Today, I was free to be back with London Social Detours again - this time, it was a talk about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - always interesting.
So, I logged on a bit early - nearly everyone signed up, which was a decent number. And again, it was the organiser's colleague doing the presentation - thankfully. She had put together a very professional talk, as someone later remarked, which included some childhood photos. She then explained how he'd gone to medical school, and how someone there, with excellent powers of observation, had proved the inspiration for his most famous character, Sherlock Holmes.
Particularly interesting was an old piece of video footage in which the man himself was interviewed. Only about 10 minutes long, it featured him speaking first about the inspiration for Sherlock Holmes, and how he used him as a device to demonstrate logical ways of solving mysteries, which were never generally used before that. He'd said he'd continue afterwards to talk about spiritualism - however, she stopped the video before that point. Which I thought was very bad form - regardless of the content, it would have been interesting to see how he presented it: and it was only another five minutes.
Sure enough, when the group was discussing it afterwards, the talk centred first on spiritualism - until one old fuddy-duddy said, "why are we concentrating on this rubbish when we could be talking about something interesting?" So we switched to talking about Sherlock Holmes, his various incarnations, and indeed other detectives. And when we'd exhausted that, we were back to spiritualism - and the complainer had nothing to say; I guess he was satisfied. Finished, as usual, with a chat about Covid, and one American lady complaining about the tofu shortage..
Later tonight, after what I was watching on tv ended, I was channel-surfing.. there were things I definitely wasn't interested in, and there were two films in progress: not much to choose between them, both rom-coms, one with Eva Longoria, one with Tom Hanks. Ah well now, I really like Tom Hanks - so I ended up watching Larry Crowne - happily, the tv schedule was wrong, as usual, and it had only just started, so I got to see most of it.
This was, it seems, quite the vanity project for him - he produced, directed, co-wrote, and starred in it! It's a coming-of-age story for the middle-aged, where he plays a guy who's recently lost his job (and, it seems, his family) and decides to go back to college. George Takei shows up as his economics professor, Julia Roberts as his professor for some kind of public speaking class. Bryan Cranston is the overgrown kid she's married to. (You can see where this is going..) Rami Malek is one of his classmates.
And it's really feelgood. Well, with Tom Hanks involved, and no major disasters, it'd have to be.. Case in point was the inspired inclusion of Runnin' Down a Dream on the soundtrack. Man, it's so long since I heard that - and what a great driving song! Otherwise, nothing major really happens, but it is very watchable.
Tomorrow - back to Amazon Prime, where the next most interesting film is one I hadn't looked at before, because I thought I didn't have it. "Dirtbag: The Legend of Fred Beckey" gives no results, but "Dirtbag" on its own gives exactly that film! Anyway, it's about a climber - and I always like climbing films.
No comments:
Post a Comment