.

The positive side of profiling such a recent president is that many people within the administration are still alive. The negative side is losing the perspective of history, she said.

“He’s an interesting and complex individual and I think the piece captures that,” Kerger said.

Harvard professor Gates is host of “Finding Your Roots,” a 10-part series that begins March 25. The series will have celebrity juice – Kevin Bacon, Barbara Walters, Tyra Banks and Martha Stewart are among those who have their family roots explored – and Gates tries to tie those family stories to historical trends.

Yul Kwon of “Survivor” will be host of “America Revealed” starting on April 11. He’ll try to show how infrastructure is changing traffic and food production, for example.

Cultural programming includes a premiere of Anna Deavere Smith’s play “Let Me Down Easy,” a music special on Tony Bennett’s duets album, and Michael Feinstein’s “American Songbook.”

“We’re going to continue our focus on arts content,” Kerger said.

From associatedcontent.com by Donna Cater

They are back! Director Guy Ritchie is returning physician and author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s iconic character detective Sherlock Holmes and his ever trusty partner Dr. Watson to the big screen as they play A Game of Shadows to outwit mastermind evil nemesis Professor Moriarty, played by Jared Harris.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes who notices details everyone else, including Watson, miss. Using wit and early forensics this promises to be a very good adventure mystery with some comedy, especially for Arthur Conan Doyle fans, as well as Downey fans who stay with him through thick and thin. Downey will have a love interest, hopefully not as platonic as in the Doyle’s books.

Jude Law will return to the screen as the indomitable Dr. John Watson, brainy in his own right but nevertheless spotlighting Holmes as always more accomplished.

Swedish-born star Noomi Rapace, star of the “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series plays Gypsy Sim (or Simza) in A Game of Shadows. Downey and Law, per Popeater, are lavish in their praise of her toughness in action scenes.

Some of the scenes indicate that the movie will include German cannons (Big Berthas), Gypsies including gunslinger Sim who also wants Moriarty to be history forever, a shrewd Downey disguised in drag on a train, mayhem, mystery, and sleuthing galore and some early forensics.

Yes, Sherlock Holmes is an early believer of details and forensics and microscopes. He sought the smallest of clues at crime scenes as they helped define the sequence of murderous events. Shoes, ashes, hair, tire impressions, clothing, and handwriting, to name a few, caught his detailed attention and made good use of his almost ever present magnifying glass.

The first film grossed over $500 million at the box offices. The sequel which is a somewhat loosely based tale from Doyle’s “Watson’s Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes: The Final Problem” promises to do as well.

Wonder if pipe smoking will be revitalized? Oh, and I need to find my magnifying glass, now.

From Oregonlive.com by Special to the Oregon

During a discussion of “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes,” Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie’s sly sleuth, murmurs one word: “Matre.” He’s saluting Arthur Conan Doyle, Poirot explains, not the resident of 221B Baker Street. Doyle’s tales were far-fetched and full of fallacies, “but the art of writing, ah, that is entirely different.”

Michael Dirda, the book columnist for The Washington Post and aficionado of all things Doyle, agrees. In “On Conan Doyle: Or, the Whole Art of Storytelling” he sends a valentine to the creator of Mr. Holmes, Dr. John H. Watson and lesser-known works about domestic life, spiritualism, history and contemporary events.

Holmes’ adventures appeal to all ages, Dirda reminds us. The young delight in fast-paced, suspenseful plots. Mature adults enjoy a return to a time when all was right with the world, or, at least, “it seemed rightable.” They relish Holmesian ratiocination and the tight, tart, tongue-in-cheek exchanges between detective and doctor.

Dirda is less successful, it seems to me, in ginning up interest in the rest of Doyle’s oeuvre. Almost all of it is “immensely readable,” he suggests, only to add that being dated “is not necessarily a bad thing.” “Through the Magic Door (1907) is “blatantly didactic”; the plotting in “Beyond The City” (1892) is “fairly perfunctory”; and “The Stark Munro Letters” (1895) is “talky.” Sherlock Holmes, it seems, was something of an exception to Doyle’s dictum that “man is never so interesting as when he is in earnest.”

Fortunately, Dirda understands the unimportance of being earnest. For “a happy month,” he confesses, Robert Fish’s groan-filled “The Incredible Schlock Homes” (“sabotage, next to the pilfering of coal, is the dirtiest of all crimes”) became his favorite bedtime reading.

“On Conan Doyle” is at its best when Dirda, a card-carrying member of the Baker Street Irregulars, lets us in on the great “spoof scholarship” game of filling in the gaps in the narratives of Watson/Doyle in the canon’s 56 stories and four novels. Could Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s fat, lazy and really smart older brother, be the original “M” of British intelligence? Did Sherlock do graduate work at Johns Hopkins? Could he be a woman? (“You know my methods, Watson. I put myself in the man’s place.”)

Always searching for Sherlockiana, Dirda, we learn, has not read all of Doyle’s 21 novels and 150 short stories. “One of these days,” he resolves, he will get to “The Great Shadow” (1892) and “Rodney Stone” (1896) and Doyle’s last, “reportedly very muddled” book, “The Maracot Deep” (1929). But for now, “on a dark and chilly night,” he prefers to turn out some lights, find a bottle of Orange Crush, and reread “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Why make this choice? It is “elementary, my dear Watson.”

Reading: Dirda discusses “On Conan Doyle” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 S.W. Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton.