Thoughts on Jonny Lee Miller please?
sdfghjhgfdsadfgh FRIEND YOU JUST MADE ME VERY HAPPY
(we need to send asks more!!!!!! in this interwebs tumblr cultúre)
JLM THOTS (JLM thot)
okay so I cannot remember when I started watching Elementary, but that was my first conscious JLM (I had watched Trainspotting, but I was but a babby at the time -- I have seen it... some times since then), and listen. we through around the word ND on this here site, but I think Mr. JLM as Sherlock Holmes is one of the original tumblr ND regents, and still absolutely Peak! this man knew what he was doing!
and then I went on a little JLM tour, and I am here to give you the top movies I saw with him at the time (after which I will do the list of movies I want to watch now): Hackers, Trainspotting + T2, Plunkett and Mcleane (seriously, this movie is underrated!), The Flying Scotsman, Mansfield Park, Regeneration -- also most underrated Mr Knightley in Emma + in a fun, odd little show called Eli Stone (I also watched Mindhunters, Byzantium -- which is some great Gemma Arterton -- The Escapist, Aeon Flux, and Dark Shadows, and I'm not necessarily saying don't watch these... well, maybe don't watch Dark Shadows... but they weren't my favourite. although Byzantium is fascinating. misogynist vampires)
Movies I have yet to see that I want to watch: Dead Man's Walk, Complicity, Love Honour and Obey, and Dracula 2000
MOVIES TO SHORTLY GIVE AN EXTRA SHOUTOUT TO
I'm not going to talk about Hackers (famously dreaming about wearing a latex bodysuit and getting railed by his future irl wife Angeline Jolie) or Trainspotting, but T2 -- is it good? yeah, it's not bad actually. did it need to exist? no, no it didn't. did it enjoy textually pointing out that Renton and Sick Boy have some kinda Sexual Tension? yeah, yeah, yeah! actually kind of feels like the main reason it exists is to go "hmmm do you think Renton and Sick Boy are a bit... youknow?"
also shoutout to Robert Carlyle who's in the Trainspotting films and also co-starred with JLM in their very own homoerotic duo film, which includes Liv Tyler "Plunkett and Macleane" loosely based on the history of two real highway men, and it's. just such a great movie. it's one of my "please it's so fun and so silly and such a product of the 90s! Craig Armstrong did the music!" it's kind of got some polyamory going on?
The Flying Scotsman is about a real amateur cyclist, and it's a pretty by-the-numbers inspirational tale, but I quite like those when they're about real underdogs and Graeme Obree certainly was that. From memory (it's been a few years now) I believe I watched this film and went "ah so that's where some of the early development of Sherlock Holmes mannerisms stems from," so it's also just fun as a study of JLM the actor
Regeneration -- gotta mention this one, because of it being about Siegfried Sassoon. he doesn't play Sassoon, but he's very good in it and generally it's a fascinating piece based on a book that I for some reason have only read the sequels of, and I'd recommend anything about Sassoon, I'm easy like that
I also didn't mention Frankenstein up above, but I watched both versions of it back whenever it was being shown with National Theatre Live and he was fucking stunning in both roles. as Frankenstein he's a little different to how I often picture him (read: JLM is not giving pathetic twink, although he is giving twitchy weirdo), but JLM is so physical throughout, so pitch-perfect in how he's interpreting the role. and as Adam/the creature it's like every bit of tension he's ever been able to control is just unleashed, it's sooooo (argh gotta see if I can find a torrent of that so I can rewatch him)
Now the thing about JLM is that he's often cast as kinda the straight man in a lot of his stuff, but he's... so not.... that man is silly! and you can tell! his physicality is a bouncy little weirdo, and for a good long while his body was that of a bouncy little weirdo -- and then he got fuckn Big 🥵😂 (you can take the man out of the bouncy little weirdo, but you can't take the bouncy little weirdo out of the man...... smthin like that. the more i look at this sentence the more I feel like this is an innuendo, oh well. now it's intentional)
the thing I really like about him is that he seems totally un-self-conscious while playing characters who are often under great scrutiny, either for being considered criminal and/or for being visibly non-neurotypical and/or otherwise non-normative. he's a hacker, he's an addict, he's a creature that was created from the bodies of other men, he's a bipolar cyclist, he's giving us Thee Sherlock Holmes of modern times, stimming, kinky, caring, blunt, overstimulated, relapsing, deeply unconventionally in a relationship with Watson that doesn't attempt to fit them into any mainstream language at any point!
also he has the best grimace of ever. he's so good at looking simply. perturbed. uncomfortable. get me out of this party. when he's 70 or 80 he's going to be the best old man face 🥺🥺🥺
also if I am very very lucky and very very nice to my mum, she'll take me to watch him in his current play in London, wish me luck!
TL;DR underrated character actor JLM, broader than you think he is, the hero of portrayals of weirdos and freaks and outcasts, I think it's wild that he's danced around playing queers this entire time, make him kiss a man stat!
(there's a whole other, very specific analysis of his gender in Hackers and how that relates to a wider feeling about his particular take on masculinity in a lot of my favourite portrayals of his, and also there was a youtube video that i just spent 15mins trying to find on Hackers from a transgender perspective that's mostly correctly-so about Cereal Killer/Matthew Lillard, but touches on the gender-fuckery of JLM and Angelina Jolie)
(okay I wasn't gonna talk about Hackers, but we cannot forget this scene, we simply cannot!)
