Happy Thursday, everyone! I hope everyone is having a good week. No light-hearted banter for me this week, as will become apparent. So let's dive right on in.
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Last week, my father died. Daniel Finn was a good man, a good father, one I disagreed with a lot but I almost never felt he was straight-up wrong. (Well, there was how he, a life-long democrat, voted in 2016.). So I figured I would feature a movie I watched the other night that he introduced me to as a kid and I've always loved.
1963's The Great Escape is a very fictionalized version of a real-life occurrence, the escape of Allied prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III in Poland in WWII (based mostly on real-life British escapee's memoir of the same name, which I highly recommend). The real life story is fascinating as hell and it's really impressive how this version (directed wonderfully by John Sturges) gives every character room to breath and develop. And GOD, this cast. Richard Attenborough. James Garner. Donald Pleasance. James Coburn. Steve McQueen. David McCallum. A whole host of other US and British character actors. This movie is a delight of good performances that never forgets it is set in a WWII POW camp.
And good god, that theme music.
The Great Escape is available for rent/purchase at the usual places and is streaming with ads on the Roku Channel.
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A random find for me this week of an Ishiguro I've never read. I've not read of much of his work as I should have, considering I think his Novel Prize is one of the best of the last 25 years, so this one I was very happy to run across. This is an edition from Faber and Faber, the London publishing house that is close to a hundred years on in excellent British publishing.
I don't have much to say about this, but I did finally recently see the movie version of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, one of the saddest science fiction novels I've ever read....and the novel holds that feeling up. I will always recommend an Ishiguro, be it NLMG or Remains of the Day.
Never Let Me Go is streaming on HBO Max and very much worth your time.
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Did you know there are Criterion Collection knock-offs from The Republic Of Korea? I didn't! It looks like this is all-region, so I took a flyer on it. (I do love Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast.)
The Blood Of A Poet is streaming on the Criterion Channel.
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So many people talk about Monroe in Some Like It Hot, but I do think this might be her better movie. A Technicolor noir set at, yes, Niagara Falls, this is some real good fun of weird double-crosses and marriages gone wrong and huge vistages of water and betrayal. And come on, Joseph Cotten! This is his second best noir after Shadow Of A Doubt.
Niagara is streaming on Criterion Channel and Flix Fling.
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Finally, this is my skull Boris thatI found last year. Say hello to everyone, Boris. Yes, for Karloff. I could have gone with Yorick, but he looked more like a Boris.
Which leads me to my schlock recommendation of he week, 2000's The Skulls.
You will be hard-pressed to find a movie that is both so weirdly stupid and also so weirdly entertaining. Director Rob Cohen went on to also direct The Fast And The Furious and xXx and that should tell you exactly the kind of dumb movie you're in for.
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