Happy Thursday, everyone! It's Veteran's Day here in the USA (and appreciation for all our veterans). This week in thrift store finds we have a 19th century utopian novel, an American Treasure knockoff and Mark Harmon has to reflect on his life before he goes onstage!
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Let's start with the schlock of the week! There's a whole run of Mummy and National Treasure knock-offs over the last 20 years and frankly, I'm here for this cast even though I bet some of them are in it for about 5 minutes. Even better though? Looking the plot description, this is also a knock-off of the middling Dan Brown decoding mysteries like The DaVinci Code. And it's a 4-hour miniseries! This might be something I toss on today to fall asleep to on my day off. Because come on, it has thieves dressed up as Knights Templar stealing a decoder and leading everyone on some sort of adventure.
Worth noting...poor Mira Sorvino. She has a very-well deserved Academy Award and then had her career absolutely destroyed by the Weinsteins, those sick bastards. Thankfully, it looks like she's back in the game again with some interesting projects coming up. But still, 20 years of potential great work lost because of them.
Sadly, The Last Templar does not appear to be streaming legally anywhere.
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Now here's something I was completely unfamiliar with. The story of a man hypnotized into sleep in 1887 wakes up in 2000 (I know, let's not think too hard about that), this looks to be one of those old novels that tries to picture a utopian society according to the mores of 1887. (My personal favorite so far is that they have a version of Spotify, but because the electronic transmission of music was a few years in the future instead they have people playing live music that is transmitted to people's homes through phone tubes, a quite fun steampunk solution.).
Of course, a lot of this even flipping through is speechifying about how bad 1887 is. It's just that kind of book. I mean, I get it. Even Huxley and Orwell could be prone to it in Brave New World and 1984. It's just something you have to be aware of in a novel like this.
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Now this is one I'm curious to revisit. Stealing Home is a movie about a an ex-baseball player, played by Mark Harmon, who comes back to his home town to reminisce about his his career never qutie panned out like he hoped. There's a lot of flashbacks to the late '60s and his older friend, played by Jodie Foster, who was his mentor and (in my memory) unrequited crush. I remember it being a very lazy summer gold light sort of movie and Harmon and Foster being very good, (It's kind of interesting to know that they are actually very close in age despite the structure of this movie, with Harmon being a year older though Foster started her acting career earlier.)
This trailer feels just slightly more wacky than I remember the movie being, but I expect the studio marketing people were trying to find some way to tie into your typical '80s sex comedy. But then WOW I found a music video for a song from the soundtrack and maybe I don't remember this movie as well as I thought I did.
OK MAYBE THAT CRUSH ISN'T AS UNREQUITED AS I REMEMBERED and hoo boy does that raise some uncomfortable questions about age and consent. Also, excellent casting of William McNamara as the young Mark Harmon here. He's an actor I'm not terribly familiar with but I do remember him from the adaptation of Stephen King's short story "You Know They Got A Hell Of A Band," where a couple runs across a town inhabited by all the dead rock legends of the 20th century....and death turned them mean.
Huzzah! The whole episode is on YouTube, from an excellent anthology series titled Nightmares and Dreamscapes. McNamara makes a pretty decent Ricky Nelson
Stealing Home is available for rent and purchase at the usual steaming places. My DVD is (ugh) "formatted to fit your screen," so it's a terrible pan-and-scan, so I might replace it with a later edition.
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My pick of the week is a bit of an odd one, you might say, but I've been greatly enjoying Doogie Kamealoha, M.D. on Disney Plus. The first series just wrapped this week and it's pretty damn delightful, a nice take in the material but this time set in Hawai'i. Peyton Elizabeth Lee is a fun, charming lead, Kathleen Rose Perkins is very right as her Philly-born mother (there's some really choice Philly jokes in this) and the real standout for me is Jason Scott Lee as her father. Lee, frankly, should have had a sitcom quite a long time ago. He has some real comic timing but also has the dramatic skills to back it up. It's been a real rough last month or so and this is exactly the light charmer of a show that I needed.
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