We went to watch Sherlock Holmes last Monday. Very entertaining, providing you leave your brain behind, which is a perfectly fine way to watch a film that doesn't take itself seriously. I liked the incarnation of Holmes - it makes sense to me that a guy who has such incredible deductive abilities is much more likely to be a little crazed than the placid detective from previous versions. I liked Jude Law's Watson too, his backstory justifying why a doctor was also such a man of action.

There's loads of touches in this movie that I liked. The slow motion scenes where Holmes plots his next move in fights, and the explosion scene were great, with the slo-mo actually serving a purpose, and allowing us to see all the details we would have missed. There's great moments of humour as well. To take just one, I was really amused by Holmes and Adler trying to dearm the weapon whilst Watson carried on fighting in the background before being launched across the room in a Family Guy-esque moment. I also loved how Holmes was a terrible locksmith, or more specifically, I loved how this was underplayed and never directly pointed out.

Because, for all those moments, Guy Ritchie is not a man who deals well in subtlty, and sometimes, it all gets a bit much. There's moment where adversity is piled on top of more adversity to the point where you struggle to really care about any one problem. It feels too long at the climax, which is a direct result of Ritchie's overblown style. The Watson-Holmes relationship used the obvious device of them talking like an old married couple, which, whilst funny, wasn't really done particularly artfully. By the end, I was even a little tired of Holmes' many quirks and abilities, which is annoying because he had the potential to reach unparalleled levels of awesome. Basically, at times, I wanted to grab this movie and say 'Stop it'.

Movies watched this year: 4

Don't people know you can't launch a leadership challenge on a Prime Minister when the news has got so much snow to cover?

My thought? I don't like Patricia Hewitt. I remember her being dull, bordering on vacuous, but the interview I just on BBC News, where she managed to claim that a public call for a leadership vote is the best thing for the party is sort of hilarious, and as blatanly self-serving as she is pretending it isn't.

I can't remember watching many films where I've actually struggled to understand what's going on for a good half an hour. Not in the sense that I couldn't get the plot - there are plenty of films like that early on. But in the sense that I couldn't get a handle on the characters, the way they spoke and acted and thought. For those who haven't seen Brick, it's basically a film noir detective story meets high school teen drama, where the style, language and archetypes are from the former, and the characters and location are from the latter. Not having any knowledge of film noir or those sort of Philip Marlowe detective stories meant it took me a while to figure out what was going on. For example, when Brendon says of Emma "she's gone" to the Brain, the auto-pilot of my brain told me that he's hiding her death and the circumstances around it and any emotions he might be feeling, and it's only when I adjusted to the (what I know know is called) hardboiled style that I realised that's enough for one person to tell another someone's dead, murdered, and that's as much emotion as will be shown on the topic.

None of this is bad, mind. The end result is one of the most original feeling films I can remember seeing, all the more remarkable given how old the underlying story type is. I'm definitely OK with being mentally challenged by a film - it's not the filmmakers job to pander to the intelligence of the watcher, or his own limited frame of reference. I suspect a second watch would lead me to enjoy in a number of other ways lost by having to concentrate. On a first watch, however, it struck me as a satisfying balance of edgy gritiness and cool quirkiness. I really liked that this unusual world just existed, with its own internal logic, and that the film was not about the reason for that. The humour was wonderful - the scene where Brendon sits opposite The Pin in his mothers kitchen whilst his mother fixes him an apple juice with excruciating detail was very funny - and their lots of off-kilter moments like that. I also remember being aware of the music and liking it.

Movies watched in 2010: 3

Without taking an unpleasant amount of pleasure in it, The Economist's obituary for Oral Roberts is delightfully sarcastic and withering.

Young Victoria was OK. It's quite a sweet love story, but not a deeply emotional one. I thought that largely was the result of trying to include too many historical or political aspects, often without really contributing to the story; or occassionally, where they did, the impact or connection to the personal stories was so tangential that it seemed rather forced. A film like The Queen showed that you pick just a one story from a complicated history, you care so much more about it and it's characters. Positive final comment: Emily Blunt is outrageously beautiful.

Movies watched in 2010: 2
...of which the reviews cheapened women actresses: 1

I was going to start on Mafia movies tonight (I have loads), and rewatch The Godfather (with a view of watching the two sequels for the first time). However, Cath has asked we watch Young Victoria instead. Great. Thoughts later.

Watched Pan's Labyrinth. Thought it was fantastic: the performances, story, the photography (beautiful yet utterly bleak). I liked the overlap between the harsh realities of the outpost and the fights with the Resistance, and the macabre fanatasy world of the labyrinth - the two worlds borders are blurred and look very similar, which furthers the idea that the fantasy world is the creation of Ofelia. It is horrific and violent in short bursts, often executed in such a way that seems both visually shocking yet massively real, like the bullet through the Captain's cheek, and the bloody in the eye above it, or the way the Captain crushes the poacher's son's face with a bottle in distinct phases. There's lots of pleasing little details which recur throughout, which start small yet grown in significance. The broken watch, for example, begins as a bit of backstory, but ends up telling us about how the Captain mistakenly sees himself relative to his more noble and heroic father. I'm sure there's a bunch of clever stuff about Fascism and the parallels with the orders of the faun, but I haven't thought it all out yet.

Movie films watched in 2010: 1

My new years resolution is to watch films. I'm so rubbish when it comes to watching films. There are so many I should have watched (by which I mean, ones everyone has seen apart from me). A pointless ambition? Maybe. But it should hopefully be an enjoyable one. And, I always thinks it helps intelligent comedy to have as many cultural touchpoints available as possible.

I aim to watch 100 this year. I'm starting tonight with Pan's Labyrinth.