L.'s challenge

Alright. The time has arrived for L.'s challenge. To remind y'all, my charge is to connect a personal experience on a trampoline to any of Quentin Tarantino's films in three paragraphs. And I will vanquish this worthy adversary. Oh yes. She is a wily opponent, but she shall fall in the end. Wow. Apparently, red wine makes me talk like Athos from The Three Musketeers.

Shall we begin?

The last time I jumped on a large trampoline was at a summer cabin owned by my father's boss. Said boss always dressed like someone from the past. To be more precise, he looked like a guy straight out of the 1950s. He could've easily been thrown into a Grease revival. He wore black polyester pants and white muscle shirts, and sported slicked back hair.

That reminds me of Pam Grier, who was featured in Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Grier had achieved success starring in blaxploitation films in the 1970s, but her starring role in 1997's Jackie Brown marked a major comeback in her career. So, like my father's boss' mode of dress, Grier's career seemed stuck in the past until she appeared in Tarantino's film.

(Dang. I need a third paragraph to complete the challenge. Here goes nothing.) The eponymous character Jackie Brown* reminds me of another Tarantino film, Reservoir Dogs. In it, Tarantino plays Mr. Brown, whose last name is shared with Grier's character.

*On an interesting side note for the cinephiles, the film Jackie Brown was based on Elmore Leonard's book Rum Punch. In the book, the lead character is named Jackie Burke, but Tarantino changed it to Jackie Brown as an homage to one of Grier's earlier films, Foxy Brown (1974).

Elementary, my dear Ritchie!

I saw Sherlock Holmes the other night, and it was just ok. Maybe I was surly because I was up past my bedtime. Or perhaps I'm unprepared for such a physical version of Holmes. I know that several of his stories mention Holmes' proficiency in boxing, martial arts, and other fighting skills, but only small amounts of text are devoted to actual combat. I mean, Holmes also habitually used cocaine and occasionally used morphine, but the new interpretation doesn’t feature Holmes in a cocaine-fueled stupor.

Guy Ritchie is a heavy-handed presence in some parts of the movie. For instance, the scenes wherein Holmes mentally rehearses his fight moves before executing them in rapid-fire motion are highly reminiscent of Ritchie’s earlier works, such as Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. This way of visually representing Holmes’ thought processes is effective the first time, but it becomes stale and contrived after about the third or fourth repetition.

Certain elements of the movie worked for me. The witty dialogue was still there, and the dynamic between Holmes and Jude Law's Watson was particularly endearing. At times, they ventured into old-married-couple land and at other times, they seemed like two hormone-drenched adolescents trying to aggravate each other. They may bicker, but they can’t imagine a world without the other.

The upshot is that because I don’t see movies in the theater very often, I expect sheer awesomeness when I do plunk down my hard-earned dollars. For some people, SH would’ve provided that, but for me, the steady stream of fighting, ships crashing into the Thames, and orchestrated explosions eclipsed the substance of the tale.