Moments of madness

Apropos of nothing, the other day a colleague, who also lives in West Seattle, asked me to feed his dog and watch his house when he and his partner go out of town in a few weeks.

Colleague: We're heading to the Olympics that weekend.
Me: Fun, are you guys camping?
Colleague: What? Camping? Oh my God, no! We're gay men!
Me: Oh, so you're staying at a resort?
Colleague: Resort? Nooooo. Way too expensive, especially with everything going on.
Me: Wait, so it's a day trip? Why do you need someone to watch the house and dog?
Colleague: We'll be staying with family.
Me: Oh, I didn't realize you had family out there.
Colleague: We do. But we'll be out seeing the sights most of the time . . .
Me: Yeah, there are some good hiking trails. Bit late in the season, though, isn't it?

Whereupon we realized we were having two very different conversations.

In catch-up news, I saw the new Sherlock Holmes with an old friend the afternoon of New Year's Eve. (I vividly recall reading trading the Sherlock Holmes books with her and reading them during boring documentaries shown in our middle school science classes. Future humanities nerds, indeed.)

At any rate, it was fun. I liked the quirky, edgy, disturbed-genius characterization of Holmes himself. In most cases, movies that stray from the books are not exceptionally brilliant, but I liked it here. Holmes wasn't the cold, calculating, sterile brainiac we're all familiar with from the books and other adaptations -- Robert Downey, Jr. portrayed him as a borderline OCD nutso. That part was fun.

The plot was eh. Most of it was predictable: secret society (this time not the Masons) uses "magic" and murder to try and take over the world. Holmes and Watson sweep in to restore reason, thinking, and sanity. What was cool was the re-creation of London and some of the action sequences.

What I didn't like was Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler. In almost a hundred years of film, have we seriously gotten no further than the Perils of Pauline?