Happy Thursday, everyone! Still cold here in Illinois as we pack up and get ready to move to Virginia, but as I'm packing up it's fun to find some of the weird stuff I've accumulated.
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Lost Horizon is a curious sort-of classic. Frankly, I'm not sure outside of the concept of Shangri-La how many people remember that this was a novel or s a few films and even a stage musical. It's somewhat of a riff on the concept from many cultures of a place outside of borders, where some mystical concept of eternal life or philosophical nirvana or life everlasting exists. And in this case, the Westerners show up and disrupt things and everything goes to shit.
But really, you can make the argument that things are already terrible in these closed-off worlds. They have a horribly strict social hierarchy, for instance. So maybe the outside is a breath of fresh air, but of course in these fantasies the outside is always a breath of poison.
(That said, the mountain scenes as people struggle in and out of Shangri-La make this movie absolutely worth seeing. They are impressive as hell even now, 85 years later.)
Lost Horizon is available for rent and purchase at the usual places and you can stream it if you subscribe to Fubo or Crackle.
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So apparently Justified is coming back for a new season! Now, I'll admit, I've never watched an episode of this. But do I want to watch the weirdly funny Timothy Olyphant as a (I think) cop in a (I think) Kentucky town dealing with local crime lords, based on an Elmore Leonard series of novels? Well, yes, I'm not made of stone. Olyphant keeps popping up on my radar in odd places. Like, for instance, in The League as a white guy obsessed with making sushi.
This is a man who enjoys having a weird career. (I also have been told he's fantastic in the zombie comedy Santa Clarita Diet, which I have not seen.)
All 6 seasons of Justified are streaming on Hulu, as are all 7 seasons of The League.
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One of these days I will finally pick up the Criterion of Shoah, an 8-hour examination of the mechanics on the grounds of the Holocaust. I've seen it a couple of times, a harrowing remembrance by both the victims and by the people in the towns around the camps and their various levels of remembrance and denial. This little hardcover is a transcript of the whole movie, so it doesn't have the visual impact, but it is a good historical document.
Shoah is currently streaming on AMC+ for some reason.
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