Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday, everyone!   Packing continues, the Sox just lost two in one day to the Guardians,  Christina is out of town and I'm watching absolute junk and playing video games.  (Thank you, Tubi.). So let's see what fun thrift store finds I've been pulling off the shelves and packing!

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Lewis Allen is a director I know very little about (and frankly, looking at his filmography, outside of seeing a bunch of TV work I am simply unfamiliar with the vast majority of his directing work).  But this seems up my alley, by all accounts a 1944 British horror film that feels like it has pieces of The Turn of the Screw and many other British gothic horror pieces.  And god, this cover.  Sam Weber does lovely work and this piece, where you find yourself straining to see what might be holding this female figure, is both lovely and unsettling.

And geez, that's some fun 1940's movie font work going on, right?  I'm going to watch this this weekend and the joy will be that I'm going in pretty much blind.  (I'm not even sure if it has any actors I know.)

Sadly, The Uninvited is not streaming anywhere in the US at the moment.  But check your local library for the Criterion edition!

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Now this is a fun thing I found in packing.  Back in 2015, there was a 70mm run of Quentin Tarantino's movie The Hateful Eight, which might not be one of his best movies but looks fantastic.  It's snowy and snowbound and so many actors are doing some hardcore standoff work as they try to figure out who is on whose side.  And when I saw it, we all got these Roadshow programs and they're pretty great.

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My recommendation of the week, since it's now on HBO Max, is The Batman.  What an odd, moody piece of adapting various Batman storylines this is.  Robert Pattinson has a fantastic chin for playing Batman, it's grimy in a way that director Matt Reeves (who did the recent and excellent Planet of the Apes movie) knows what he is working with and isn't just for the sake of being edgy.  And then Paul Dano gets out of the deliberately bad costume and oh shit he just delivers.

See you back next week with maybe less grim stuff!