Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's a misty day here in Richmond after a day of quick thunderstorms where we had 80 MPH wind gusts, which is really exciting to watch from my home office window.  I took a trip back to Chicago last weekend and hit a bunch of my favorite thrift stores, so I have actual stuff to talk about this week!

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If you've never seen The Great Dictator, a quick recap; a Jewish barber in a fictional country, 20 years after a losing war, ends up swapping places accidentally with a rising dictator who looks exactly like him and who is trying to consolidate power and rule with an iron fist over his European country.  Oh, and he has this little moustache.  So yep, Chaplin is...well, he's playing Hitler and savagely mocking him at a time (1940) when the US was still technically not at war with Germany and there was still a decent amount of brownshirt support for Hitler in the USA.  So yeah, it's a big swing.  And what a swing this is, Chaplin's most commercially successful movie and one that never stints on the satire and emotion while also at times being legitimately lovely and funny as hell.  If you've never seen it, this absolutely should be a priority.

Part of the reason I picked this up was this fantastic cover, which you can flip and it works either way.  Olly Moss is a fantastic graphic designer known best for his reimagining of movie posters and I simply love his work.  For instance, his posters for Star Wars I-III.

The Great Dictator is currently streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel and Kanopy.

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One of the things that Criterion has been doing, outside of their usual one-movie sets, have been their interesting Eclipse sets, which are more themed around a certain director or studio or theme.  This set is all new to me, since somehow I have only seen Ingrid Bergman's acting work in her Italian and US movies.  I've always loved her work and I'm very curious to see more of it in her native language.  In particular, The Count of the Old Town  is her first speaking role and I'm very curious to see her in a purely comic role.  It looks light and charming.

These all appear to be available on The Criterion Channel.

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The other Eclipse set I found, When Horror Came To Shochiku, is the product of a very weird, brief period in the history of Japanese film studio Shochiku, which is one of the oldest of the Japanese film studios (and predates film, having started as a kabuki production company).  For a long time in their history they were kind of...stately.  Ozu was their showpiece director, for instance.  It's like one studio distributed all of the Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala films, for instance.  But for this very brief period, they got onboard with '60s Japan schlock and made magic.  Here is where I'm going to use Criterion's blurb for it, because I can't do any better:

Following years of a certain radioactive beast’s domination at the box office, many Japanese studios tried to replicate the formula with their own brands of monster movies. One of the most fascinating, if short-lived, dives into that fiendish deep end was the one by Shochiku, a studio better known for elegant dramas by the likes of Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu. In 1967 and 1968, the company created four certifiably batty, low-budget fantasies, tales haunted by watery ghosts, plagued by angry insects, and stalked by aliens—including one in the form of a giant chicken-lizard. Shochiku’s outrageous and oozy horror period shows a studio leaping into the unknown, even if only for one brief, bloody moment.

I've seen half of these movies so far.  The X From Outer Space  is a lot of goofy Japanese 1967 sci-fi fun where a spore comes back from a mission to Mars (one that has stewardesses and a frankly popping '60s lounge music soundtrack and, well, of course it becomes a kaiju and attacks a random city.  It's a ton of fun and a very Saturday afternoon movie.

But WOW, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell.  This movie is insane in all the right ways and if you told me this was a favorite of Takashi Miike (Audition, Zebraman) I would not be surprised at all.  A plane has to crash land somewhere remote and the crew and passengers slowly find themselves possessed by an alien force.  It gets gross and grisly and weird and I cannot recommend it enough.

These are also on the Criterion Channel!  I love that they've embraced the weird and schlock a bit.

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My recommendation this week is an odd one.  Jenny Nicholson is a very accomplished YouTuber who delivers deep-dive essays on pop culture subjects, sometimes celebratory and sometimes annoyed about them.  She took some time off this last year and then last night made a triumphant return with this look at the weirdly well-done Easter plays/musicals from a Canadian megachurch, many of them saved on the Internet on all their copyright-violating glory (and I'm not talking about other people; I'm talking how much the church uses pop culture references and apes character names, costumes, scenes, songs and it's all amazing).    It's about 90 minutes, which might seem long, but I cannot recommend this enough.  Especially the part where Iron Man gets crucified by Loki.