Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Let's dive into stuff I've found recently

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Götterdammerung is really one of the best German words.  It's just what it says on the tin and really rolls off the tongue.  This is a 1969 German-language film, directed by Italian Luchino Visconi, about a wealthy industrialist family that descends into backstabbing and debauchery as Hitler rises to power in early '30s Germany.  It's a new one to me, but all the reviews make it sound like "what if Salo was made by someone with a sense of scale and appropriate restraint?  And really, this has Charlotte Rampling.  I'm always up for a Rampling performance that I've never seen.

Sadly, The Damned does not appear to be streaming anywhere, even for sale.  Check your local library and they might have it on the shelf.

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Another Eclipse series from Criterion, this covers three melodramas from Gainsborough Pictures, which apparently bucked the general mode of '40s British cinema by instead of making realistic pictures going for over-the-top costume period pieces.  So hey, time to watch James Mason and his delicious voice in something called The Man In Grey!  I love how the description of this trailer refers to it as the original British bodice ripper.

All three of these appear to be available on the Criterion Channel as well as for sale/purchase at the usual places.

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Finally for this week, I'm shaking it up a little.  As we settle in here in Richmond, I've been getting my library cards; sadly, the Richmond area doesn't have the equivalent of the SWAN system in the Chicago suburbs, where everyone is on the same catalog system and it makes it much easier for hold requests.  So, at this point I now have three library cards, one for the Richmond system, one for Henrico County (for this unfamiliar, Virginia has a very weird systems where a lot of cities are independent and not part of counties, which seems insane to me) and one more for Chesterfield County,  Maybe more to come.  So when I was at Chesterfield on Tuesday and I was browsing around a bit, I was delighted to find this, the first two seasons of the BBC 1980s series Robin of Sherwood.  What an odd and moody version of Robin this is, with a Clannad soundtrack, Celtic magic, lots of deep dark woods and everything seems covered in a layer of Nottingham Forest dew.  It's what Prince of Thieves thought it would be instead of being just plain silly.  It's right on the edge of being full of itself, but in my memory works really well and I'm very much looking forward to trying it again. And OH, this Clannad theme!

Robin of Sherwood is streaming on Pluto TV and Shout Factory TV.

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That's it for this week, no real recommendation right now as we've been kind of just decompressing from watching the end of Peaky Blinders with a a lot of Bake Off holiday specials.  But hey, check those out on Netflix, they're a lot of fun.   (Especially the one with the Derry Girls cast.)