Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope your spring or fall is going well.  Baseball season has finally started here in the US, the White Sox are doing well and finally the National League has joined modern baseball by adopting the designated hitter, 49 years after the rest of baseball.  So let's see what I've found recently!

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Let's start with my Criterion of the week.  I've seen Bicycle Thieves a couple of times, but never in a proper presentation by aspect ratio and such.  So I'm looking forward to, probably this weekend, seeing this presented properly.  It's the tale of a father and son in post-war Rome

And I do love a presentation like this.  A nice collection of essays, the discs and then the box set cover.  It's very well-presented for a movie that is all about a series of scenes that build to a climax of realism and loveliness.

Bicycle Thieves is currently streaming on HBO Max, Criterion Channel, Kanopy and something new to me, FilmBox.

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My recommendation for the week is, of all things, Eternals.  Its really out there for a Marvel movie and I appreciate that, based on am intermittent series of stories going back to the '60s that are set in the 3rd tier of Marvel stories (1st is the ground heroes, like Spider-Man, 2nd are the global heroes, like the Avengers and the 3rd are the cosmic stories like the Eternals (and yes, there's a lot of overlap).). This is weird and funny and it's not perfect, but I like it quite a lot.  Hell, I'm a huge fan of how one of these supposedly immortal beings whose job might be done...decides to become a Bollywood star who slowly becomes the son of the son of the son in a Bollywood acting family.  Now that is how you use Kumail Nanjiani, who gets to show off how much he is an incandescent candle of charisma.

But seriously, this movie is weird. There's supposed gods, Earth being used as a cradle for creating new gods, a\Barry Keoghan getting to use his real Dublin accent for once (kind of a running thing, frankly; I think all of the Eternals are getting to use their natural voice).  Plus, if you enjoyed Train to Busan, you get Ma Dong-seok as Gilgamesh!

Eternals is currently streaming on Disney+.