Enola Holmes Film Series

[HerlockSholmes]

I assume that I’m telling you something that you already know here but Sherrinford was Doyle’s original name for Holmes?

[HerlockSholmes]

3 hours ago, Hikari said:

Herlock Sholmes,

I just visited David Marcum's 17-Step blog for the first time in ages; I was curious if I'd find anything there about the upcoming Netflix project.   I didn't; DM's latest entry was dated August 8th.  Going out on a limb, not terribly far, I am prepared to say that Mr. Marcum would most likely not look favorably upon this Enola project, for the simple reason that Enola does not exist in Canon but is the entire invention of Ms. Springer.  DM is open to established characters being interpreted in fresh ways but would take a dim view of major characters being totally invented and stuck in.

Anthony Horowitz's Moriarty, for example, envisions Athelney Jones, one of the lesser Scotland Yarders, as the protagonist in this post-Reichenbach set tale.  This is an amplification of a minor character, not an invention.  

Look what he has to say about Kurland's Moriarty series . . it's positively effusive!  Surprising to me, as I'd have thought he'd say that Mr. Kurland mucks around too much with the established character of Professor Moriarty.

This was cut-n-paste, so I apologize for the black lines:

Professor Moriarty has been featured in several other series of his own. The best, without doubt, are the incredibly clever and well-written books and short stories by Michael Kurland. I discovered these in the late 1970’s when I was a young teenager, just a few years after I’d found Holmes. I bought the paperback of Kurland’s first Moriarty novel, The Infernal Device, and realized that there was a whole world of ways to learn about Holmes in addition to Watson’s viewpoint. This Moriarty wasn’t quite evil – not yet, anyway – and he and his associates were incredibly fascinating. Sadly, there were only five of Kurland’s Moriarty novels published, and four short stories, before the series apparently went on Hiatus in 2014. In the meantime, I’ve consistently pestered Mr. Kurland to write another Moriarty short story for the ongoing series of anthologies that I edit, The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, so there’s still hope.

Kurland’s Moriarty stories are:

• The Infernal Device (1978)
• Death by Gaslight (1982)
• The Great Game (2001)
• The Empress of India (2006)
• Who Thinks Evil (2014)
• Victorian Villainy (2011 – Short stories, including “The Paradol Paradox”,“Years Ago and in a Different Place”, “Reichenbach”, and “The Picture of Oscar Wilde”)

Mr. Kurland has been a contributor to DM's anthology series as I recall, but he has stayed away from doing a Moriarty story.

 

I think that those books would make for an interesting film adaption.

Ill have to check online for “Victorian Villainy” as I don’t have that one. I wonder if they’re Moriarty short stories?

[HerlockSholmes]

Just checked. They are Moriarty stories. How did I miss them?

Cheapest copy at the moment is £25 though!

Its on the list.

My next crime fiction ‘want’ are the Dr Thorndyke series which I’ve wanted to read for quite a while and have been recommended highly to me. I think there are 21 novels and around 40 shorts. You can get the novels in 3 or 4 book omnibuses but they are £35 and out of stock at Amazon. I saw a short story collection but that was out of stock too. I’ll keep searching.

[Carol the Dabbler]

16 minutes ago, HerlockSholmes said:

I assume that I’m telling you something that you already know here but Sherrinford was Doyle’s original name for Holmes?

Sorry, yes I did know that, but should have mentioned it.

And his original name for the good doctor was Ormond Sacker. 

 

[HerlockSholmes]

10 hours ago, Carol the Dabbler said:

Sorry, yes I did know that, but should have mentioned it.

And his original name for the good doctor was Ormond Sacker. 

 

Sherrinford might have been ok but Ormond Sacker? Good choice to change that one I think. 

Theres a group photo of schoolboys and one of them is Moriarty. Almost certainly the boy Doyle got the name from. I wonder if anyone’s researched to try and locate his family for a photo? I’d have imagined that they have but with no luck.

[HerlockSholmes]

Good points. Doyle was certainly unwilling to acknowledge his fathers ‘issues’ overtly, they weren’t discovered until well after Doyle’s, but it’s noticeable that he  often uses characters with drink problems; Black Peter, Sir Eustace Brackenstall in The Abbey Grange, Mr Woodley in The Solitary Cyclist and Jim Browner in The Cardboard Box. These are the ones I can remember - can anyone name others? There’s Hugo Baskerville of course.

[HerlockSholmes]

17 hours ago, HerlockSholmes said:

Just checked. They are Moriarty stories. How did I miss them?

Cheapest copy at the moment is £25 though!

Its on the list.

My next crime fiction ‘want’ are the Dr Thorndyke series which I’ve wanted to read for quite a while and have been recommended highly to me. I think there are 21 novels and around 40 shorts. You can get the novels in 3 or 4 book omnibuses but they are £35 and out of stock at Amazon. I saw a short story collection but that was out of stock too. I’ll keep searching.

Life isn’t all woe after all😄

I just ordered Dr Thorndyke Investigates from Amazon which is a collection of a few of the short stories. With postage it was £7.28 but apparently I’m in credit from vouchers I received at Christmas so my book is costing me nothing.

Happy days

[Carol the Dabbler]

10 hours ago, HerlockSholmes said:

Sherrinford might have been ok but Ormond Sacker? Good choice to change that one I think. 

I agree.  Mr. Holmes is a bit of an exotic creature, so he needs a somewhat exotic name.  But the doctor is our down-to-earth connection, the guy who does his best to explain the oddities he encounters, so he needs a nice, common, down-to-earth name -- and you couldn't do much better than John Watson.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

@HerlockSholmes -- I've moved your post to the Recently Watched Movies thread.  It probably sounds like I'm being arbitrary, since even we mods often go off topic, so I thought I'd better explain.

It's perfectly OK to wander off the topic in a natural, conversational sort of way.  If the digression takes on a life of its own, one of the staff members may eventually move the whole thing somewhere else or even create a new thread with it -- but usually we just wander back on topic after a bit.

However, if a new post is an abrupt change of topic, with no connection to prior posts, then it belongs elsewhere.  If you're not sure where to put it, that's what the Speedy's Cafe thread is for -- as the thread's subtitle says, "general chat about anything you like."

 

 

[HerlockSholmes]

No problem Carol

[BBally1981]

I've noticed some people are upset at the movie because they portray Mycroft as one of those "women should know their place" people.

And are accusing this as woke Hollywood, ignoring that this is based on the first of a book series that began in 2006 or that this wasn't the first incarnation of Mycroft to have a similar attitude like Charles Gray's incarnation from Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series.

 

Edited September 25, 2020 by Carol the Dabbler
Removed spoiler box (pretty minor one) so we can discuss the matter.

[Carol the Dabbler]

*sigh*  That's one thing that really bugs me about some people's reactions to period TV shows, movies, and books, namely the attitude that such works must be respectful to one and all -- according to current standards!  Showing a fairly accurate picture of the Victorian era allows Enola to react to it much as we might in her shoes -- in other words, she's not only the Holmes of this adventure, she's also the Watson through whose eyes we experience what might as well be a foreign territory.  This enables us to learn something about history!

I read recently that a children's book award that had originally been called the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award, after the author of Little House on the Prairie and its sequels, is now called something else.  This is because the Little House books are now deemed racist, because certain minor white characters react to the local Indians in historically accurate (albeit considerably watered down) ways, and even though Pa Ingalls (one of the main characters) counters those attitudes by teaching his children to respect the people whose land this used to be.  Renaming the award displays the same narrow-minded attitude that prettied up the TV series based (somewhat loosely) on those books.

How are today's children to be aware of the amazing strides that society has made in the past two hundred years, if they are "protected" from how things used to be?

 

[BBally1981]

Seems Enola Holmes had hit the Top 10 in 78 countries, being #1 in 76 of those countries

https://flixpatrol.com/top10/netflix/world/biggest-streak

https://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbean/2020/09/24/enola-holmes-nabs-the-1-spot-on-netflixs-top-10-list/#77cf9ff04e1e

 

[BBally1981]

Apparently, Enola Holmes' user score on Metcritic is 5.9 because a lot of people are giving it a 0 rating.

 https://www.metacritic.com/movie/enola-holmes/user-reviews

[Carol the Dabbler]

On 9/23/2020 at 8:24 PM, BBally1981 said:

I've noticed some people are upset at the movie because they portray Mycroft as one of those "women should know their place" people.

And are accusing this as woke Hollywood, ignoring that this is based on the first of a book series that began in 2006 or that this wasn't the first incarnation of Mycroft to have a similar attitude like Charles Gray's incarnation from Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series.

Thanks for posting those links in your subsequent posts, BBally.  I now have a better idea of what people are complaining about.  It's mostly NOT that Mycroft is a sexist, it's that Enola is a feminist, which the complainers see as anachronistic.

As I mentioned above, I don't like retroactive political correctness.  But feminism didn't suddenly happen circa 1970, it's at least a hundred years older than that.  In the US territory of Wyoming (which became a state in 1890), women campaigned for and won the right to vote in 1869, and the same was soon true in several other western territories and states, but the nationwide battle continued until 1920, when all US women gained the right to vote.  British women of that era were also fighting for the right to vote, and the movie is apparently set in 1900 (though the book takes place some twelve years earlier), smack in the middle of the Women's Suffrage campaign, when women were also beginning to rebel against restrictive clothing and a number of other things.  Bloomers date back to about 1850, and women were also starting to reject corsets at that time.  So the books, at least, fairly and accurately represent a certain segment of the British female population of that era.

Admittedly, the women's rights movement died down quite a lot in the mid-20th century, so it's understandable that a lot of people think feminism started only about 50 years ago.  And I haven't yet seen the adaptation, so for all I know it carries things to ridiculous extremes.  As soon as I get the opportunity, I'll see for myself.

 

[BBally1981]

I think most of us can agree that one of the film's few issues is it's portrayal of Mycroft. 

Spoiler

He's supposed to be smarter than Sherlock and yet that doesn't seem to be the case in the film, making him seemingly less smart than either Sherlock or Enola

Is this how he was portrayed in the Enola Holmes Mysteries books?

[Carol the Dabbler]

The books are Enola's territory, so neither Mycroft nor Sherlock spends much time "on stage."  She nevertheless manages to bamboozle them pretty regularly.

Doyle's Holmes describes Mycroft as smarter than himself, but since he never acknowledges even the existence of Enola, who knows what he might have said about her relative intelligence?

 

[Artemis]

My father’s first comment was, “Why do they have to make a female version of every male hero now?  I’m tired of it!”  I wonder how many people are giving it a low rating for similar reasons.

 

[Carol the Dabbler]

52 minutes ago, Artemis said:

My father’s first comment was, “Why do they have to make a female version of every male hero now?  I’m tired of it!”  I wonder how many people are giving it a low rating for similar reasons.

True, some of the negative comments I read could have been reactions to that just as easily as to Enola's feminism.

I also wonder how many of the negative reviewers had even seen the movie?

 

[Sheerluck]

After watching Enola Holmes I found it to be fun, charming and very entertaining. Henry Cavill's unusually beefy Sherlock is an interesting change from the typical Sherlock mould. Cavill's Sherlock is more thoughtful and caring than normally portrayed and while interesting to watch he doesn't overshadow the main crux of the film, which is Enola.

Millie Bobby Brown carries the film well and while it won't win any awards Enola Holmes is a fun way to spend a couple of hours. It isn't Sherlock Holmes, nor is it meant to be.

[BBally1981]

Something odd happened on the film's Rotten Tomatoes page, it seems many user reviews suddenly disappeared including mine. I remember it was around 800 user ratings yesterday and now it's down to around 578 user ratings.

[Artemis]

I don’t know why yours would be deleted, but RT has done it before.  Before “Captain Marvel” even hit theaters, it received a massive number of negative reviews from people who were basically just complaining about “the feminism”.  RT chose to delete the ones that were deemed offensive or sounded like they came from people who hadn’t actually seen the movie.  Not sure if that’s what’s happening here, but it might be.

 

[BBally1981]

43 minutes ago, Artemis said:

I don’t know why yours would be deleted, but RT has done it before.  Before “Captain Marvel” even hit theaters, it received a massive number of negative reviews from people who were basically just complaining about “the feminism”.  RT chose to delete the ones that were deemed offensive or sounded like they came from people who hadn’t actually seen the movie.  Not sure if that’s what’s happening here, but it might be.

 

I assumed so at first but I noticed, the audience rating went down from 79% to 69% when that happened, which means if this was true they must have accidently deleted a ton of positive reviews.

[Artemis]

Hmmmm... it’s a mystery!

 

[BBally1981]

For the past number of months, Enola Holmes' Audience Rating on Rotten Tomatoes was around 70%, which was a decent number but all of a sudden it's down 58%, I've noticed it received a lot of 1 star to less ratings in just last month and a lot of it is complaining about how it's anti-male propaganda. A little suspicious.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/enola_holmes

 

Edited February 5, 2021 by Carol the Dabbler
If you can't read this post, try highlighting it (like you wanted to copy it). That should make it legible. I've seen this problem before, but don't recall ever figuring out what was causing it or how to fix it.