BEFORE: OK, this is going to be a weird thing to say, but you've probably come to expect this sort of thing by now - I've got a path to the end of October. I'm not sure it's THE path, but it is A path, and that's a comforting thing to know. Given that I know what film I'm scheduled to watch on July 4, and given that I think I know what film I want to watch on October 1, there's just a little matter of filling up the space in between. I thought about picking a random point halfway through and just naming a movie, then that would make things easier. But in the end I didn't need to, I just estimated that I would need about 63 or 65 movies to bridge the gap and still have room left for 26 or 28 horror movies, that would save about 20 slots for November and December.
So I just started linking today, not really randomly but based on what I WANT to watch from my list, which feels a bit odd, because I don't usually program that way, and considering there are about 4 blockbuster movies coming out this summer that I might want to catch in theaters - well, I just kept linking and shifting things around and flipping various parts of the chain when I saw another way to arrange them - and in a couple hours I had connected my July 4 film and my October 1 film. Well, I did this a few times, really - the first time I connected them in about 10 films, and that was way too few. Next try, and I really went for it, taking whatever weird direction I could think of that felt like it was bringing me closer to horror movies. OK, stop and count the steps - 53, well that's still not enough, I have to fill up July, August and September.
A couple more flips, adding some more bridging material, and I found a few new paths, and I got there in 62, not quite the 63 or 65 I was hoping for, but I think it will do, if I can't come up with a better plan. If you think about how there are probably 2 or 5 or 10 possible directions to go with each step, depending of course how many actors any film shares with the other films on my list, you can see that to fill up 62 slots, there are probably at least 100,000 possible paths. The trick is finding one that I like, that focuses on films I want to watch, mostly, and then whatever bridging material is needed to connect those. It can be done, it just takes up a lot of my time.
Well, I've got time now, I'm only working three days a week, and I made a big list of things for me to get done before my second job needs me again. Crossed off two things today, I went to the podiatrist and learned why my feet have been hurting so bad (calluses) and I came up with one possible path to program my summer movies. OK, what can I get done on Thursday now?
Adeel Akhtar carries over from "Murder Mystery 2".
THE PLOT: When Enola Holmes (Sherlock's teen sister) discovers her mother is missing, she endeavours to find her, becoming a super-sleuth in her own right as she outwits her famous brother and unravels a dangerous conspiracy.
AFTER: You know, what could really ruin my summer would be if I plan to watch "Guardians of the Galaxy 3" on Disney Plus in August, and then it doesn't start streaming until September. That could be a big monkey wrench in my plans, then I really wouldn't know what to do. So I guess I better start making back-up plans. Anyway, that's something to think about later. Today I have to think about Enola Holmes, secret never-before-mentioned sister of Sherlock.
This is based on a book series that started up in 2006, because I guess there's no copyright law that says you can't write about another author's characters' relatives that they forgot to mention or never wrote about in the first place. Obviously the Sherlock Holmes character must have aged out of copyright protection, because "The Great Mouse Detective" and those movies with Robert Downey Jr., plus the CBS series "Elementary" and the PBS series with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. I think there are a few cheapo animated films out there were Sherlock Holmes is a CGI dog or something, too. I think once Mel Brooks made a parody movie about Victor Frankenstein's grandson, all bets were kind of off on the whole relatives thing. So watch for movies coming soon about Robin Hood's secret daughter and James Bond's female second cousin, once removed, on his father's side.
That adaptation I watched late last year of "David Copperfield" comes to mind, also, even though it was very true to the narrative, it also depicted 1800's London as a very ethnically diverse time and place, when, come on, we knew it was anything but that. And a couple years back they came out with films like "Mary, Queen of Scots" and "The Favourite" that went even further back into history to also depict those past centuries as hotbeds of liberalism, with characters of many colors and sexual orientations featured, and I'm not exactly sure who benefits from this, maybe all the teens today feel more comfortable in thinking that those time periods weren't extremely racist and conservative and anti-gay, but they kind of were. "Enola Holmes" fits right into this model, with a few prominent characters of color, like Inspector Lestrade is played by an actor of obvious Indian descent, and yet this probably was set before Great Britain even colonized India, so it doesn't really make much sense. Well, as long as it makes people today feel better about themselves, then it's OK? Not sure.
There's a heavy feminist message here as well, which is to be expected with a female lead character, during a time period when women of the day were fighting for voting rights. No spoilers here about why Enola's mother left the family estate, because that's kind of the central mystery to be solved here, but yeah, it's got something to do with suffrage, I think I can let that slip and still preserve some secrets. Enola enlists the help of her older brothers Sherlock and Mycroft to find their missing mother, but then once she realizes that Mycroft's going to put her in boarding school, she heads out to London herself to do her own detective work and solve the mystery of the missing mother.
Instead, she encounters the young Lord Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwater, while on the train. He's in a similar position, he's about to be shipped off to a military academy, and he maybe doesn't feel like being a soldier - jeez, what's the point of the aristocracy if you can still die in a war? Say, you don't suppose that the young teen boy running away is somehow connected to the other mystery of the missing mother? How could THAT be, unless it's all part of some larger picture that the characters just can't see yet? And you don't suppose that by spending time together, after leaving the train and making their way to London, that the male teen aristocrat and the female teen detective might come to an understanding of sorts, and perhaps even be attracted to each other? Nah, that's crazy talk - still, stranger things have happened, no pun intended.
Once they reach London, though, they separate, and Enola uses some of the money her mother left for her to rent a flat, and then tries hard to avoid her brothers, who have also returned to London, by dressing as a sophisticated lady. You see, her brothers would expect her to disguise herself as a boy, that would be the obvious move, so she's got to go in the other direction, get a corset, and a black dress to look like a young widow, because everybody avoids talking to a grieving widow. (Do they, though?)
On her own, Enola takes the initiative and leaves coded messages in the personals section of the newspapers her mother is likely to read, and then also manages to puzzle out what part of town her mother might be living in, and also visits her old martial arts instructor to get more clues that way - she's a young woman of action, where Sherlock is depicted here as more of a man of inaction, he's very observant when it comes to visual clues, but he doesn't seem to want to get out and do the legwork, he'd rather sit in the club with Mycroft and wait for clues that come from reading between the lines in newspaper articles. I'm not sure I agree with this depiction.
Anyway, it all plays out like a solid origin tale, as Enola takes the time and opportunity to figure out who she wants to be. Sure, there's a larger mystery to be solved but I wish the origin and backstory didn't take up so much time. It's kind of like how it would be if a "Batman" movie spent its first hour just telling us who Bruce Wayne was as a teen, when really, we just want a five-minute recap of the origin we all know so we can get to the Batman stuff. Once this film finally got rolling, it was fine, so I'm expecting a bit more from the sequel. Yes, it took me so long to get to this film in my Netflix queue that there are now TWO films in the series to watch. My bad.
NITPICK POINT: I guess I've never heard the word "Marquess" spoken before, because I thought that maybe a marquess was a female marquis, maybe. OK, so I guess I was wrong about that - but naturally I assumed that it should be pronounced "mar-kess" because the French word "marquis" is pronounced "mar-kee". But every British person here said "mar-kwess", so what the hell do I know? Next thing you know, they'll be saying "vis-count" instead of "vie-count".
Also starring Millie Bobby Brown (last seen in "Godzilla vs. Kong"), Henry Cavill (last seen in "The Cold Light of Day"), Sam Claflin (last seen in "Love Wedding Repeat"), Helena Bonham Carter (last seen in "Ocean's Eight"), Louis Partridge (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Burn Gorman (last heard in "Guillermo Del Toro's Pinocchio"), Susan Wokoma, Hattie Morahan (last seen in "Operation Mincemeat"), Ellie Haddington (ditto), David Bamber (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Frances de la Tour (last heard in "Dolittle"), Claire Rushbrook (last seen in "Secrets & Lies"), Fiona Shaw (last seen in "Colette"), Alex Kelly, David Kirkbride, Mary Roscoe (last seen in "Paddington"), Esther Coles (last seen in "Emma.")
RATING: 6 out of 10 times Enola breaks the "fourth wall".
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