Holy Crap

So, I just re-discovered this blog, and I figure, why not give it a go again? I'm pretty sure no one was reading this, so it's not like anyone will really notice my long absence. And I've been looking for new and interesting ways to kill time, and who knows, a blog might work. Or I might get bored again, who knows.

So, being my weird sort-of-organized-but-not-really self, I laid out a bunch of things I thought could be good blog posts when I doing this more regularly. And one of those was a huge list of recommendations, because I do love telling people what they should like. Because I think that I like good things, and I just want to spread that goodness around :)

Well, most of those posts that I laid out (including the recommendation one) are out of date, so it was basically a huge waste of time, but whatever, maybe I can rework them and put them up here after all. But anyway, what this meandering rambling was supposed to be was an introduction to some actual recommendations. So here goes.

So, I'm not sure how I found out about Sherlock (I spend too much time wandering around the internet), but when I first heard about it, I knew I had to watch it. Yeah, I know, Sherlock Holmes has been done to death, but this is a little different. It's set in present day, so Sherlock has many more tools at his disposal, and almost always uses his mobile phone to look stuff up. But what drew it to me most was the actor they chose to play John Watson. It's Martin Freeman. I fucking love Martin Freeman! And that's all it took for me to look up this miniseries put out by BBC1, and I'm so glad I did. It's fantastic. It's composed of 3 episodes, each 90 minutes long. Each episode adapts ideas from Doyle's original stories. Some are more obvious than others. For example, the first episode is called "A Study in Pink", and is about a lady found dead in an empty room with "RACHE" scratched into the floor next to her, who was [SPOILER] poisoned (sort of) by a taxi driver. This is based on the story "A Study in Scarlet", where a dead man in found in an empty room with "RACHE" painted in blood on the wall, who was [SPOILER] poisoned by a taxi driver.

I've only very recently gotten into Sherlock Holmes, but I can see why his stories have been so successful. Sherlock Holmes is a fantastic character. It's like he has a super power, but he just know's how to think more efficiently than other people. And even though he is blessed with this "super power", he really isn't a hero. He just solves crimes because he's bored. And that's what I like about Sherlock. It doesn't try to make Holmes into some hero running around the city trying to make it better. It actually shows how out of touch with social conduct he is. This modern Sherlock doesn't know who the prime minister is, and is baffled at the idea that a woman would still be upset years after the loss of her stillborn daughter. And the casting of Martin Freeman was an amazing choice (not simply because I love Martin Freeman). Sherlock Holmes is an almost unbelievable character, but the addition of Martin Freeman as John Watson has a wonderful grounding effect. Freeman is very good at playing a normal person. Even when he's in ridiculous comedies (The Office, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), he plays the straight man who's trapped with all the funny crazy people. And that's sort of his character in Sherlock, except he chooses to stay with Sherlock, and he also gets the chance to save the day every so often.

One thing about Sherlock that makes it stand out (to me, at least) is the humour in it. I think a lot of the time, people think that Sherlock Holmes has to be this very serious character who goes around solving crimes without a sense of humour. But that's not true. Sherlock solves crimes because it's fun (or at least he thinks its fun). And Sherlock shows that. They even lampshade it at the end of "A Study in Pink" where Sherlock and John are bantering and laughing and John says "We can't giggle, it's a crime scene!". And the humour in the show is handled really well, because the show can be really dark, but the humour is woven in so that it's not jarring or annoying. And they worked in funny things from the original stories that most people probably don't know, like that fact that Sherlock Holmes didn't know the Earth went around the Sun. Who'd have thought that the worlds greatest consulting detective wouldn't know how the solar system wan organized?

Well, I think that's enough rambling for now. Go check out Sherlock: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00t4pgh