f13.net

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,536643,00.html

 :awesome_for_real:

Stupid.

I mean you posting it, or even reading Fox news.

The bar is lowered so positively low that neither Hollywood nor Fox could ever surprise me.

That can't be real. Please god tell me that's a joke.

1. At no point did RDJ or Law say it had anything to do with homosexuality.

2.
I don't know of ANY straight men, women, gays, etc that WOULDN'T want to see that. It's fucking Jude Law and RDJ. It might not be HOT to half of them but it's certainly not going to turn away anyone. And it's DEFINITELY not going to lower the box office draw by 2/3rds. Rather, it'll probably raise it by at least that much. People are retarded.

I know a fuckton of people that wouldn't want to see two dudes making out.  What utopia of prejudice are you living in?


Edit:  Oh right.  Texas.  A veritable hotbed of tolerance.

I'm a pretty big fan of gay people not being gay in my immediate vicinity, but I'd watch jude law and RDJ make out for the lulz.
Edit: that being said, I'd much rather have a non-homo sherlock holmes adventure to watch come xmas.

You didn't even read the article. People are just making shit up. He said:

At what point does that say "watch us assfuck?"

Nobody said they were making a homosexual bareback gangbang flick.  They reported that there was a gay "vibe" or undertone to the movie.

I don't care in the least, in the abstract sense, if men in movies make out.  Depending on the movie, it may add to or detract from overall quality.

What I do care about is turning a character gay that was never, ever portrayed that way merely for shock value.  I love the Holmes stories (my edition of the stories, printed exactly as they appeared  in the Strand Magazine, is my favorite and most precious book), and if he had started out gay in them, fine.  But don't change things just to be edgy and 2009.  

Hear, hear!

This movie is NOTHING LIKE THE BOOKS, GAY OR NOT, what the hell are you even doing looking for information on it - YE, THE SELF-PROCLAIMED WHITE-KNIGHT PURIST?

 :heart:

God I love the internet.

So what is the Fox film that they are trying to sink this one for? They've copied it around every single News International web imprint. Google the quote and you'll get an idea. That's exactly the sort of double entendre that you expect RDj to say with a twinkle in his eye. Holmes & Watson aren't going to be gay for each other - they'll do exactly as described - wrestle and share somewhere to sleep. Expect Guy Ritchie or the studio to make a statement some time in the next day or too to prevent gay fearing America from condemning the movie based on a Screws of the World misrepresentation of RDj humor.

Not that I need Holmes to be an 'active homosexual', but aren't there various interpretations of Holmes as, at the very least, a closeted homosexual? I thought it always added to Holmes' intensity that he could never really express himself in Victorian England (or was it Edwardian by then?) and his sublimated sexuality lent energy to his persuit of Moriarty.

Watson, on the other hand, has never been portrayed as even remotely gay to my knowledge, so the project seems a bit off.

Except that the project almost certainly isn't gay, and is just what Righ said above, with Tri obediently propagating.

Marketing is fun.

Wasn't really talking about this project specifically. I was more addressing Tri's outrage at a Holmes being portrayed as gay 'for shock value'.

RDJ is probably hamming it up to get Fox News air time but would it be so terrible to have a Holmes that does let his hair down?

It would probably tend towards the childish fanfic for me, especially if it included Watson, because I can't see how Holmes being explicitly gay either:

A: Relates to Holmes as he is in the books.

or

B: Develops anything interesting about Holmes, the series of books, sexual identity, etc.

Holmes is plenty interesting enough with his obsessive behaviour, drug addictions, arrogant arsehole attitude and so forth without having to make him explicitly homosexual. I would tend to think that those taking it in that direction would be making less of him, not more.

It could probably be done well and interestingly, but I don't think it would.

I swear gay stopped being 'edgy' a while ago.

Fox News edges closer to http://www.landoverbaptist.org/

That site has to be a troll...

It is mostly a pastiche of sites like the Westboro Baptist Church (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westboro_Baptist_Church). I won't link to their own sites as they don't deserve the hits but here's a work safe demonstration of the crazy (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/4678943/Westboro-Baptist-Church-justifies-UK-picket.html).

No different than Hamlet making out with his mother.  I can see Holmes as gay.  As long as they the keep it Fraiser-level gay, I wouldn't mind watching.

Holmes isn't a bare-chested action hero in the stories, either. Which it appears he'll be in the film. But god forbid an old cultural property get reinterpreted. You probably hate The Seven-Percent Solution as well? There's plenty in there that's not in the original stories, but it's a brilliant take on Holmes nevertheless.

Among the clever things in that reinterpretation is some thinking about Holmes' sexuality. Which in the original stories is pretty non-existent: he's palpably uninterested in women. If I had to pick a 19th-early 20th Cent. pop culture icon that someone could make a reasonable argument was closeted or had had some kind of sexual relationship with a man, Holmes would be pretty high on the list.

(http://livedesignonline.com/theatre/ACCENT.jpg)

Guy Richie is directing. Haven't seen all his films, but the ones I have I can't think of a gay character in them.

But it is RDJ. He can play any role he damn well wants.

Isn't Holmes the deifinitive asexual and despite Watson's obvious mancrush on him isn't Watson interested in the ladies?

Watson is married at some point in the original stories, though the details are kind of fuzzy and contradictory: Doyle wasn't terribly interested in continuity. (Holmes is in some respects the original serial pulp/comic book character, complete with 'if you don't see the body, he's not really dead' comeback.)

Holmes' asexuality arguably is of a piece with Doyle's portrayal of him as intellectual, ascetic, obsessive. But some of the details of the Doyle stories look pretty different from a contemporary perspective, such as (most prominently) Holmes' cocaine use, which is a central part of The Seven-Percent Solution. Cocaine was a pretty new thing at that point, and thought by many to be pretty innocuous: Doyle probably had no intent to suggest Holmes was an addict.

For the same reason, it's perfectly plausible to look at Holmes' "asexuality" and think about it a bit. For one, quite a few prominent Victorian and Edwardian men in the US and UK had sex of some kind with other men without being what we'd think of as gay: it was a pretty common thing in elite boarding schools, the military, ship crews, etc. But men who retained a preference for other men outside of those contexts were generally really deeply closeted, Oscar Wilde notwithstanding (and demonstrating why men who were did stay closeted). You're never going to find an explicitly gay popular culture figure in late 19th C. British fiction for that reason. If you compare Holmes with an overtly heterosexual pop cultural figure like Tarzan, who comes along a bit later, his "asexuality" looks pretty distinctive.

Drug abuse? Obsessed? I think I need to pick up some Holmes books. Sounds pretty awesome.

Also, I'm so Canadian that the minute I saw "holmes" I thought of...

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/41161/Images/holmes.jpg)

A pretty good essay on Holmes' cocaine use: http://www.bakerstreetdozen.com/coca.html

Holmes's complete lack of interest in Women, even when in the context of the story they are described as everything an enlightened 19th century Englishman would want and are throwing themselves at him (in a reserved Victorian way of course) had led to speculation that Holmes was gay a LONG time ago.

I'm pretty sure I had this conversation in an English Lit class 15 years ago.

Are we trying to out a fictional character? I'm just making sure.

It's RDJ playing with words, I agree.

FOX has obviously never been to the manga section of a bookstore.  Straight women are fucking crazy about Yaoi.  As much as men are about lesbian lovers that want to do them.  Maybe moreso.

Make one of the participants Robert Downey, Jr.?  Oh yeah.  I think even I wouldn't mind seeing RDJ in this non-existant scene.  The dude is hot and an amazing actor.  He'd make it something I want to see.  I think it'd be something my mom would want to see.

Tri, you've made some posts that make me scratch my head at times, but this one is just blindingly stupid. Not only do you link to the bastion of journalistic hackery, you actually follow the tortured line of anti-logic your original link posited to its fullest conclusion at the corner of Retard and Moron?

Some points

1. RDJ was fucking around with words, this is clear.
2. If it were true and there were actual gay undertones I believe it would indeed put off more people than attract.
3. Fox is a bunch of hacks.
4. Sherlock Holmes could have been gay and Spongebob could be into BDSM but you know what? It's never addressed in the fiction so it doesn't matter. 

I thought this was a thread about Hannity & Colmes and/or that Hannity had finally come out of the closet.

Didn't Robert Downey Jr. already make that movie? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xdtj0njD_5Q)

So, if someone wants to make a film with some suggestions that Sherlock Holmes had sexual feelings for Watson, well, so what? Why does it affect you? Why does it bother you? If you don't want to watch it, then don't.

Are you suggesting they should be prevented from making such a film? No, that would be ridiculous. There are 100's of films released every year that I have absolutely no interest in seeing and I have access to a fantastic plethora of ways of finding out what films I *might* be interested in. It's rare that I find myself watching a film that I utterly hate and when I do I can always walk out of the cinema or turn the DVD off.

But to rant about every one of the romcoms or kids TV tie-ins or crappy vehicles for talentless Hollywood "actors" would be stupid and pointless, unless I had some kind of axe to grind, or prejudice to air. Just saying.

For me, its because I did want to watch a Robert Downey Jr flick directed by Guy Ritchie. Now, if RDJ wasn't kidding and was really alluding to some sort of homosexual underpinnings in the relationship between him and Watson, its suddenly something I'm not as excited to see. So, ya, there's an emotional reaction there. I was excited. Now I'm disappointed. That's how it affects me.

Try being less of a pussy, maybe?

Uh. What?

You are suddenly emotionally involved because there might be some gay underpinnings between Watson and Holmes. That's absolutely ridiculous.

It would seem to me that you're exactly the type of pussy-footed mass-marketed consumer that Fox is trying to make question their need to see a movie that will kickass.

Action flick involving RDJ and Guy Ritchie and Sherlock Holmes sounded like a bad ass movie that I got a bit excited about. Watching a homosexual relationship on any level develop on screen between Holmes and Watson gives me almost the opposite reaction. Mixing the two makes me overall less interested in seeing it. Those are all emotional reactions. These aren't violent emotional reactions that have me all raged out or anything. They're just "Yay" followed by "Oh... ehh... maybe not so much". Still... technically emotional reactions. But not in the extreme that you're trying to make them.

If you need further explanation, or would like to wrongly accuse me of any sort of anti-homosexual views or opinions, please feel free to ask me my stance on these issues and I'll gladly lay them out for you so that you can make more informed judgments of my character instead of completely uninformed accusations. You haven't asked, so you don't know. I also imagine you're not really interested, but I figured I'd throw the offer out there anyways.

I'm not really interested in your views or a semantic argument about emotive response.

But even for a moment, if you think Guy Ritchie - no matter what is (or in this case ISN'T) said in the press - will make a movie with some deeper meaning, you're crazy. That's not the guys bread and butter and he learned that the hard way.

The fact this (once again, probably fake) press actually made an impression on you in any way, like I said, makes you exactly the type of person Fox is targeting.

Most straight guys DON'T want to watch Brokeback Sherlock.  That said, I think it's obvious this movie won't be that.  There will probably be some subtle nods/jokes towards that effect at best.  Straight dudes NOT being pumped about homosexual love affairs unfolding on the silver screen is normal and widespread.  NOT THAT THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT.

Let me put it this way. If you're into looking for subtle homoerotic nods, there's a FUCKLOAD of buddy movies that have a scene or two that can plausibly be read that way. There's a few action flicks that hetero guys who don't want the queer all over them seem to have watched without a clue that they had screaming manjuice oozing from every corner (cf. 300). Or they had a clue and didn't care.

So now we're talking about a reinterpretation of a famous pop culture icon in which he is going to be something he absolutely was not: an action hero with fistfights and explosions galore around him. Ok by me, mind you. And, by the way, there's some provocative let's-get-some-press mindfuckery coming out from RDJ suggesting that maybe they'll do some winking about an aspect of the Holmes stories which savvy people have been winking about for OH SEVENTY YEARS OR SO.

And we get some people saying, "Hey, don't mess with my Holmes stories". Not about the fistfights and explosions, but about the winking, which is more consistent with the original stories by a magnitude more than the action-hero stuff. And we get people saying, "Wow, now I'm less interested, because there will be winking about teh gay, I'll just go watch some cop buddy movies and Star Trek and lots of other stuff where there is no winking about teh gay in the adventures of manly men working in manly ways with each other."

There will be no homosexuality on open display in this movie.  Downey was having fun with words.  They will be some hot women in the movie that either RDJ or Ritchie will bang.  Maybe repeatedly.  That's the only sex there will be.

Yeesh.

Duh.  :drill:

This.

Seriously, I thought the "Holmes sure doesn't seem to care much for the ladies" thing was pretty much mainstream 'duh' at this point.

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

I wanted it to be perfectly clear in case Khaldun's rant upset their emotional investment in it being a movie about manly men doing manly things with manly implements.

This thread is once again a reminder that linking to Fox News only leads to retarded conversations.

Holmes was an obsessive freak. He wanted to be the Ultimate Consulting detective and pored everything into it. When Watson told him once the earth was round he said he would do his best for forget that fact in case it pushed some fact to do with his work out of his head. Anything to  His brother went to a club where nobody talked to one another because it was the only place his razor sharp mind would give him peace. The fact is Sherlock was asexual because anything to do with attraction would have been interfered with what he was obsessed about.

Watson got married in the first series of Novels. That created an awkwardness in the later stories as Watson would have to arrive at Sherlock's at the beginning of a case to write about it, till Doyle finally had him living there again as it was easier, with Sherlock making vague references to Watsons "tragedy." In the time before he "resurrected" Holmes, Doyle gave permission to an author to write a play where Sherlock meets and falls in love with a woman. Doyle didn't seem to care much about it, but the fact he raised no objections at all shows that Sherlock was not overtly gay in his mind. Either way its not an important part of the Holmes character. If your mind wants Holmes in pastels with lavender napkins, its your mind.

To be honest the biggest problem I have with most portrayals of the Holmes-Watson relationship is that Watson has nearly always been portrayed as a complete fool. Watson was NOT a fool. For one thing Holmes would never have stood him if he was, for another he was a Doctor, and Holmes always deferred to Watson in matters of Medicine. Holmes had his craft, Watson had his, and Holmes respected Watson enough in matters of his profession to defer to him.

I'll wait and see about the film. Charlton Heston played Holmes once, and did a pretty good job too if I remember right.

Geek mode off. And please no linking to FOX for gods sake.

Horrid typo aside:

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/articles/1617599/story.jhtml

Holmes having a sex scene AT ALL would be wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong. But I betcha most people going "omg teh gay" wouldn't weep about the INTERGRITY OF TEH ORIGINAL if he was humping a lady in it.

He plays on the undertones most people here agree are present, but there's no brokeback investigating. So all you manly men can rejoice! Hurrah for an unbreakable bond between two men that could be called love, but not real love, cause that's gay.

Bromance is the in thing in movies these days after all.

So too, apparently, is making Holmes a bareknuckle boxer.

lol

Fact? No.

He hated the character and was sick of it all, I wouldn't be surprised if he let someone turn him into an alien or robot either. Doesn't mean that Holmes was heterosexual.

While Watson wasn't a complete fool, he was foolish most of the time.

Watson repeatedly berates Holmes for his drug addictions and other unhealthy habits and Holmes just laughs it off and makes jokes about it. So this "Holmes always deferred to Watson" thing is not at all right. Holmes treated Watson like a pet and looked down on him, as he did everyone.

Watson repeatedly talks of Holmes as never displaying an interest in women (and Watson despairing of it). On the subject of men you don't have much, but it's probably just as reasonable to make suggestions about Holmes being gay as asexual.

How the hell do so much of you know so much about Sherlock fucking Holmes?  I think I read like two of the stories in high school English.  Jesus.

I would.  Its not him, either way.  Lets make Holmes XTREME!!!  I hope they give a few scenes to his equally XTREME dog, Poochie. 

Man, some of you guys hate fun.

Maybe, but he FREAKS THE FUCK OUT when Watson is shot in a way I found really surprising at the time, given what a douchebag Holmes is the rest of the time.

I'm pretty sure that Holmes was a boxer in the books. Quick check produces this conversation between Holmes and Watson:


So probably not bareknucle, but he was quite a physical character. For those interested in the stories: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1661

From IMDB:

"To Sherlock Holmes always 'the woman', the attractive Irene Adler appears in the Sherlock Holmes short story, 'A Scandal in Bohemia'. She is widely regarded as the only woman to outwit Holmes, and for that the detective admires her greatly, keeping a photograph of her to remind him of her 'dubious and questionable memory'. However, it is incredibly unlikely that the sleuth felt 'any emotion akin to love' for Irene. She is deceased by the time Watson prints 'A Scandal in Bohemia'. "

Rachel McAdams is playing Irene - most likely your "love interest" of the movie right there.

The canon boxing reference appears to be:


From The "Gloria Scott" in Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/834/834-h/834-h.htm#2H_4_0004).

Hmmm there was a pretty strong plot point about the secret homosexual desire between two of the leading male roles in RockNRolla. It kind of lends credence that Ritchie will further explore this with the admittedly queer and asexual Holmes.

I'm re-reading the stories myself now. There's another reference to boxing in The Sign of the Four:

Holmes can't be gay. He didn't join the fancy.

Yeah, all he's remembered for are the bible epics and Planet of the Apes, but the guy really was a solid actor.  I also had to respect that although he was the conventional leading man in most ways he also wasn't above character acting.  This is more common now, but that really wasn't the case when he was in his prime.  Yeah, he made some crap, but I think he was just one of those guys who liked working (Michael Caine also springs to mind).

Much love to Chuck.

OMG, this is crazy!  What's next, is someone going to tell me that Dr. Quest and Race Bannon were gay too???

Nonsense!  Sure, there was that time when they were staying in a castle, and had a WHOLE FUCKING EMPTY CASTLE, but shared a room, but that was okay because they had seperate beds.

My grandparents had separate beds...

Heard a good program on the radio extolling Holmes as a perfect character sketch for high-functioning autism, and praising the Holmes-Watson warm friendship for showing that even though seeming cold and distant, autistics are people.

Wish I could remember where I heard it, but can't. And am too terribly lazy to google it.

Every single male character in 300 was flamingly gay.

Jsut thought I'd throw that out.

Why do people keep trolling 300?  Back in those days, giving a sensuous oil massage to the rippling muscalature of another man was like a handshake is today. 

I thought I'd just way in re: Miller's Spartan's making fun of the Athenians for being homos. That bit's actually relatively accurate, as far as the Spartan's were concerned the Athenians were girly gay guys because they enjoyed plays and had love affairs. Sleeping with young boys (which I'm guessing means pre-teens since the Spartans certainly fucked the hell out of their teenage boys) was also generally more acceptable in Athens which the Spartans frowned upon.

Weigh in.

 :facepalm:

Because it was fascist war porn? Anyway, that wasn't the really gay 300 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Band_of_Thebes).