The trailers were HOW loud?

My new essay went up on Storytellers Unplugged over the weekend. It’s called Promotional Consideration.

We went to see Sherlock Holmes 2 yesterday. Other than the one for Iron Lady, the trailers had one thing in common: they were all really freakin’ loud. I could feel my chest compress and my ribs vibrate. These included trailers for John Carter, Battleship, G.I. Joe and the new Dark Knight flick.

As for the Holmes film, it was very much in keeping with its predecessor. I mourned the fact that Irene Adler wasn’t in it for long, but as soon as Mycroft mentioned Reichenbach Falls, I knew where the story was heading ultimately. Jared Harris (Mad Men) makes a good Moriarty, especially given the fact that we really know very little about Holmes’s nemesis from the books. I liked Kelly Reilly as Mrs. Watson—we had just seen a much younger version of her in an episode of Prime Suspect a few days ago. Naoomi Rapace, the girl who does various things in Swedish movies, is appropriately exotic in her role as a gypsy leader. Stephen Fry has a lot of fun as Mycroft, though I could have done without the partial monty! The movie had lots of explosions and luxuriated in some Matrix-style stop motion during one scene that featured a lot of armaments that seemed a tad unnecessary. They played around with the gimmick from the first film where Holmes maps out his strategy step-by-step for the audience and then executes it. Only the first instance of this works out as planned. Other things intervene in the second and third instance. The bit with Holmes on the pony was a little over the top, played too long to remain funny, and yet it somehow still was. Holmes’s experiments with urban camouflage were funny, and the movie did really play fair with things that were relied upon late in the story. If forced to take a stand, I would say it was not quite as good as the first film simply because the first film introduced us to this rebooted version of the characters, so it was new and fresh and this one was, in a way, more of the same. Still enjoyed it, though.

I was a little disappointed and surprised by how Survivor turned out. I was rooting for Ozzy, but the writing was on the wall when he didn’t win that final immunity challenge. Coach led us (and him) along with his ideal of taking a worthy opponent to the end, but the reality was it was about $1 million and anyone would be crazy to take Ozzy along when most of the jury is composed of his former tribemates. Glad to see he didn’t go home empty handed after all. I didn’t see who voted how, but I suspect that Coach lost the game when Sophie revealed the fake-out with the hidden immunity idol. Brandon was astonished, and he may have switched from Coach to her after that news. Dawn sort of foreshadowed the winner during her questioning, but I was still hoping for Coach, because he played a more consistent and visible game than the other two. I predicted that there would be no votes for Albert. At least I got that right, I think. For the first time, I felt a little sorry for Brandon when I heard about the sort of reaction he got from his family after he went home. The premise for the next series is interesting: two tribes battling each other but living in the same space.

I’m not a big fan of amnesia plots. They did one on The Mentalist last week and it was sort of an iffy proposition. They turned Patrick back into a thief and a con, which makes it hard to remain sympathetic with him. Even Cho noted that Patrick was a better person after his family died. Kudos to Cho for trying to fake Patrick out by lying to him about how enthusiastic he was about tedious police work. “That’s one of your favorite parts of the job,” he deadpanned.

I think American Horror Story is turning into Beetlejuice. All they need to do is kill off one more cast member and they’ll have the whole happy family living (so to speak) under one roof again.

An intriguing ending to the season of Burn Notice. How will Michael react now that Fi is in custody? Does he immediately take out Anson, who no longer has anything to hold over him, or does he turn Anson into an ally of sorts? Just when you think they might run out of ways to keep the gang of merry spies off balance, they come up with another twist.

Speaking of twists, Dexter finally got around to introducing a story element that has been in the novels since the end of the first book, though in the strangest way possible. For people who haven’t read the books, the first one is much like the first season, the one about the ice truck killer, except for two things. In the book, Dexter’s brother gets away and Deb finds out the truth about who Dexter is. Now on the TV series, it looks like the same thing is true, though we don’t yet know how that will play out. The big difference, though, is that Deb has just come to the realization that she’s in love with Dexter (they aren’t biologically related, after all) and is preparing herself to announce this to him to see how he will react, when she catches him in the midst of a kill. Granted, he could say that he went off the deep end because Travis kidnapped Harrison, but it’s all going to look to slick, the way he has his kill room set up and all. I’ll be very interested to see how they play this out next season. All in all, I found this season a little lackluster and unfocused. What was the deal with the ice truck killer’s hand, for example? What did the guy inscribe on its hand and what will it mean when Dexter ultimately finds it in his house? And how will Deb close this case and get all those murders off her open/unsolved list? LaGuerta was the most unstable character of all this season, which is saying something when you also have Quinn derelicting his duties right and left. Still, a mediocre season of Dexter is better than most other shows on the tube.