Posts Tagged ‘cohen’
Russell Crowe *not* playing Watson and other worrying niggles
There was a scary rumour going round the web recently that Russell Crowe had been cast to play Dr Watson in Guy Ritchie’s upcoming film… thankfully this rumour is false as confirmed by Ritchie during a recent interview.
Ritchie also said that the film goes into production next month and that he doesn’t as of yet have a Watson, there was a bit of info’ released about the film however and it still makes me want to cry..
“[the film] will draw widely from the four novels and 56 short stories written by Conan Doyle rather than focusing on one particular tale.Ritchie’s Holmes is set to compete with a comic version headlined by Sacha Baron Cohen as the great detective and Will Ferrell as Dr Watson. The former will be an all-action adaptation emphasising Holmes’ skills as a boxer and swordsman, with the latter playing its subject matter for laughs.”
In talking to MTV news, Ritchie also said about making Holmes into an action character
“They never seem to manifest that [element] in some of the earlier productions they’ve done of ‘Sherlock Holmes,’ ” Ritchie said of what would separate his upcoming reinterpretation of the character from earlier versions. “We’re trying to bring a completely contemporary and entertaining perspective on an intellectual action hero true to his origins where he was more of an action guy originally.”
‘intellectual action hero’ ‘true to his origins’ ‘more of an action guy originally’ … are we still talking about Holmes? Did someone hand Ritchie a James Bond book and say “here, this is a Sherlock Holmes book.”
The producer confirmed my suspicions by adding
“It’s like James Bond in 1891,” producer Joel Silver added. “Nobody ever did the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ story as an action movie, and he really was an action guy. [Ours] is a big, wild action movie.”
it’s also been confirmed that Moriarty will be the villain but hasn’t been cast.
As for the other film, it seems like Etan Cohen is doing his research with “books about Victorian forensics, all the stories and dictionaries of Victorian slang.” In an interview with MTV news he said
“What’s been exciting is to do a giant comedy but at the same time try to be true to the mechanics of a Sherlock Holmes story like using the Victorian forensics that Conan Doyle used,” Cohen said. “It’s a cool opportunity to write a good mystery that also gets to be a giant comedy. Fortunately a lot of the stories are public domain now. We can actually draw on a lot of the situations and language of many of the original stories.”
It could be we have one vaguely historically and canonical accurate film that’s supposed to be a comedy and a film just using the characters of Holmes and Watson that’s supposed to be the serious one.
I suppose we’ll have to wait and see how it all comes out but personally, I’m still worried.
