Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!    A good New Year to everyone and I hope you've been having a good holiday season.  (And for my own joy, today is the 12th anniversary of my first date with my wife!). So on to my usual thrift store nonsense.

________________________________________

Hey, do you want a movie with Hitchcock actors without the Hitchcock hangups?  Would you you like a witch comedy that understands that Kim Novak could be very, very funny?  Do you want a movie where Jack Lemmon is the happiest bongos player that has ever existed?  Then boy howdy you need to check out Bell, Book And Candle.  It's a kind of silly movie that also feels at times like if Hitchcock decided to make a witches and warlocks comedy.  

Bell, Book And Candle is available on the Watch TCM app.

______________________________________

Ah, here we have a curiosity.  This novel, from 1955, won the second Hugo for Best Novel....and infamously is easily the worst novel to win that.  (And I've read every Hugo novel winner; this is an absolutely correct assessment.)  It's a weird, pretty sexist novel even by the standards of '50s science fiction, with woman characters that are dull, shrill and grotesque.  It's one of those things where I wish I could talk to the voters in 1957and go...why?  Why this thing?  This was the last year where they didn't have a list of nominees so we can't even know what it beat.  But jeez, this is the year that Leigh Brackett's The Long Tomorrow came out. 

______________________________________

Look.  Yes.  I have a Spider-Man lunch box.  Have I ever used it?  No.  Does it live on a shelf?  Yes.  It is pretty awesome?  Hell yes.

______________________________________

Now this is my find of the week, maybe the month.  I've owned the basic Monterey Pop movie on Criterion for a while, but finding the full set (which includes the original movie, all the performance sets and separate mini-movies on Jimi Hendrix and Otis Redding) was a real find.

If you've never seen this, it's one of the absolutely great concert films about one of the great music festivals.  Monterey Pop Festival took place in 1967 in California and is infamous for how it was the US major debut for Hendrix and The Who and Ravi Shankar and the big debut of Janis Joplin, all of whom were at the top of their game.  Add in Simon and Garfunkel, The Mamas and the Papas, Laura Nyro, The Grateful Dead...and geez, so many more.  This is one I'm absolutely looking forward to watching a bunch of over the New Years weekend.

Plus, this set smells like the previous owner smoked a good deal of decent pot and that just seems weirdly kind of right.

Monterey Pop is streaming on both HBO Max and Criterion Channel.