Knives Out 3

I've been so focused on Holmes lately that I haven't had time to review the new Benoit Blanc mystery, Wake Up Dead Man. I did see it in a local theater, and I was very disappointed that the major chains didn't carry it. Now it's streaming on Netflix, and I suppose I would have to resubscribe to rewatch the movie. Lately Netflix is also trying to buy Warner Brothers while facing interference from Paramount. Any huge media merger is bad, of course, yet you root for the lesser of two evils.

As for the movie, I enjoyed it a lot, though I don't care for Blanc's new hairstyle. But that's me being shallow. I did like his fashion; he rocks a classic suit. Father Jud was very charming and sympathetic as the protagonist. I enjoyed the film both as a clever locked room mystery and also as a meditation on faith and religion. See, there is a way to wrestle with moral questions without being fucking hamfisted, like Suchet's later Poirot movies including Murder on the Orient Express. He was shoveling his religion in where it didn't belong. But I digress.

Plaidder has a good analysis of Wake Up Dead Man, that includes her perspective from growing up Catholic. I grew up Buddhist, though I didn't understand a thing in Temple because I didn't know the language, nor did they try to teach me anything theology-wise. So I remain ignorant and mostly agnostic now. Of course one cannot escape the dominant Christian culture in America, especially with the rightwing GOP acting holier than thou and bleating constantly as if they were the oppressed victims.

Meanwhile,  I was searching the internet for help in trying to do my chronology timeline, and I came across this Queer History of Sherlock Holmes, which is useful. If you click in the timeline and drag it around, it even mentions my old college essay "Validity of Interpretation in Sherlockiana" from 1998! How flattering. It's offline now along with the old Sacrilege website. I haven't reposted Validity as I thought nobody was still interested in my college essays, but I still have the text on my computer. So I reread it and noticed typos and punctuation errors that I never corrected. Is it worth cleaning it up and posting it again? I had referenced numerous posts on the Hounds of the Internet listserv, though I've no idea whether any of the old links on the Works Cited page would still work.