Word: sleuth
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...consecutive weeks back in December 1972, the Palomar production company and 20th Century-Fox teamed to release two films: Sleuth and The Heartbreak Kid. Now, on consecutive weekends in October 2007, come remakes of those movies. As it happens, the original Sleuth and Heartbreak were smart and funny and took a fairly brutal view of their main characters. The remakes, though honoring the basic plots of their predecessors, are dumb, witless and humiliating to all parties...
...simple blacks and whites, how everything then was better than anything now, etc. etc. That alterkocker argument might be made to apply to the Farrelly brothers' dumb-down of the Neil Simon-Elaine May Heartbreak Kid, which I was unkind to last week. But it doesn't work on Sleuth, an art-house effort with more modest box office aspirations, a much loftier collection of talent, on and off screen - and, you'd think, an unwreckable scenario...
Within that exclusive group of literary characters who have survived through the centuries - from Hercules to Hamlet to Huckleberry Finn - few can rival the cultural impact or staying power of that brilliant sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. Since his debut 120 years ago, the gaunt gentleman with the curved pipe and a taste for cocaine, the master of deductive reasoning and elaborate disguise, has left his mark everywhere - in crime literature, film and television, cartoons and comic books. Even his home on Baker Street has for decades been one of London's most popular tourist destinations: the Sherlock Holmes Museum...
...cornering of the evil genius. That should give The Kingdom mass-audience appeal as a retro-fantasy of American grit and smarts, culminating in politico-military triumph. Who needs a stalled, baffled, exhausted Army when our four globetrotting, gun-toting crime-solvers can be sent to the scene to sleuth out and wipe out the bad guys...
Indeed, Bruguiere has over the years become a recognizable icon in the world of international counter-terrorism: the dapper, pipe-smoking, sleuth whose doggedness and efficiency hunting terror masterminds forced him to pack a Magnum to fend off attacks on his own life. (In recent years, he's swapped the gun for round-the-clock bodyguards, although the nickname it earned him, "The Sheriff," has stuck.) He was known as a hands-on investigator who would literally picked through wreckage of a downed airliner, or rent a boat to enter Libya to investigate the agents he accused of blowing...