Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  January is moving along and Chicago just came out of a deep freeze that involved some black ice and slipping but now it's warmed up a bit.  So, let's take a look at what I've found recently.

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With Sidney Poitier passing away recently, I decided to seek out this '80s thriller that he starred in with Tom Berenger and Kirstie Alley.  It's of course not the dramatic heights of something like Raisin in the Sun or The Defiant Ones but I feel like it's always worth appreciating a good genre movie like this.  A killer escapes into the woods and FBI agent from the city, Poitier, is sent to capture him.  A lot of it is city mouse dealing with country mouse, but it's done so well that it transcends a lot of those cliches. 

Director Roger Spottiswoode has such an...odd career.  He directed this minor thriller classic, as well as one Bond film (the under appreciated Tomorrow Never Dies, the one with Michelle Yeoh) but he also has Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot on his CV and the Tom Hanks has a police dog movie Turner and Hooch.  (I admit I need to catch up on Ripley Under Ground, where Barry Pepper gets to play Tom Ripley; so far, I don't think I've seen a bad Ripley movie and Pepper is a damn good actor who doesn't get enough interesting work.)

Shoot To Kill is, sadly, not streaming anywhere but the DVD is only about $5 and worth that.

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I always feel like I should read more Malamud.  I've loved various novels of his that I've read, even though I kind of backed into it after watching that crummy The Natural movie and then reading the fascinating and complex character study that the novel is rather than the weird "dude hits home runs for St Glenn Close of the Outfield" movie.  But anyway, this is a Malamud I've not read from 1972, what looks like a story of two men who are rivals in an inner city of the day.  Plus, really, that cover just screams "I am a 1972 mass market paperback."

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I like having physical copies of things rather than relying on streaming, but I'm very happy to discover that Hill Street Blues is now all streaming on Hulu.  In terms of the history of the current golden age of TV that we are in, HSB really has a place in terms of the early start of it.  Set at a Chicago precinct (the city is never named, but it's pretty obviously Chicago), this was a very solid police drama that never pretended the cops were always right.  It was part of an era of network TV that almost broke through the way that cable dramas would a few years later, with this and LA Law and Miami Vice pointing the way (and so many of the people involved with those shows would go on to things like Mad Men and The Sopranos).  

And hoo boy, this show gave us one of the great crude cop characters that paid off in TV history down the road.  Dennis Franz played Buntz, a hard-bitten police detective who became one of the breakout stars of HSB, a weirdly funny character who a lot of viewers gravitated toward.  To the point where, 4 years into the run of the show...he got a spinoff.  He and his favorite informant, Sid (played by the great Peter Jurasik), headed off to LA for their half-hour comedy.  Yes, the HSB spinoff went from a full-hour drama to a half-hour comedy titled Beverly Hills Buntz,

I cannot express how much I love that the pilot episode was directed by Hal Ashby.

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Time for my schlock pick of the week!  Troll 2 is about the least-connected sequel in movie history that isn't Halloween III: Season of the Witch.  There aren't even any trolls in this; they're goblins.  Excuse me, "nilbogs."  Yes, nilbogs.  It's a weird, goofy little horror movie made entirely with amateur actors (and frankly, what seems like amateur directing and writing) but it's a good amount of silly fun even though it doesn't make a lick of sense.

And really, one of the joys of Troll 2 is that it lead to the documentary from one of the child stars of it, Best Worst Movie, which is a rollicking look at the production of the movie and it's odd legacy as a bad movie that people genuinely love.  A great joy of this documentary is how George Hardy, who is and was a practicing dentist who did this one movie, is kind of delighted at the movie's reputation (and frankly, that he made this one movie; I mean, he was in a movie!  And as an amateur actor he's pretty good!). Hardy is just so happy to talk about it and he's a lot of fun.

Best Worst Movie is available on various platforms with ads, especially Tubi.

Troll 2 is available for rent and purchase on the usual platforms.

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My recommendation of the week is over on Shudder.  Every year I do a little movie project where I watch movies from 100, 90, 80 and so on years ago.  I look at Letterboxd and look for the highest rated move from 1922, 1932 and so on that I haven't seen.  That led me to, this time around, James Whale's 1932 horror movie The Old Dark House.  A group of British travelers end up stranded in the rain in a creepy country home, and of course mayhem ensudes.  This isn't quite up to the moody greatness of Bride of Frankenstein, but where it is better is in some of the characterizations.  Especially the delightful Lillian Bond, who plays a chorus girl who knows exactly who she is and isn't making any excuses for that.  

And hey, it's fun to see Gloria Stuart decades before Titanic when she was a blond ingenue!

It's a tight little movie that's very much worth your time.  (It's also on Hoopla, Kanopy, Tubi and a bunch of other platforms.)