In Which We Perform An Operation On Doctor Strange

You Would Have Done It So Easy

by ETHAN PETERSON

Doctor Strange
dir. Scott Derrickson
115 minutes

Everyone in Doctor Strange is extremely cognizant of Dr. Stephen Strange's white privilege. The Ancient One (Tilda Swinton) is overly contemptuous of the knowledge Strange presumes as a neurosurgeon. "There is no such thing as a spirit," Strange proclaims to her, touching her chest with his hand. Strictly speaking, he tells the truth — magic in Doctor Strange consists of hand-to-hand combat at a slightly quickly pace. When the characters enter The Mirror Dimension, they move slightly quicker and everything looks like an M.C. Escher drawing. But they still fight each other as men and women do.

Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) is a talented surgeon whose hands are destroyed in a car crash. When he wakes up, his ex-lover and colleague Christine (a pert looking Rachael McAdams) explains that no one could have fixed his digits to the point where he would be allowed to continue performing surgeries. "I could have," he tells her, and then passes out from the extreme trauma of his ordeal.

He is a serious dick after this to everyone, but not exactly as bad as he could have been. He blows through all of his savings looking for a cure, to the point where he is unable to pay the mortgage on a glitzy condo. He finally meets up with Benjamin Bratt on a basketball court, who tells him to head to Nepal.

The next forty minutes of Doctor Strange takes place in Nepal without featuring a single individual from that country, which has to be some kind of record. Swinton runs a cute retreat there, with fully featured wifi and an incredible library. The most dangerous books in the facility are held against the wall by chains for some reason. It is a symbolic imprisonment that parallels the weight of the knowledge they hold.

Slowly, Dr. Strange becomes substantially more attracted to Tilda Swinton than his old girlfriend, who took care of him. Doctor Strange implies that we should be contemptuous of those who tell us how to help ourselves, and treasure more direct aid. When Strange returns to Christine, she moves in for a soft kiss, but he tells her that he has to go away. He can't bear to even look at her. 

Kaecilius (Mads Mikkelsen) is the kind of patient villain who is always explaining his point of view. He seems strangely sympathetic by the end, reducing the weak plot of Doctor Strange to an internecine struggle between coteries within the same discipline. Cumberbatch gets a lot of scenes with Karl (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Ejiofor is not really suited to this lame sidekick role and he and Cumberbatch have about zero chemistry together.

After its bravura opening, Doctor Strange turns into a slog, an impressive feat considering the movie is well short of two hours long. Strange's powers mostly consist of projecting green and orange circles at his opponents, and sometimes toying with time. Both are among the most basic tricks that a wizard can master, and really don't come across as all that eye-popping. Inexperienced director Scott Derrickson seems overwhelmed by the material, and his action scenes are frequently confusing but never pleasantly surprising.

All the emotional parts of Doctor Strange happen in the first thirty minutes of the film. After that, nothing is the least bit consequential, especially after Tilda Swinton has a long talk about how many different universes there are. If so many outcomes are indeed possible, then it is hard to care about any singular one. Kaecilius destroys an important building in Hong Kong, so Strange rewinds time and tries to prevent it.  

Eventually he meets a purple head in another dimension with whom there is no reasoning. This is a prescient metaphor for our current president-elect, or maybe just terrible storytelling. I couldn't tell which.

Ethan Peterson is the reviews editor of This Recording.

In Which Alan Turing Comes Across As Gay In Name Only

Sweetums and Gonzo the Great

by ALEX CARNEVALE

The Imitation Game
dir. Morten Tyldum
114 minutes

The most important thing about telling the life story of any gay man is to never show a penis. Alan Turing presumably had a penis, but we will never really know. Benedict Cumberbatch refused to do full frontal in his role as Turing in The Imitation Game, causing the film's most important scene - the one where he penetrates a code-breaking computer he has named Christopher with the precision head of his Dr. Pepper - to be left on the cutting room floor.

Instead of showing Turing's relationships with men as an adult, The Imitation Game settles for depicting an innocent crush he had on a classmate as a boy. When the object of his affection drops dead of tuberculosis, Turing is briefly upset. Gay relationships are still only palatable if they are completely unrequited, making The Imitation Game the most cowardly biopic in history.

After his codebreaking days in World War II ended, Turing cruised a local bar for a hot bang. This would be a fascinating moment to depict on film, but instead all the exciting parts of The Imitation Game happen offscreen or in montage. The movie has about as much respect for its subject as Angelina Jolie does for the Japanese.

Cumberbatch's spastic overacting reaches a nadir here. The newly engaged actor is fun to watch at times, particularly when he is shaking and crying as he jogs around the small English village that serves as The Imitation Game's main set. Director Morten Tyldum falls on his face by never giving him much to do - Benedict even wears the same fucking outfit for the duration.

Although the period sets are great fun - U-boats steaming through the water, children donning gas masks after the bombing of London - the larger costume design of The Imitation Game is tragically boring, along with pretty much everything else in it.

We never even see Turing with his shirt off: he's one of the good, non-threatening homosexuals, you see. After a police officer terms Turing a "poofter", a man in the audience loudly whispered to his wife, "He's a gay" so that she would funderstand the rest of the movie.

Despite his devotion to never being with a woman in that way, Turing asks Joan (Keira Knightley) to marry him so she can help him crack the German code machine and finish the Nazis off. Because her teeth look like hot garbage and she has little in the way of other options, she agrees. He ties up a piece of twine and presents it to her as a ring. Even though he never kisses or touches Keira, her knowledge of his sexuality never goes beyond, "Alan's a bit strange."

Turing's death was quite poetic, but The Imitation Game does not show that part of Alan's story either. Instead it focuses on a dogshit voiceover; by the end the film is scrolling text across the screen that reads, "Today, we call them computers," treating its audience as a bunch of six year olds. The Imitation Game seems intent on driving anything the slightest bit controversial or unflattering out of the man's story, so much so that I feel I will never know whether or not Alan is a top or a bottom.

As to what actually constituted Alan Turing's genius, The Imitation Game never seems overly concerned with that. It seems he was very good at crossword puzzles. He puts one in a newspaper in order to attract codebreakers, which is how Knightley comes into his life originally. (She has never met a dentist, at least not one she likes.) Those revolting dark eyebrows make her look slightly insane. They should never have allowed Keira to appear onscreen looking like Sweetums from the Muppets.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording.

In Which We Boomerang Across The Pond

Uncle Sleuth

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Sherlock
creators Steven Moffat & Mark Gatiss

The detective work of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC's version of the character is only impressive if you have never seen House or CSI, even once accidentally while waiting for something else to come on. "Noises can tell you everything," the sleuth opines, and somehow everyone around him resists vomiting in their tea. Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes treats women as if they were mentally disabled idiots incapable of understanding the logic (of noises). If Holmes treated people this way in America, he'd be qualified for the Republican presidential nomination. For christ's sake, the man smokes indoors.

Bringing this UK icon "into the 21st century" actually consists of bringing it into the late 1990s. This younger Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is barely aware of what a blog is, even though it is the major source of his notoriety. Holmes reads the newspaper every morning like a 60 year old retiree, wakes up in a bathrobe and has a servant, even though he lives in a shitty Baker Street apartment. When he is abducted to Buckingham Palace, Holmes refuses to put on clothes, but he is still super impressed: he becomes so giddy he steals an ashtray as a memento. This Sherlock is about as modern as the Queen's corgis.

There is a certain Luddite sensibility to Sherlock. Sure, Watson (Martin Freeman) uses a computer, but (1) he appears to be running Windows Vista and (2) he doesn't use much more than the thing's webcam and google search. In fact, Sherlock focuses on the insights that man can achieve without a computer, which is merely another tool in his psychic arsenal. While in a literary sense this assertion might be slightly plausible, in the real world detective work without forensics, computer science and DNA testing is about as likely as a grown man with an ex-military manservant.

To solve the crucial riddle of the show's second season premiere, Sherlock Holmes merely has to input a four character code into a mobile phone. Deciphering such a problem would merely be minutes in the life of any decent cryptographer or tattoed waif, but it takes Holmes the entire episode. Unless he is merely dragging it out to be dramatic, the display of his intuitive abilities is underwhelming at best, criminally negligent at worst.

The villain of this Sherlock is a black widow named Irene Adler. She is both a dominatrix and a lesbian, which I suppose incriminates her twice. Her lack of true interest in men is inevitably her fatal flaw. When Holmes and Watson first meet her, she shows up naked — the true villain is all woman. By the end, when he claims his final victory over her naked carapace, it is not simply enough that she begs for his indulgence, but she must also be reduced to tears like the simpering whore he believes her to be. As a final insult, he calls her, "The woman" and dresses her in a burqa.

As bad as the female gender is, Americans drive Sherlock absolutely bonkers. If a British person offends him, the ensuing Oscar Wilde-like dance constitutes an elaborate game he's going to win anyway. When Holmes encounters an American, he pepper sprays the poor guy and throws him out a window like some kind of reverse Captain America. I expect this kind of inferiority complex from Sarkozy, but threatening the people of the United States with a fractured skull just seems below the belt.

As it happens, the central plot of Sherlock's premiere (it's the show's fourth overall episode — a teleplay takes at least four times as long to write when the government is involved) concerns a grotesque caricature of 9/11. For shame. I had to watch this youtube over 40 times to get the bad taste out of my mouth and quietly sing "Neeeeen elevvvvvvven" to myself until I nodded off from patriotism overload.

Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill the original Sherlock Holmes, but he was unsuccessful in this attempt. Such a move would be too original and creative for such a predictable character. Moffat's Sherlock is just as obvious — he is more focused on what would be the most suitable quip than ever engaging with the people around him. The most surprising move he ever makes is to not have sex, another affectation that seems decidedly anti-modern. "Are you really so obvious?" his brother Mycroft asks him, which I suppose is his attempt to explain the program's inadequacies as part of its charm.

Three things manage to save Sherlock from being an outright bomb. The first is that the show looks astonishing; the Fringe-esque twists, cuts, and special effects of the show manage to make it visually stimulating even when you can see the next plot "twist" a mile away. The show's sets are also magnificent and, from all evidence, insanely expensive.

The second saving grace of Sherlock is Moffat's talent for dialogue — it's what made his version of Doctor Who and his sex comedy Coupling more than a rehash of Quantum Leap and Friends. Bouncing back and forth, Freeman and Cumberbatch are both very entertaining in their roles, each containing more charisma in their fingertips than Jude Law has in his entire body. Essentially Sherlock is a delicious but not-so filling pastry. Perhaps the real problem is that Sherlock Holmes wasn't a very good character to begin with.

The idea of the know-it-all detective actually represented a regressive move in the mystery genre. Far more interesting than the detective who knows everything is the detective who drinks too much, or the detective who is employed in a more intriguing job like that of a businessman or priest. The ideal detective doesn't even know he is one, or better yet, isn't a he at all.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about a new novel from Vernor Vinge.

"Either Nelson" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"The Things That Never Need" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"Cyclone Utilities" - Guided by Voices (mp3)