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The Irreverent Joys of a Japanese Sherlock Holmes

HBO's new take on Arthur Conan Doyle's detective sees two young women solving crimes in present-day Japan.

Miss Sherlock is a new adaptation of a much-reprised tale. You might recognize Tachibana’s Syria story as an update to Dr. Watson’s return from the Second Anglo-Afghan War. 221B is, of course, an address in Baker Street, in London. The strange young woman’s name is Sherlock. A great deal more is recognizable as original Arthur Conan Doyle material, but tweaked: Sherlock, played by Yūko Takeuchi, is slender and eerie and brilliant, but unmistakably female. She plays the cello, instead of the traditional violin. Tachibana (Shihori Kanjiya) is the straight man in the relationship. Listen closely, and you’ll hear her referred to as Wato-san—her first name, plus an honorific.

So, we have our Sherlock and our Watson, two attractive young women solving crimes in contemporary Tokyo. In these facts alone Miss Sherlock injects Holmes’s old white corpse with new energy.

Melania Trump’s new documentary, Melania, is looking like an opening-week box office flop—after Amazon’s MGM studios paid tens of millions of dollars for the rights to it.

The documentary detailing the first lady’s return to the White House is projected to make just $1 million in its first week. While documentaries generally do worse at the box office, the sheer amount of money Amazon spent—$40 million for the rights, $35 million for an aggressive marketing blitz—and the constant stream of Truth Social posts from President Trump make this a particularly pitiful showing.

Melania’s early failure comes as a new report from Rolling Stone details serious labor issues behind the scenes and a whopping two-thirds of the film’s staff requesting not to be credited at the end of the film. Director Brett Ratner, who made headlines after six women accused him of sexual assault and harassment during the #MeToo movement in 2017, was perhaps the most loathed person on set. (Actress Natasha Henstridge alleged that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 19, Olivia Munn claimed that Ratner masturbated in front of her, and more recently, he was pictured shirtless in the Epstein files.)

“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one crew member shared, “but Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.”...