No, shit

Okay, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows isn’t THAT bad, as I, um, explain in my review of the film for MSN Movies, but you know how I can­not res­ist such a ter­rible joke. 

I noticed some­thing weird watch­ing it, which I did­n’t get into in the review, because I did­n’t want to look like I was insane. Here, where I feel more, let us say unin­hib­ited, I can let fly. In Game of Shadows both Holmes and Moriarty reveal them­selves to be great afi­ciana­dos of the clas­sic­al music, which won’t sit well with who­ever the heck that dork who does the advice column at The Hairpin is. In any event, one of the film’s big set pieces vis­its the Paris opera, where a really ornate pro­duc­tion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is going on. it looks pretty hot, hot enough that I think if Guy Ritchie were to really apply him­self, he could come up with a sta­ging of the opera entire that could sup­plant Zeffirelli’s boffo ver­sion. So that’s pretty cool. And later, dur­ing a nasty con­front­a­tion scene, Holmes and Moriarty dis­cuss the Schubert lied “The Trout,” the strains of which had been heard earli­er in the pic­ture. What’s weird is that the great American expat dir­ect­or Joseph Losey dir­ec­ted a pretty damn fine motion pic­ture adapt­a­tion of the Mozart opera in 1979, then, after doing Boris Gudonov for French tele­vi­sion, made a fea­ture called…La Truite, or, The Trout. Nothing to do overtly with the Schubert piece, but hell, don’t pre­tend that Losey (who was what we’d nowadays call a “snob”…didja know he put Davy Graham in The Servant, jeez…) would­n’t have made the men­tal con­nec­tion at some point in his pro­cess! And as I recol­lec­ted this I wondered, was this some sorta odd under­cur­rent Losey trib­ute, and if so, why. Empirical evid­ence points to com­plete coin­cid­ence, but it’s nice to dream of these con­nec­tions, maybe.