Not so astounding, Holmes.

Yes, I'm afraid it really is that bad. I'm talking about the recently released film called "Sherlock Holmes". I have to put it that way rather than "the latest Sherlock Holmes film", because the film has nothing whatsoever to do with the famous detective.

I don't see myself as a purist when Holmes is concerned. I have seen, read and enjoyed all kinds of sequels, spoofs and "forgotten cases" featuring Holmes. And to be honest, much as I admire the detective's razor-sharp mind, he can be irritating at times. Both Watson and Lestrade have my sympathy for putting up with his arrogance. What's more, in this case, my expectations regarding the film's faithfulness to the original stories, or even to the spirit of the original stories, weren't high. There had been much talk about Holmes suddenly becoming a first-class pugilist and action hero. Well, well, I thought indulgently, Holmes is actually rather good at defending himself in the original stories. Anyway, even if Holmes is not very recognisable, a crime story in nineteenth-century England can never be an entire waste of time, can it?

This time, it is. It's like those trendy cynical films called things like "True Romance" who aren't romantic at all. The protagonist of "Sherlock Holmes", played by the otherwise charming Robert Downey Jr. who is nevertheless pretty insufferable here, is a disorganised, absent-minded, childish slob, who tries to sabotage his friend's engagement out of pique. Now, does that sound like Sherlock to you?

Which leads me to Watson, played somewhat surprisingly by a trim, handsome Jude Law. Personally, I don't think Conan Doyle ever intended Holmes and his loyal sidekick to be more than just good mates. But if the film had hinted at something more and depicted the two friends as an affectionate but bickering old couple I might have lived with it. The thing about Holmes is that he's asexual, so inventing female love interests for him - which has been done often enough - is just as wrong-headed as romanticising his relationship with Watson. Here, though, the two behave not like an old married couple but like a token gay couple in a rom-com. A squabble about a waistcoat is a case in point ("I thought we agreed it was too small for you"). That is just plain wrong - whatever they are, Holmes and Watson aren't honeymooners. By the way, there is a female love interest for Holmes, so it is perfectly possible to take or leave any homosexual subtext. She is Irene Adler, or she is called that, but like "Sherlock" she bears no noticeable resemblance to the character invented by Conan Doyle. This Irene is a femme fatale and gangster moll between whom and Holmes there is zero chemistry (at least that part is strictly true - Holmes only ever revered her for her mind). The only thing faintly Doyle-ian in the whole film was Eddie Marsan (a.k.a.Pancks to those of us who have seen the superb TV adaptation of "Little Dorrit") as Lestrade.

The biggest problem with the film, I believe, is that if you are going to invent freely on the basis of a legendary figure like Sherlock Holmes, you still need to have some references to the original before you take off in flights of fancy. I suspect this is why the "realistic" film about King Arthur with Clive Owen and Keira Knightley was not a hit, and why I would be surprised if the new "Robin Hood" film with Russell Crowe should turn out to be a box-office phenomenon. (Though I may be doing these films an injustice: the "this is the true, unvarnished story" spin they both used has put me off actually seeing them.) King Arthur needs his Round Table, Robin Hood needs his merry men and an archery competition or two, Sherlock Holmes needs his pipe, his violin (not just to pluck at) and his tidy, logical mind. Otherwise, why bother to tell a story supposedly about them at all? Do a film about a Briton fighting in the Roman army, or a rugged non-merry freedom-fighter, or an unshaved nineteenth-century detective who can kick ass, and call them something else.

Brutus says he was ambitious...

After having finished the high-prestige Swedish crime story - which proved not to be so very gloomy after all and included a touching description of male friendship - I'm back in ancient Rome. Harris's second novel "Lustrum" is even more highly acclaimed than the first one, but I must confess that in my view, it could have done with a bit more "the politicians at home" scenes. What I liked in "Imperium", apart from the West-Wing-in-togas-feel, was the intimate portait of some of the Famous Romans. The lumbering Pompey enthusing "didn't I tell you he was clever?" when Cicero came up with one of his brilliant ideas or the tough old bird Crassus genially pinching Tiro's cheek (Tiro is Cicero's secretary/slave and the books' narrator): these kind of scenes added a personal note to all the political schemes. They are still around in "Lustrum", but not as much as I would have liked. We never do get any real take on what Catilina was like as a person. I have gathered this much, though: if any Roman resembled the kind of villain I easily fall for, it was Caesar, not Catilina. Caesar is the sly one.

This idea gets some getting used to. Only now do I realise how favourable the portrait of Caesar in my old "Asterix" comics really was. Yes, he was an enemy of the intrepid Gauls and was time and again defeated by Asterix and his gang, but he had dignity and honour all the same. "Asterix" comics shouldn't really be allowed to influence one's judgement regarding a historical personage - they are, after all, cheerfully unhistorical, and only the Latin quotations have any basis in fact. But once you have seen the Asterix version of Caesar slumped in his chair, as baffled as the reader by a lecture on economics, and finally giving the one-word comment "Eh?", it's hard to imagine him as an unscrupulous wheeler-dealer with little regard for anything except his political ambition.

As I remember it, Shakespeare didn't help either. Granted, it's a long while since I saw the play (or read the Illustrated Classic - a very good cheat's guide to the Western Canon). But I chiefly recall three things about Shakespeare's Caesar: 1) He loved Brutus like a son (big mistake) 2) he preferred fat people to men with a "lean and hungry look" who thought too much 3) he couldn't swim as well as Cassius. Honestly, who would have thought he was a lean-and-hungry-looker himself?

It is possible, of course, that Harris is exaggerating Caesar's dastardliness a bit just to make a point. He is on Cicero's side after all. All the same, I do trust him more than I trust the "Asterix" comics when it comes to historical accuracy.

Now, time for a summary of the Swedish crown princess Victoria's wedding festivities on TV, and then a football match with the Ivory Coast, trained by our "Svennis". I told you I'm very Swedish in some ways.

I may not know much about football...

It was fun while it lasted, being a critical consumer. For weeks I have proudly used Chrome instead of Internet Explorer, praised its swiftness, and felt very grand for making the effort of testing another browser instead of passively trudging on with IE, just because it's Microsoft and what I'm used to. But now, after having wasted an hour of my life looking for a print preview function, I give up. If you want to do anything remotely fancy in Chrome (and surely print preview isn't that fancy?), you have to rely on a "Gallery" of additional functions programmed not by Google itself but by happy amateurs around the world. I'm sure it's very kind of them to share their add-ons with us, but sadly there's no guarantee (as, after trying to install two of them, I've now found out) that they actually work. So, back to lumbering old IE. At least it's got all the functions you need, as well as a great many you don't need. "Don't be evil" is all very well as a company motto, but "Be professional" would be even better.

Anyway, moving on to the subject of the moment: the Football World Cup.

Wonderful as world and European championships must be for real football fans, they (the fans) do have a lot to put up with as well. It is at times like these when people like me, who don't know the first thing about the game, insist on taking an interest. Instead of regional teams, which don't really capture the imagination of the football illiterate, we have ACTUAL COUNTRIES playing against each other. This is great fun. If our own country doesn't win, we football philistines can always root for other countries we like for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with actual footballing skills. I love French history and English literature and have a Western European bias altogether - with the result that no matter how many times they let me down, I will still have a soft spot for these countries' teams.

I am starting to change my mind about France, though. One thing a football philistine does not forgive easily is if a team plays "boring" football. We want to see the players rush back and forth on the field trying to score goals. We don't care about tactics or saving your strength until it's really needed. This is why I can never warm to the Italian team, even though I like Italy as a country. Once they score, they spend the rest of the time more or less standing in front of their own goal defending their position. It may be tactical brilliance, but it's boring, boring, boring. France suffers from a similar problem: their games have, in later years, become increasingly dull to watch. Now the England team may fail as often as not, but something still makes them watchable. Perhaps it's all those near-misses that keep you on your toes. Pity any sincere football fan, though, who has to watch World Cup games with me and listen to my comments. "If Lampard is such a great shot, why has he never scored a goal while I'm watching?" "Didn't Crouch use to be a red-head? I think red hair goes better to the lanky, lantern-jawed look somehow." Capello, as you see, needn't fear any competition from this quarter.

Lazy Monday afternoon

A bonus day off today because the Swedish National Day (6 June) was on a Sunday. The holiday commemorates the vaguely-more-democratic-than-the-last-one constitution of 1809 which has been ditched many times over since then, so it's hard to get too steamed up and patriotic. Although if I'm not mistaken, Gustav Vasa marched into Stockholm after having defeated the Danes on 6 June as well, which is a bit more like it. All right, Independence Day it ain't, but a holiday is always welcome, whatever the pretext.

The problem is, it's time for me to pick a new Ambitious Book Project, and I'm feeling far too lazy. It should cheer me that the last ABP turned out to be great fun - "Imperium" by Robert Harris, which I counted as ambitious because I haven't read anything by him previously and because the scene is set in ancient Rome rather than in, say, Victorian England. It is also a book about Cicero, which sounded faintly worthy. I remember a picture of Cicero we had in our Latin book in school, painted 1800 years or so after his death, I would say. In it he was attacking Catilina in the Senate. Cicero had a flowing white beard and looked upright and noble. Catilina looked like a bird of prey. You can imagine whom I rooted for.

It turns out, though, that Cicero was a shrewd politican and only vaguely more principled than his contemporaries. Yes, he tries to do the right thing, but only if it does not hinder his political ambitions. It makes it easier to cheer him on than if he had been the incorruptible paragon ready to defend the Republic at all costs I imagined. As for Catilina, he seems a bit too loony and violent to be a villain in my taste, but I'm not quite giving up on him yet - he did look very foxy in that picture. Let's see how he turns out in "Lustrum", book No. two in Harris's Cicero series (it does sound learned, doesn't it?).

After "Imperium", I indulged myself with a frothy Regency Romance by Julia Quinn ("How To Marry A Marquis"). Frothy entertainment is not so easy to write as one may think. I remember being thoroughly bored with one bestselling author's supposedly escapist novel, in spite of a good premise and a glamourous setting, and at another time I was bemused when a romantic bestseller turned out to be written like a children's book. But Quinn knows her stuff. She is not the new Austen, as someone quoted on the cover alleges, but she may well be the new Georgette Heyer, and that is not bad at all. In spite of the title, there is less snobbishness displayed here than normally in the genre. The hero is not a nonesuch of the first stare, fussed about the tying of his cravat, for which one is thankful. I do wish, though, that he had not been an ex-spy. I cannot imagine him, or any other Regency Romance hero, lasting ten minutes pitted against Fouché's finest.

But now I have wallowed in a bodice-ripper, including romantic but blush-inducing sex scenes, I really should read something meaty and mind-expanding. A gloomy crime story written in the Fifties by one of Sweden's leading authors seems the likeliest candidate right now. I just wish I felt more enthusiastic about it.