Will ferrell

I’ll be upfront: I’m skeptical of the trans movement. Not the individuals within it, but the broader cultural shift that prioritizes feelings over facts and subjectivity over objective reality. Yet, despite my reservations, I have deep empathy for those grappling with identity confusion — an experience that must be profoundly disorienting. My concern is that we’re accelerating this confusion by feeding a culture obsessed with validation. So, when I sat down to watch Will & Harper, I hoped, perhaps naively, that this film might grapple with these, my own very real questions, in a meaningful way. It doesn’t. What I found instead was a film that falls short as cinema and even shorter as a piece of prop art.

As the midterm elections loom, there is the usual excitable commentary about what it all means. Every voter will have their own heroes and villains, the dashing white knight and the looming bogeyman. The complexities of the wider sociopolitical issues at hand will be subsumed to simple questions: will the results encourage Trump to run in 2024? Is this curtains for Kamala’s presidential ambitions? These are, of course, over-simplifications of difficult and nuanced issues. This is why the movies have inevitably dealt better with the drama (and farce) of fictitious — or at least fictionally disguised — election campaigns.

Don’t believe the critics. Don’t believe the score on Rotten Tomatoes, which has risen to 7 percent as of today. And don’t believe the fake news about mass walk-outs either. Holmes & Watson is the funniest film I’ve seen in 2018, and if I saw it next week, it would probably be the funniest film of 2019. Will Ferrell is the best Sherlock Holmes since Jeremy Brett, whose high-camp Holmes was always halfway toward hilarity, and John C. Reilly, a rubber-faced release of repressed love and resentment, is the best Watson ever. 221b or not?