{"id":81,"date":"2010-08-26T23:09:10","date_gmt":"2010-08-26T23:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/?p=81"},"modified":"2010-12-06T15:18:13","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T15:18:13","slug":"sherlock-holmes-in-the-demonstration-of-explosive-diarrhoea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/?p=81","title":{"rendered":"Sherlock Holmes in the Demonstration of Explosive Diarrhoea"},"content":{"rendered":"

Watched O Zango de Baker Street<\/em>, or The Portuguese Sherlock Holmes<\/em> as my dad and I decided to dub it. Being a foreign film that I don’t think has even had an official DVD release over here, I had absolutely no expectations aside from maybe a dude in a deer hunting hat showing up. It’s a quirky and mildly enjoyable watch, but I admit the primary feeling I felt after seeing it was “they could’ve done it so much better.”<\/p>\n

Women are being murdered in Rio de Janeiro and a priceless violin has been stolen, and since the local detective isn’t doing a great job of cracking the case, here comes Sherlock Holmes and the stereotypical doddering comic relief incarnation of Doctor Watson to try and solve it! Mind you, it’s close to the thirty minute mark before the duo even appear on-screen, so I was almost expecting the Brazilian detective to be the main character with Sherlock (if he ever showed up) acting as a guest star, but nope, the Brazilian dude shares a few scenes with Holmes and there’s some cute interaction between them, and then he more or less disappears from the film. A waste and a disappointment.<\/p>\n

I suppose that sentence could sum up my thoughts if I were 25% more pessimistic. The film has an intriguing plot and a very rich environment – we see the various shades of Rio such as the more upmarket fancy-pants locations and the contrasting seaside marketplace, with a variety of characters for the detectives to interview. There are several subplots to spice things up: the story is set against a background of a slavery abolitionist group trying to get their plans underway, Sherlock enters a romantic relationship with a young actress, and the Brazilian police force have a prejudice against Holmes for taking over their duties. The problem? None of it actually goes anywhere.<\/em> It slumps a little in places and in others it’s truly engaging, but then the story comes to an abrupt conclusion and is left to linger for a final fifteen minutes, and I’m left with an unfortunate feeling of “what was the point?”<\/p>\n

For instance, when Holmes first interviews the emperor, there’s a running gag of him pacing the room theatrically and accidentally knocking his priceless antiques over in a very Clouseau-like manner, and since it’s one of the first instances of proper comedy in the movie (there’s a language joke earlier on involving French swear words, but that’s really only amusing to dorky people like me)<\/span>, it’s a decent laugh. And then that element of Holmes is never played up again. There are a lot of jokes that you almost feel will become relevant in some manner later on, but the likes of Holmes partaking in cannabis and admitting that he’s a virgin… they don’t actually contribute anything, they’re just there. Over halfway through a public display of affection between Holmes and his lady friend lands him in jail by an overzealous police officer, and one gets the impression this could be a turning point in both Sherlock’s interaction with the Brazilian police and also maybe act as a source of clues on who the murder suspect is. Instead Watson and the Portuguese detective arrive before he gets thrown in a cell and he’s allowed out, and that’s it. It adds nothing to the story and although the basic idea that he’s arrested for snogging in public is amusing, it’s not taken advantage of to a decent extent.<\/p>\n

There are several jokes like that. Watson visits a barber so he can get a shave and a haircut, but doesn’t know a word of Portuguese. He’s told how to say “beard and hair” in the language and is told to go in alone, and results in a brief argument with a barber who can’t tell if he just wants his hair styled or cut off but can get no further elaboration out of the Englishman. It’s pretty weak. The very final ‘joke’ is that Holmes and his actress friend say their emotional kissy goodbyes in an empty theatre on stage behind the curtains, which an unseen stagehand raises, causing them to look out in alarm. Is there a joke that there is, in fact, a large audience watching them get all smoochy-style? Is there a joke that this otherwise private moment is now made public to the stagehand? We can’t tell, because it just cuts to the pier immediately after. It’s like they had an idea for a joke, but never bothered filming it.<\/p>\n

I know I come across as very negative, but I won’t deny that I enjoyed watching it. As I said, it’s an engaging (if rather corny) plot, and when the humour is good, it’s good<\/strong>. There’s a fantastic scene in the morgue where Holmes inspects the organs of a murder victim and deduces that the killer pulled out her heart and rubbed it against his beard (why? why not?<\/em>)<\/span>, and the father of the victim comes in crying his eyes out. Holmes, Watson, the detective and the mortician end up having to hide the girl’s liver from him by passing it to each other than they least expect it, getting it in their faces and on their coats, all unnoticed by the father… until Watson, in English, says to him “I believe this belongs to you” <\/em>before dumping it in his hands and scurrying away. Definitely worth watching for that scene alone.<\/p>\n

I think one of the issues with the film is that it doesn’t appear quite sure of what it is. It comes across as a serious and intriguing historical murder mystery at the start, but it’s not until half an hour in before it begins to imply that it’s a comedy, and then the comedy takes over so much it’s hard to realise there’s even a murder mystery behind it all, before becoming starkly serious in the final twenty minutes and leaving the audience with a rather disheartening ending. It has a running time of two hours but it never feels sluggish – there are scenes that are pointless, yes, but it keeps a steady and entertaining pace, though I get the impression that there was a lot of content they left on the cutting room floor that would have tied things together a lot more nicely. Instead, the remnants of what we get come across as awkward and out of left field.<\/p>\n

The fifth-to-last scene is Sherlock attending a Nubian spiritual festival and undergoes a ritual that declares his spiritual guide to be Xango. While this does clarify the title of the movie, what is the point of the scene? The spiritual side of the Nubian folk isn’t even discussed before this scene, and outside of a needlessly lengthy scene where Watson is possessed by a god and basically spells out that the real killer has been in their sights the whole time, it doesn’t add anything. The movie is based off a book that I imagine expands on these elements a little more (though this review<\/a> implies it focuses more on Sherlock’s sexual misadventures, which is a mighty fine turn-off)<\/span>, but it’s just an awkward scene altogether. It doesn’t help there’s a character in that scene who shows up as a head on the platter in the next, causing me to boggle over the logistics of that, like how far the two areas are from each other, what time lapse there was between the scenes and all kinds of frustrating details.<\/p>\n

It’s a very frustrating ending.<\/p>\n

Again, I try and reinforce my point – I relatively enjoyed it. I wasn’t expecting much, but I got a good story, some corny jokes and a surprisingly intriguing little movie. The ending is just where it gets iffy – the case is solved in the sense that they get the violin back and find out how the murderer operated, but only one of the murders is prevented and the empress is among the deceased, leaving everyone a bit bummed. The stringless violin does serve as a trophy of the one mystery Sherlock couldn’t solve, which I guess is rather poignant… until he then decides to unintentionally unleash Jack the Ripper upon London by inviting the murderer along. He didn’t know<\/em> he was the murderer, but what’s’s formerly a fun and lightweight movie kind of becomes an exercise in making everyone’s life a misery by the end of its running time. It’s certainly a twist, but the movie is already rife with mood whiplash beforehand, and that swerve just sails the deal.<\/p>\n

I’m sure Sherlock Holmes<\/em> fanatics will find it an insult to the franchise due to the characters’ wacky antics, but I’d dare say it’s an entertaining if seriously lowbrow romp. Just don’t expect a happy ending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watched O Zango de Baker Street, or The Portuguese Sherlock Holmes as my dad and I decided to dub it. Being a foreign film that I don’t think has even had an official DVD release over here, I had absolutely no expectations aside from maybe a dude in a deer hunting hat showing up. It’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[7,6],"class_list":["post-81","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-movie","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomhoohaas.flyingomelette.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}