Well, someone's gonna split this hair, so I guess it might as well be me: In one of the original stories, Holmes claims to know a martial art called baritsu ("the Japanese system of wrestling"). Most Holmes scholars who are interested in that particular corner of the canon assume that Doyle meant Bartitsu, and either misremembered the name or deliberately varied the spelling to forestall complaints from contemporary authorities in the event that he got some details wrong.

>Early as in one
>of the first. It's primarily a mix of scientific boxing and jujitsu
>(William Barton-Wright, the inventor of the style, was the first
>gaijin to train under a Japanese master), but it also features a lot
>of savate, or French cane fighting.

Savate is actually French kickboxing (it's the signature art of the great Georges Batroc, in fact!); I believe, but am not certain, that the French art of fightin'-with-a-stick is called la canne de combat (literally "the cane of combat", which is pretty boss). Pretty sure Bartitsu included both, anyway, as well as other stick-fighting techniques that were adapted from classical fencing.

Regardless, it's a fascinating story, Bartitsu. Barton-Wright was a man well ahead of his time.

>This, by way of a few less-than-entirely-SFW diversions, led to me
>imagining Asami in a finely tailored three piece suit with a
>diamond-topped cane that contained a terrifying amount of gizmos, a la
>the contents of the Adam West Batman's bottomless toy box. This
>led to the following image:-
>
>Asami Sato: Diqiu's hero!Penguin.

Heh. By contrast, the notion of Asami very-well-dressed and employing a technologically gimmicky cane makes me think of the Doctor in the climactic scene of "Let's Kill Hitler". "Oh, always waste time when you haven't got any. Rule four hundred 'n eight, time is not the boss of you."

Which is also pretty good, at least until the falling-down-poisoned-to-death part, we'd as well to skip that bit.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

As someone who likes Batroc far more than he probably deserves, I would like to take this moment to note that in the recently released Winter Soldier, they manage to do a certain amount of justice to Batroc. His savate looks completely and totally badass, like the brutal, somewhat savage fighting style it is, rather than the joke many people treat it as because of its french origins.

He still gets his ass kicked, of course, because when you are Batroc and you are fighting Captain America in Act I, there is only one way that fight ends, but he comes across as a legitimate threat and someone who would be a terrifying combatant against anyone not named Steve Rogers, rather than just some jobber.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Counter-hair-split activate!

Yes, it's true that in the books Holmes learns baritsu, and yes, it's most likely Bartitsu in all but name for the reasons you laid out above. However, in the films, some of the leading practitioners of Bartitsu were employed by Guy Ritchie as fighting consultants, and Ritchie said in an interview, I forget where, that he was excited to show off Bartitsu. This was what I had in mind when I made the post, since I'm pretty into the art (though lacking in tuition at present), but upon further review I didn't make that clear. Sorry about that.

As an aside: Bartitsu was also taught to ladies of quality should they be required to defend their virtue without a gentleman in the vicinity. One of the diagrams details how to subdue a ruffian with your new-fangled safety bicycle.

I had a poster made of it.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Huh! I wonder if that was more for the second one (which I haven't seen most of); I just re-watched the "making of" thing on the DVD of hte first film the other day, and they didn't mention it there - only that RDJ already knew some kung fu, which made the Action Choreography easier and more authentic than it might otherwise have been.

Regardless, that's pretty spiffy. I'm of two minds generally about the Ritchie/RDJ take on Sherlock Holmes. I enjoyed the first film very much, and I get where they're coming from with their more actiony angle - the literary Holmes is a pretty considerable badass, and rather less the buttoned-up gentleman than Sidney Paget's illustrations in The Strand Magazine (which is where most film interpretations take their visual cues) generally implied. On the other hand, I think they've overcooked the bohemianism a bit, and the entire lot of them can just fuck right the hell off for that business with Irene Adler in the sequel.

>As an aside: Bartitsu was also taught to ladies of quality should they
>be required to defend their virtue without a gentleman in the
>vicinity. One of the diagrams details how to subdue a ruffian with
>your new-fangled safety bicycle.

Ha! That's excellent.

>I had a poster made of it.

I can think of several characters who ought to have that or some later-period equivalent on a wall somewhere. :)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

As is the literary Dr. Watson. Dude served in Afghanistan in the late 19th century, and survived a wound taken there and a subsequent case of typhoid with nothing more than the very best leechcraft that medical science at the time could offer.

You don't do that without being tough as nails.

> and the
>entire lot of them can just fuck right the hell off for that business
>with Irene Adler in the sequel.

Jesus Christ, yes. One of the more egregious cases of fridging I've ever seen. I'll raise a glass to that sentiment with you, sir.

-Merc
Keep Rat

This is so. One of the things I like best about both the first Ritchie film and the first series* of the BBC's Sherlock is that both went out of their way to depict Watson as, well, an army doctor - which is to say a highly trained, physically adept professional, not just a fumbling great oaf whom Holmes happens to like having around for no really evident reason. Even the '80s Granada series, though it usually made an effort, didn't always manage to walk off the legacy of Nigel Bruce that effectively.

>> and the
>>entire lot of them can just fuck right the hell off for that business
>>with Irene Adler in the sequel.
>
>Jesus Christ, yes. One of the more egregious cases of fridging I've
>ever seen. I'll raise a glass to that sentiment with you, sir.

If I had been seeing A Game of Shadows in a theater, I might well have been furious enough to leave at that point, which is not a gesture I am in the habit of making; the only other time I can remember doing it is after the Big Reveal in the 1996 Mission: Impossible film, and that was so near the end that it didn't really matter. (And, annoyingly, I wasn't there alone, so all I really did was go play video games in the lobby; I couldn't actually leave the building in a huff. :) As it was, I returned the DVD to the Redbox without watching the rest of the movie.

--G.
* Unlike the Ritchie films, Sherlock did nothing to offend me; I just haven't seen past series 1 because the gaps are long and I've never quite got round to it.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Elementary is managing nicely on that score as well. Joan Watson doesn't have a military background, but she's nobodies idiot and is actually better at detecting and cutting through bullshit than even Holmes is.

> As it was, I returned the DVD to the
>Redbox without watching the rest of the movie.

You did not really miss much. About a third of the way through the film Game of Shadows decides it wants to stop being a mystery for awhile and instead be a WWI action movie that takes place about 25 years before WWI. And Holmes' misogyny is on full and teeth-grinding display throughout.

>* Unlike the Ritchie films, Sherlock did nothing to
>offend me; I just haven't seen past series 1 because the gaps are long
>and I've never quite got round to it.

There are things in Series 2 and Series 3 of Sherlock worth watching, but to the extent my opinion carries any weight with you, I would discourage you from doing so unless you feel like getting angry. Moffat doesn't fridge any of them, but the man clearly has issues with women and they're on full, Frank Miller-esque display.

-Merc
Keep Rat

Yes, quite possibly. However, where Elementary falls down is when it attempts to be intelligent, funny, interesting, and generally non-turdtastic television. It's not a modern-dress Sherlock Holmes. It's a run-of-the-mill American cop show with a protagonist who shares the name (and very little else) of a famous literary figure. And it's one that only exists at all because the organization that produced it wanted the rights to remake Sherlock and Auntie told 'em where they could shove it. They announced Elementary about three weeks after the talks broke down and centred on Lucy Liu's casting as Watson, which smacks to me of the "blackjack and hookers" school of negotiation techniques.

tl;dr: I have Views about Elementary. They are mostly along the lines of "it's humdrum as a TV show and utter fucking garbage as an adaptation". That said, maybe it gets better in later series; I've only ploughed through the first one, and even then I was losing the will to live towards the end.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

As an Anglophile, I love it when English people get angry about the quality/quantity ratio of most American television. It's so adorable. It's like the cultural converse of my own countrymen being flummoxed by driving on the left.

--G.
If you guys could be bothered to make more than three episodes a year, we wouldn't have to steal all your shit. :)
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Generally, when I want to sell people on Elementary, I open by saying "you know how Sherlock starts off really awesome and gradually turns awful? Elementary does it the opposite way." It has one of the worst pilots I've ever seen and then by the end of the first season I was like "man I will cut you if this show isn't renewed oh my god."

As far as the merits go... Elementary seasons are about ten or twelve episodes too long, I think. They pad it out with a lot of procedural episodes, a lot of using the cop-show formula, and seem reluctant to use any sort of metaplot. I feel that this is hurting them, because this ain't a Law & Order remake.

That said, I find it brilliant as an adaptation, mostly because they're not afraid to follow things logically through if that'd make good storytelling. Sherlock completed edited Holmes' rampaging substance abuse because they weren't interested in exploring that in the context of the 21st century, where shooting up isn't a charming eccentricity. Instead it was like "No, you know what? Let's run with that. Let's run the HELL with it, see where it goes."

-Merc
Keep Rat

Elementary, on the other hand, kept a plot point from the short story the episode was based on involving identical twins. Letter versus spirit. Pick a side. I've picked mine.

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

Amen and hear hear! I admit that I was enough into the movie that I was able to move past that initial WTF! moment, but it felt like a -glaringly- continuous hole in the cast; places where I'd be thinking, "and now we see Ire-...she dead. -God dammit-."

-Droken

I've never seen either of Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes movies -- not out of disdain or deliberate choice, just never gotten around to it. (Most of the movies I see now are either the handful of films I get out to see in the theater, or stuff that pops up on Netflix streaming.) So, after reading these complaints, I went a-Googling to find out just what was up.

I can only assume that there's no ambiguity about Irene's death when it happens, because if there was even the slightest chance that she wasn't actually dead, I would've spent the entire rest of the movie watching and waiting for her to be not really dead. Given that there's apparently no ambiguity about her death, I might have finished the movie, but it's giving me all the more reason to not bother with Ritchie films in the future.