For movie fans everywhere, a lot of the news this month has been about The Force Awakens, the new J.J. Abrams film in the the Star Wars franchise, and the seventh installment in the ongoing story of Jedis, the Dark Side, and a scrappy rebellion that stretches across a galaxy. But if the film itself is news — and after the execrable three prequels that were foisted on eager fans over the last decade or so, any Star Wars film that isn’t utter schlock is news most welcome — the month has also been remarkable for what didn’t happen. Spoiler alert: we avoided the spoilers.
It says a lot about fans’ respect for the Star Wars experience that I was able to head out to a screening on a Sunday night, several days after the film had opened, without knowing very much about it beyond the few trailers I’d seen online.
While there was no Twitter or Facebook around when we found out that Darth Vader was Luke’s dad (does that still need a spoiler alert? Sorry!), it seemed inevitable to me, today, that even without trying I’d stumble across some bombshell in an errant retweet or share — that the new villain, for instance, was actually three sloths standing on each other’s shoulders and wrapped in a black cloak. Instead, there was dead air — no one wanted to be the terrible person that gave it away.
(Ironically, the one place I later learned had published a massive spoiler was a much more old- fashioned concern: the comics page in the New York Daily News featured a one-panel strip that quite plainly spilled one of the film’s biggest secrets two days before the opening). And so I, too, will keep quiet about The Force Awakens, except to say that it was certainly worth seeing, and especially so for Star Wars fans still trying to rinse away the aftertaste of those prequels.
Abrams’ new film might not be the most groundbreaking in the series, and certainly has its share of flaws, but it is a welcome return to a world we had almost let slip away. If you care about that world at all, go see it before someone assumes you already have, and starts talking.
As it happened, I ran across another childhood hero when I went to get my Star Wars fix; in the lobby was a poster for The Abominable Bride, a new feature-length Sherlock Holmes film, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman of the fantastic BBC series Sherlock.
Hitting area screens (including Cinemark theaters in the Hadley and Springfield areas) on Jan. 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m., the new film has a bit of a twist: while the BBC series has become famous for setting Sherlock in modern-day London — much of his sleuthing is done via cell phone these days — the film special will relocate the duo to 19th-century London. There, they investigate the strange case of an apparition — a murderous bride back from the dead in her own wedding gown, her face covered by a large cloth — who is killing men in the streets.
For fans of Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories have always been the base on which a wide variety of portrayals has been based. Indeed, when the Guinness World Records named Holmes the most portrayed literary human character in film and TV a few years ago, he had by their reckoning beaten out Hamlet by about 50 roles.
And yet the notion of Holmes never gets tired; like Shakespeare’s great Dane, he has become a bottomless vessel for actors to pour themselves into. Cumberbatch is among the finest to don the deerstalker cap; for those who found the modern day Holmes too much of a change, The Abominable Bride offers a rare chance to see a Holmes for the ages in the age of his own.•
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
