Last night as Jentry & I were driving home from watching Sherlock Holmes we were talking about the trend in Hollywood to take old stories and retell them. The James Bond franchise has gone back to the beginning, as has Batman, and Star Trek. And they've been very successful. Why have they been succesful? Here's why: they make the characters super badass.
Think of the new (young) Captain Kirk. He is badass, and though he's still young, you see glimpses of the classy, mature Captain Kirk to come. Bruce Wayne? Badass, and classy too. Daniel Craig is perhaps the most classy/badass James Bond in the history of the franchise. Sherlock Holmes? You guessed it. Friggin' badass. His eccentricities at times betray his classiness, but he is most capable of classy/badassness.
But despite the classy/badass awesomeness, all of them are also slightly (or more than slightly) immature. Holmes' apartment is an oversized 14 year-old boy's bedroom. He's also having a hard time letting the band break up as the natural result of his BFF Watson winning a bride. Bond's casual and unrestrained sexuality is slightly more mature than the 14 year old boy in his messy bedroom (Bond has sex with actual women). And it's not too much of a stretch to say that the big difference between Bruce Wayne and the 34 year old "genius" living with his comic book collection in mom's basement is income, and lots of it. It goes on.
Craig Ferguson has figured all of this out.
So, Hollywood is saying that the ideal man is Classy/Badass with a slight case of arrested development. I'm guessing they leave the immature aspects in to make the characters more real, more relatable, more honest, because let's face it: how many truly classy/badass/mature men do you know?
I think Craig Ferguson is right. It takes decades to cultivate maturity, classiness, and gentlemanly badassness. And it all begs the question: what is a real man?