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Christmas Mysteries: A Sherlock Carol @MaryleboneTHLDN

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A mash-up of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes would seem an unlikely pairing. Yet it provides a surprisingly fun Christmas-themed adventure. These two Victorian tales (albeit separated by about 40 years) provide the basis for an inspired adventure at Christmastime that just also happens to turn out to be a murder mystery as well. With lavish costumes, a few spooky set pieces and some good old-fashioned stage trickery with lights and a lot of smoke machines, it is hard to resist. It returns to the Marylebone Theatre for Christmas after a run there last year.  The premise is that after Holmes sees off the criminal mastermind Professor Moriarty, he is left adrift in London. People thought he was dead, and he might as well be. Disinterested in the misdeeds of other Londoners, Holmes has even given up on his friend Dr Watson. It's almost as if he has become a Scrooge. Or half a Scrooge, moping about shouting, "bah" in respon

Movies: Match Point

Today was one of those cold windy and wet days so it was a perfect opportunity to go to the movies. Match Point had just opened and being a new Woody Allen flick (and his first to be shot in London) it was well worth going to… Or so it seemed. It turned out that the story was a series of clichés held together by some pretty bad acting / pouting on the part of lead actor Jonathan Rhys-Myers. There was also a rather absurd plot development of two murders committed by a shotgun that took place in a central London apartment block with not a CCTV camera in sight. In real London six cameras would have caught the murderer's every move (unless the cameras had burnt out or malfunctioned)…

Part way through the film A asked me if I was seeing a lesson in the film for me and I whispered back to him that the lesson from this film is to not screw around with your tennis coach as they can be such nasty bitches...

The locations were bog-standard spots and included St Mary Axe ("the gherkin"), views of the Palace of Westminster and the passé vogue upmarket shops around New Bond Street that are now in any city of the world. It is a pity that you don't see films shot in London use more interesting sites. Granted "The Constant Gardener" showed off some great London locations, but where are the films shot in Catford, Haringey, Hackney and Stockwell? Ok maybe they aren't the nicest spots in town but there is also Highgate, Hampstead, Soho and Bloomsbury that don't often get a look in…

London was also Woody Allen-ised in that it was always overcast, and at one point there seemed to be a blizzard happening. One can only hope that Woody's next London outing is a little bit more entertaining and interesting than this one. Oh the rest of the cast weren't too bad, but when they were such boring characters with such silly dialogue to speak it was a struggle to get too excited about them…

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