The amateur storm-chaser from Colorado who launched a flying saucer-shaped helium balloon from his back garden one breezy day in October and told police that his six-year-old son was inside received a 90-day prison sentence yesterday. The stunt, concocted jointly by Richard and Mayumi Heene, was riveting while it lasted. Millions of people around the world watched live television footage of the silver contraption as it soared over the high plains before eventually coming to rest in a prairie field, with ambulances in hot and dusty pursuit.
The amateur storm-chaser from Colorado who launched a flying saucer-shaped helium balloon from his back garden one breezy day in October and told police that his six-year-old son was inside received a 90-day prison sentence yesterday.
The stunt, concocted jointly by Richard and Mayumi Heene, was riveting while it lasted. Millions of people around the world watched live television footage of the silver contraption as it soared over the high plains before eventually coming to rest in a prairie field, with ambulances in hot and dusty pursuit.
It's a reworking of Conan Doyle's original stories that in many ways makes more sense than the treatments we know so well. Gone is the dim but nice Watson and the hypodermics. Gone also is genteel foggy Victoriana, to be replaced by a much grittier feeling of London.
They've also set themselves up for a sequel or two. Downey Jr is already fully attached to the Iron Man franchise, and now he'll be Sherlock for a long time to come. Quite a comeback for someone who totally had a cock up on the catering front 1996 - 2001.
Of course it's essentially shallow, but unlike Dan Brownish shallowness it makes no attempt to disguise itself as serious. Guy Ritchie just doubled his budgets. Let's see if that will be an improvement or not.
If producer Joel Silver and Susan Downey (former Silver exec and Downey's wife, also producer on RocknRolla)) stay in control, I imagine they might get a couple of good sequels out - they don't have a bad track record. I'd like to see what Ritchie could do with Bond, but he'll certainly stay with Holmes because, as a Hatfield boy, he has a lock on Londonness (relative to anyone you could name in Hollywood).
Only the Coen Brothers could re-refresh the franchise imo and that's not going to happen. You can't be me, I'm taken
