ELEMENTARY: First Thoughts on CBS’ Totally Not Like The BBC’s Sherlock Show At All

Elementary (2012) – Season 1, Episode 1 – “Pilot” – Written by Robert Doherty; Directed by Michael Cuesta – Starring Jonny Lee Miller, Lucy Liu, and Aidan Quinn.

Has there been any show in recent memory where more people had made up their mind before an episode had even aired than CBS’ Sherlock Holmes in New York detective show, ELEMENTARY?

While you were busy decrying the show as a ripoff of the certain-to-be superior SHERLOCK from the BBC, your parents were busy deciding they loved it. It’s a natural fit for CBS to fold the world’s most famous detective into their cop show revue, which is probably why they had discussions with the BBC about adapting their show before they decided to just do their own show. Accusations have been flying from those in and the know and those who simply have an internet connection over how much ELEMENTARY was going to be a ripoff of Sherlock that I’m not sure if it’s more unbelievable that the show is finally here or that a grand total of one episode has been broadcast.

To be clear on where I stand, I am mostly of the feeling that there have been 8 billion Sherlock Holmes adaptations, which makes me initially think the makers of Sherlock should get over it. But the fact that they met with CBS makes me think that the American network is guilty of some creative thievery. I’m not going to go into a point-by-point breakdown of how the two shows compare to one another because that’s for the Beeb and CSI: CBS to fight out in court. All I really care about is this:

Sherlock is one of the best shows on television.

ELEMENTARY is also on television.

But before I get into that, there’s another issue I want to address and that is the overwhelming amount of suckage that is CBS.com. I realize that I’m spoiled by Hulu, but CBS.com is one of the most mindbogglingly inane websites I’ve come across because instead of their playback capabilities marking the site as an alternative to Hulu and Netflix – which is what a network website should be, CBS.com struggles to compare favorably to Daily Motion and their fan-uploaded videos. It’s stunning to me, literally and absolutely stunning to me that CBS.com has such a crappy steaming operation. I don’t have the strongest computer in the world, but I routinely stream shows on Hulu, movies on Netflix, and sports on ESPN3 and I almost never have a pixelated image, yet the strength of the ELEMENTARY stream was constantly changing. If you watch the program full screen, you can not get rid of the timeline at the bottom of the screen. Why do they think I want to look at that blue line creeping from left to right for the entire show? When they go to commercial, they often force you out of your full screen viewing mode to look at a smaller screen, and then KEEP you in the smaller screen when your show restarts, meaning you have to go click the button to go full screen again. Maddening.

And it gets worse.

There are ads during CBS.com streams, which is understandable. There are a LOT of ads during CBS.com streams, which is annoying. But neither of those facts would get me to not watch a show I wanted to watch there. What I don’t understand, what truly drives me bonkers, what clearly demonstrates that CBS.com simply does not give a f*ck about you or their shows is this:

They run commercials IN THE MIDDLE OF SCENES!

Yeah, you’d think they’d simply wait for the, you know, commercial breaks to lay their commercials in, but they don’t. Commercials seem to run on some kind of pre-determined schedule, and if the clock says it’s time to go to commercial, then the stream cuts to commercial, even if the episode is knee deep in a scene.

What the f*ck, CBS?

Honestly, WHAT. THE. F*CK?

What is the point of cutting to commercial right in the middle of a scene? Is that supposed to make me go, “Oh, this sucks, I guess I’ll watch the show on TV, instead?” Stupid. Utterly stupid. Is it this way for every single show they stream? Or is this just a special thing because this is the first episode of a new show and they want to annoy you?

Dear Whomever Runs CBS.com,

You suck at your job.

Signed,
Internet Programmers From 1996

As for ELEMENTARY itself, it’s a highly predictable formula show that almost no one who loves Sherlock is going to turn into every week, yet will probably be a massive hit. Honestly, how many people out there in America Land have ever even seen an episode of Sherlock? And of those, how many will not watch ELEMENTARY simply because PBS runs a British show featuring Sherlock Holmes?

The two big “changes” here are that Watson is a woman and that it takes place in New York, but neither of them amount to anything. The show could be taking place anywhere, and Watson’s switch in gender doesn’t have any immediate effect on the narrative.

What ELEMENTARY does well is operate inside the CBS crime show bubble (and this is a backhanded compliment, if ever there was one), offering a bit of something slightly different yet not really different at all. This is a safe show from start to finish. Oh yeah, sure, they intimate that Sherlock (Jonny Lee Miller) likes his sex BDSM style and they keep saying he had a drug problem, but they don’t show any of it actually happening. Even when Sherlock visits Captain Tobias “Not Lestrade” Gregson (Aidan Quinn) at a bar and leaves Sherlock to watch his coat, there’s no sense that Sherlock might be tempted to down Gregson’s drink. No, Sherlock has said that he’s done with drugs and, apparently, he means it. When Joan Watson (Lucy Liu) gives him a drug test, it’s because he unplugged her alarm clock and not because there’s any actual belief he took something. The audience is never invited to think Holmes might fall back into old habits. In other words, this show decides to tell us that Sherlock had a drug problem severe enough he needs his daddy to hire a babysitter for him, and it does nothing with it. It’s like telling us that Sherlock once had a sandwich for lunch.

Where this show fails is that it is not very smart, nor can it fake the appearance of being smart. Miller does his best to talk fast and play slightly off-center, but that can’t hide the fact that his big insights aren’t really all that impressive. ELEMENTARY tries to make a big deal out of the fact that he looks at glass on the floor and can instantly tell there’s enough shards there for two glasses, instead of the one glass the cops think has been smashed. Sherlock proves how smart he is by laying down on the floor and looking under the refrigerator and finding the second, unbroken glass bottom.

Thrilling stuff.

He also notices there’s a box missing because the owner of this apartment likes symmetry.

What a f*cking genius.

The only way Sherlock really comes off as particularly smart is due to the cops he’s working with being complete morons. Aidan Quinn’s Gregson just kinda stands around with hunched shoulders, grunting and looking confounded. And his main investigator makes the depiction of security guards at malls look like Detective Frank Pembleton. If the Pilot is any indication, the cases Holmes and Watson will be solving are cases that every other detective on TV would be able to solve in an hour, too. This episode’s mystery of a dead woman and her manipulative husband was as generic as any other mystery you’d find on any other network cop show.

Where ELEMENTARY does have a chance to be mildly entertaining is in the chemistry between Holmes and Watson. It’s not there, yet, but there are moments when Miller and Liu show a spark, such as at the end of the episode when he wants to go to dinner but she wants to watch the end of the Mets game. He does a bit of a “this will happen, then this, then this” routine and stomps off to wait in the hall. The game unfolds exactly as Holmes said it would because of course it would, but what’s important here isn’t that he’s right as much as how it lets the two protagonists interact with one another, and if ELEMENTARY is going to succeed, it’s going to be because Miller and Liu are worth watching. They’re not, yet, but as they find their characters, they might become a fun pair to watch.

ELEMENTARY is not an awful show, but it isn’t a good show, either. like nearly everything CBS puts on the air, it is an entirely forgettable show. CBS makes its bread being the Microwave Dinner Network, the place where you go to watch TV shows because you think you have to watch TV shows and you can’t be bothered to change the channel. Miller and Liu are trying, but they’ve got such a stupid script to work with here that there’s only so much they can do. As it stands, I don’t see any reason why I should come back and watch the next episode, and that’s not even because CBS.com is so overwhelmingly stupid.

DARK SHADOWS: You’ll Have to Imagine Us On a Better Day

Dark Shadows (2012) – Directed by Tim Burton – Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Helena Bonham Carter, Eva Green, Jackie Earle Haley, Jonny Lee Miller, Chloë Grace Moretz, Bella Heathcote, Christopher Lee, and Alice Cooper.

“These people might be freaks and weirdos, but don’t freak and weirdos deserve to be happy, too?”

That quote does not come from DARK SHADOWS, which takes the title for being the worst Tim Burton movie made to date, but rather from Derrick Ferguson on the Better in the Dark #129 podcast. In episode #129, Derrick and Tom Deja hold a Director’s Court on the career of Tim Burton. (And if you like Burton, or movies, or good conversation, you should be listening to the BITD podcast; I’m listening to #129 right now as I write this review.) They released this episode back prior to the release of DARK SHADOWS so they don’t discuss this latest Burton/Depp team-up but it’s all the better they don’t because DARK SHADOWS is as bad a movie as a major talent like Tim Burton could ever hope to release.

At the end of the film, Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote) has been turned into a vampire by Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp). He calls her Victoria and she corrects him, telling him her name is, “Josette,” which was the name of the original love of Barnabas’ life, who looks just like Maggie Evans, which is Victoria Winters’ real name. The person I saw the movie with asked me if we were supposed to think Victoria had become Josette, or if she had always been Josette.

My answer?

I don’t care.

I don’t. DARK SHADOWS is brutal, awful, bad film making. If it was just a bad movie, I wouldn’t freak out because bad movies happen all the time. What’s unforgivable about SHADOWS is that it’s a poorly made film and a director with all of Burton’s talent should not be making fundamentally flawed movies. He can make bad movies but not poorly made ones, and DARK SHADOWS has so many problems that I felt like Burton turned in his film and then someone who hates him re-cut it to make it as stupid as possible.

There are problems with tone and narrative here, and I’ll start with tone.

DARK SHADOWS has no idea what it wants to be. It’s ostensibly a horror-comedy, but it’s neither scary nor funny. Really, it’s a bad comedy because there’s very little attempt to do anything horror-related, at all, beyond the “mob captures the monster at his castle” sequence early in the film. There’s an attempt to have a love plot going on, but it’s barely touched upon and it’s given lip service instead of active proof. Barnabas falls in love with Victoria because she looks like Josette.

That’s it.

He has much more passion with Angelique (Eva Green), even though he doesn’t love her. Heck, he has more passion with Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter) than he has with Victoria, which isn’t a bad thing because Victoria looks like she’s 16.

Right, so I’m now listening to the portion of the BITD podcast where they touch on the unseen DARK SHADOWS and Tom Deja makes the point that Johnny Depp’s Barnabas looks like (based on the TV commercials) it’s another role where Depp’s conception of the character is all artifice. Without seeing the movie, Tom has rather nailed it, but the artifice critique really applies to the whole film – you know, except for the actually being clever part. Things just happen here and then disappear and you get the feeling they just happen because they make a good scene or have a good visual and not because they add to the film’s narrative. There’s no consistency here, in feel or story.

For instance, the movie opens two centuries ago and we get the whole back story of Barnabas not being in love with Angelique, and Angelique actually being a witch, and casting spells that sends his real love off a cliff. She curses him with becoming a vampire and then turns the town against him, sticking him in a coffin. Great.

We cut to the present and spend a good amount of time introducing Maggie Evans/Victoria Winters in 1972. First, she’s on a train, then she gets a ride from some hippies, then she ends up at Collinwood where she gets hired to play governess to David Collins, a young kid who thinks he can talk to his dead mom. Pretty clearly, the film has set up Barnabas and Victoria to be the two leads of the film because it’s taken all this time introducing them.

It’s rather curious, then, when Victoria then proceeds to largely disappear from the film for huge chunks of time.

What?

The love story is never really developed; they’re both drawn to each other and that’s apparently all the film has to say about love.

And that’s where the film falters in terms of character. Barnabas is a monster, but not because he’s a vampire with a pale look, but because (in the past) he’s screwing Angelique without being in love with her. Angelique’s rage is lit when she tells Barnabas she wants to hear that he loves her, but Barnabas refuses, and says that wouldn’t be true. Now, that alone doesn’t make him a monster because lots of guys sleep with women they don’t love, but when you add in the fact that Barnabas lives in the house and Angelique works there as an employee of the family, things get a bit trickier.

Still, not wholly a bad guy at this point. But cut to the present where he falls in love with Victoria, and then proceeds to have sex with Dr. Hoffman and Angelique on the side. He slaughters the workers who free him from his coffin and the hippies who help him understand the contemporary world, but the film treats these events as coldly as Barnabas does. At the end of the film, Barnabas tells Angelique that her curse is that she’s incapable of love, but she’s not. Her love is misguided, but there’s no indication at all that Angelique was anything but in love with Barnabas back in the 18th century. Her problem isn’t that she cannot love, but that she cannot move on from who she believes to be her one, true love.

Think back to Derrick’s quote up at the top of this review. He perfectly encapsulates the heart of Tim Burton’s movies, but there’s no heart in DARK SHADOWS. The Collins’ family endures, but there’s no sense of family here. The mom (Michelle Pfeiffer) is the hard matriarch overseeing the downfall of the family business. Her brother (Jonny Lee Miller) is a letch, who eyes the newly arrived Victoria like a piece of meat to be humped, but then never, ever talks to her. Mom’s daughter Carolyn (Chloë Grace Moretz) is an angry, isolated teen who wants to run away. And the brother’s son (Gulliver McGrath) talks to his dead mom and no one believes him. They are dysfunctional and the film ultimately tries to bind them through their supernatural abilities: David talks to the dead, Barnabas is a vampire, and Carolyn is a werewolf (which comes out of nowhere), and Michelle Pfeiffer is, um, a mom?

DARK SHADOWS tries to draw a line about who’s the actual monster because David’s father chooses to leave Collinwood with a huge sum of cash instead of acting like David’s dad, but the film hasn’t taken the time to make them seem like real people, so I don’t care.

Carolyn’s status as a werewolf is a good example of things just happening. It comes out of nowhere, which is just as bad as things going nowhere. When Barnabas returns, he decides he’s going to restore the family’s business to its former glory. So he goes and hypnotizes Christopher Lee and then they have a ceremony where they open the factory and then … nada. The next time the cannery plays any role in the film of note is when Angelique blows it up.

The film probably should have set itself up as a total Barnabas vs. Angelique film because that’s where the film clearly wants to go. Eva Green is her usual gorgeous self (I have a fondness for black boots and she rocks that look deliciously) and her character provides the wildness to counter Barnabas’ bland exterior. That whole opening sequence with Victoria is time they should have spent with Angelique.

DARK SHADOWS has two positive things going for it. The first is the look of the town, which is fantastic. The second is the mid-film appearance by Alice Cooper an the use of my favorite Cooper song of all time (which is also one of my favorite overall songs of all time), “Ballad of Dwight Fry.” The song integrates wonderfully with the story during this sequence (including Carolyn speaking the little girl’s part of the song) and gives the film some much needed life, and is the only real evidence of any ingenuity from the film makers.

The theater I saw the movie in actually had a decent crowd, but there were no rumblings of approval on the way out the door. People shuffled out either complaining about the film or silently, shuffling back to the light like disappointed zombies. Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have both made bad movies in the past, but this time around they failed at the simplest aspects of storytelling.

Simply put, DARK SHADOWS is a poorly made movie, and the worst of Tim Burton’s long, illustrious career.

ÆON FLUX: I’ve Lived and Died Seven Times Since Then

Æon Flux (2005) – Directed by Karyn Kusama – Starring Charlize Theron, Sophie Okonedo, Marton Csokas, Jonny Lee Miller, Frances McDormand, and Pete Postlethwaite.

ÆON FLUX is a complete and utter waste of time. Dumb, melodramatic, vacant, hokey, and sterile, there’s not a single honest emotion in ÆON FLUX, not a single believable character, and not a single frame of film that needs to be seen a second time.

The main problem with ÆON FLUX is that everything about the film feels cold, calculated, and perfunctory. Honestly, while ÆON FLUX looks like a movie, it plays like a read-through. No one comes across as invested in this story – heck, the story doesn’t even come across as being interested in the story. Instead, it’s the back story that generates the most heat – the 400 years of the post-virus world in which Trevor Goodchild (Marton Csokas) has been repeatedly cloning the world’s population (which all live in his city) to keep humanity going.

Æon (Charlize Theron) is a Monican secret agent. She walks around like a normal person, but then she pops a magic pill and can talk to a life size hand puppet of Frances McDormand called the Handler.

You know ÆON FLUX takes place in the future because everybody wears weird clothes and goes by weird names like, the Handler, the Keeper, Una, Æon, Oren, Sithandra, Freya, Claudius, Giroux, Inari, and Trevor.

So, Æon’s sister Una gets killed and Æon wants revenge and so the Handler sends her and Sithandra (Sophie Okonedo, who goes on to play Liz Ten in DOCTOR WHO) to kill Trevor. Everything is going all awesome until Æon actually gets to Trevor. She pulls her gun and …

Can’t kill them.

The movie then proceeds to take four or five days of your life to reveal to you what you already know – Trevor and Æon FLUX know each other from a shadowy past. We know this because we see Æon’s hazy memories and because Trevor calls her Catherine. Yeah.

The story consists largely of Æon and Trevor looking forlornly at one another, and Æon doing some investigating where she learns about humanity’s past and how Trevor has been cloning dead people, which is now causing everyone to have memories of past lives and blah blah blah. What ÆON FLUX gets wrong is that all of the back story is infinitely more interesting than the contemporary story. I don’t care about Æon or Trevor’s romance in the present because it’s completely based on their romantic past, when she was Catherine. Æon doesn’t love Trevor – Catherine loves Trevor and Æon is just a shadow seven times removed.

It’s dumb.

It could be tragic. It could be this hugely powerful moment where the assassin we’ve seen kicking ass all over this city in 2415 is ultimately revealed to be nothing more than a shadow of an ordinary woman from 2011. It could be.

But it’s not.

Karyn Kusama’s direction has no passion, and she seems to prefer to shoot Æon like she’s modelling for a magazine ad instead of accentuating her physicality. The artistic design is fine from a technical point of view, but it’s so cold and sterile that Bregna doesn’t feel like a real place. There’s all kinds of rather off-putting decisions all across the board: Frances McDormand’s robotic delivery, Sithandra having hands where her feet should be, a ridiculously silly assault by Sithandra and Æon on the capitol, Pete Postlethwaite’s costume, and Charlize Theron’s inability to throw a convincing punch or kick or emotion.

What more is there to say? ÆON FLUX is a very bad film. There’s talented actors here, but none of them give memorable performances. Combine that with a limp script and wooden direction and this film doesn’t stand a chance.