The estate of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle have filed a copyright and trademark lawsuit against Miramax for the movie, Mr. Holmes. The film stars Sir Ian McKellen (pictured, via) as an elderly Sherlock Holmes.
The story for this film adaptation, based on Mitch Cullin’s novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, served as the inspiration for the script. Variety.com reports that Cullin and Penguin Random House, the publisher of Cullin’s book, have also been named defendants in the complaint.
Here’s more from The Hollywood Reporter: “According to the complaint, Doyle’s public domain works ‘make references to Holmes’s retirement,’ but the ones still in copyright tell ‘much more about Sherlock Holmes’ retirement and later years,’ such as the detective’s attempt to solve one last case, how he ‘comes to love nature and dedicates himself to studying it,’ and how Holmes develops ‘a personal warmth and the capacity to express love for the first time.’ Mr. Holmes screenwriter Mitch Cullin allegedly took ‘protected elements of setting, plot, and character’ to create his work, setting up a defense that will likely explore what was covered in earlier Doyle work and what might be generic ideas not worthy of copyright protection.”
A trailer has been unleashed for the Mr. Holmes movie. The video embedded above offers glimpses of Sir Ian McKellen playing an elderly Sherlock Holmes.
The actor announced on his Facebook page that this story shows “Sherlock Holmes as you’ve never seen him.” This film is set to hit U.K. theaters in Summer 2015; no U.S. release date has been announced yet.
Here’s more from E! Online: “Before the elderly detective digs into an unsolved case involving a mysterious young woman, McKellen begins to spend a lot of his time with a curious young boy played by Milo Parker. While the inquisitive youngster is deeply intrigued by the detective’s life, McKellen is a bit more focused on trying to remember a few clues that could crack the final mystery.” (via Entertainment Weekly)
By Stanley Wells
The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male. Nevertheless none are explicitly homoerotic in the manner of some of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton, or for that matter of some modern poets such as W. H. Auden or Thom Gunn.
All those that are clearly addressed to or written about a young man, or “boy,” are among the first 126 to be printed in the 1609 volume. Yet Number 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment ….,” one of the most famous love poems in the language, is frequently read at heterosexual weddings. And other poems in the first part of the sequence – such as Number 27 – could even be love poems addressed to the poet’s wife.
Shakespeare’s most idealized sonnets fall among those that are either clearly addressed to a male, or are non-specific in their addressee. His explicitly sexual sonnets, all concerned with a woman and all among the last 26 to be printed, suggest severe psychological tension in a man who has to acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it, at least in its current manifestation. An example is Number 147, which begins:
My love is as a fever, longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
None of the poems that celebrate love between the poet (whether we think of him simply as an identity assumed by Shakespeare for professional purposes or as Shakespeare speaking in his own person) and a “lovely boy” is explicitly sexual in the manner of the frankest of the “dark lady” sonnets. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers. They have also met with castigation from homophobic readers for this very reason, as the history of their reception over the centuries makes abundantly clear. And a number of the sonnets addressed to a male are deeply passionate if idealized love poems which one can easily imagine being addressed to a young man with whom the poet was having a physical as well as a spiritual relationship. Consider for example Number 108:
What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or my dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet like prayers divine
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show
Actor Elijah Wood will return to Middle Earth in the two-part film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit.
Deadline New York reported: “Wood is confirmed to star in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit to be shot in New Zealand. In addition, he has signed on to play ‘Ben Gunn’ in Stewart Harcourt’s adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island along side Eddie Izzard.”
Besides Wood (pictured, via), other castmates returning from Lord of the Rings include: Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Sir Ian McKellen as Gandalf, and Andy Serkis as Gollum. At the moment, Orlando Bloom is rumored to be considering his return as Legolas.
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