strange and random happenstance: 221B Baker Street

When I first watched Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking it felt like a fresh take on Holmes and Rupert Everett seemed well cast. The problem is in the proceeding twenty years Sherlock Holmes kind of went boom then bust, with Robert Downey Junior playing him on the big screen in Guy Ritchie's films, to Jonny Lee Miller on Elementary, to Benedict Cumberbatch on Sherlock. Now people are wanting their Sherlock with a twist, look to Millie Bobby Brown as Enola Holmes and Blu Hunt as Sherlock's daughter Amelia Rojas. We as the audience demand more of our stories and watching Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, we see the flaws. What will strike you most is that they didn't even bother to film this TV movie on a decent film stock. It lends that faux reality to it, wherein it almost feels like you're watching the news. This is actually a problem I have with all high-definition film conversion, which this is obviously not. But there's a weird surreality making them hyper real. If you doubt my theory watch Jaws in high-def, it's like watching a documentary about the seventies. But here they coupled their bad film stock with a bad transfer, wherein the PAL to NTSC transfer is jittery, making it look even shittier. Though the worst decision of all was they stuck to the when in doubt use a fog machine for atmosphere school of Victorian filmmaking. There is so much fog you can barely make out any of the action in outdoor scenes, yet incongruously there wasn't enough fog to hide the modern metal structures near the cemetery! The lack of production quality seeped over into the historical details. They very obviously had no historic adviser. Instead they had a slouching Duchess smoking filtered cigarettes almost thirty years before they existed. I mean seriously, she wouldn't have shown exasperation and insolence to a police officer, she would have shown hauteur! And that doesn't even cover the telephones and the improper titles for the King and Queen! They seemed to want to update Holmes, but instead of going all out like Elementary or Sherlock, they added incongruities that exasperate the audience versus adding to the story. But oddly enough what annoyed me the most was the lackadaisical floorplan for 221B Baker Street, which in an odd error is actually once referred to as 222B Baker Street. Of all locations in books and films, I don't think there's any one more regulated than 221B Baker Street. But then again, watching it all these years later, I seem to have nothing but problems with this production. I even question the casting of Rupert Everett as Holmes. He brought nothing to the role other than the required hawk-like profile. Holmes is fun for his excitability, his dark humor, his mood swings, yet Everett plays him almost atonally. But Holmes is supposed to be balanced by Watson. And Ian Hart was miscast abysmally as a lecturing antagonistic parental figure for Holmes, with a very rat like face. With their ongoing bickering one wonders why they are even colleagues at all, because with this behavior they are certainly not friends! Yet all these flaws could be overlooked if the conclusion and the revelation of the killer hadn't been so absurd. And in what is an even weirder turn of events, it isn't Holmes who expounds on how he figured it all out and when and why, but it's the killer explaining himself FOR NO REASON to his latest victim that we get his lame reasoning for killing. He's not a Bond villain for crying out loud! I actually applaud the production of a Sherlock Holmes story wherein Holmes is a nonentity. Not what I or anyone else would have done, but it's at least novel.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: 221B Baker Street, Amelia Rojas, Bond Villain, Dr. Watson, Enola Holmes, Fifty-Five Years a Masterpiece, High-Def, Ian Hart, Rupert Everett, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking, Victorian

The Case of the Gypsy Good-Bye by Nancy Springer
Published by: Philomel Books
Publication Date: May 4th, 2010
Format: Kindle, 177 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy (different edition than one reviewed)

Enola has another disappearance to solve, that of Lady Blanchefleur del Campo. She is the wife of a wealthy foreign nobleman, Duque Luis Orlando del Campo. The beloved Duquessa was with her ladies-in-waiting, ironically right near 221B Baker Street, when she disappeared into thin air. There was a woman who approached her at the entrance to the Baker Street Underground stop, but what happened next no one knows. Did the woman lure the lady down onto the busy platform? Was she dragged along the tracks to be dealt with? She had no reason to run away but then why is there no ransom? Enola is approached in her disguise as Miss Ivy Mshle, now Mrs. John Jacobson, Dr. Ragostin's assistant, she gave herself a promotion. The husband says he is desperate and would have called on the great Sherlock Holmes but he is out of town. Curious on so many levels Enola goes to meet the ladies-in-waiting and see the life the Lady Blanchefleur del Campo was living. If there is such a thing as a slave to fashion, the missing Duquessa is the embodiment of that phrase. She has spent her entire life in a constricting spooned corset, even sleeping in it. She has had several confinements but has always lost the children, not a surprise to Enola as the poor woman has the same measurements she did as when she was a child. But Enola has a theory.... The ladies-in-waiting lovingly describe their mistress's clothes when she disappeared and Enola wonders, what if she was taken not for who she was but how she looked and what she was wearing? As Enola herself knows from her first day in London, there are unscrupulous people who will do anything to earn a little money. She quickly flees to check out her hunch which is easy enough to prove, and also to avoid her brother who has arrived on the scene, but what won't be as easy is what Sherlock has in store for her. The problem with installing her ex-landlady, Mrs. Tupper, with Florence Nightingale is that now Sherlock has a place he knows she will return to. But just cutting out Mrs. Tupper wouldn't be right so Enola will have to risk being found out. Which happens in short order, not because Sherlock recognized Enola, but because her faithful pooch did. That's where he was when the Duque searched for him, down at Ferndell getting an accomplice to out Enola! But at least Sherlock views his sister in a different light after all her adventures. He's not going to throw her to the wolves, or as the case here would be, to Mycroft. No, instead he will ask her for her help with something that their mother sent him and in return they will search for the Duquessa together. And she guesses Mycroft can come along for the ride. Maybe they will reach an entente?

The "problem" with this book is the title, The Case of the Gypsy Good-Bye. Oddly enough someone, somewhere, seems to have realized this and in the short story Enola Holmes and the Boy in Buttons which was released as a teaser for the first Enola Holmes book in over a decade it is referred to as The Case of the Disappearing Duchess. Some time later down the internet rabbit hole and it appears that perhaps this was done on British and Australian reissues when the Netflix movie came out. Be that as it may, someone at least realized the title of this book is just one big spoiler. Not that this really takes anything away from the book, it's just that you read the title and you think, oh, her mom's dead. Which is indeed the case. Which is also a good end to the series, or as it now stands, an end to the first arc of the series. Because Enola might have lost her mother but by opening up she realizes that she does have two brothers and if they could just really see her perhaps she doesn't have to spend her whole life alone like her name prophesied. And for me, the way the siblings come together through an interesting case and a long night shows that Enola can be accepted for who she is. What's more, I loved that Mycroft's every assumption was so far off base that he had more than a little egg on his face. While tying up the Holmes family drama Nancy Springer continues to handle topics of women's rights and what is done to them in the name of societal expectations. Lady Blanchefleur del Campo has suffered so severely at the hands of fashion that she literally cannot bear her own weight because her spine is too weak from a waist training corset. What I find interesting is that more recently there has been a push to say that corsets aren't the evil we once viewed them. That only those rare few cinched them tight enough to cause damage to internal organs leading to health issues such as the inability to bear children and constantly fainting. I have worn a corset and I didn't have any deleterious effects. But I wore one for only a few days and reading this book I thought back to one of my friends who in grade school had a scoliosis brace. To have to wear something everyday would be hard, but to do so AND try to use it to "improve" your figure? I don't think any right minded person would ever come to the conclusion that corsets are a good thing. But then again, people have always been choosing fashion over health.... Perhaps that's why there are those trying to rewrite the true history of corsets?