Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Thursday, everyone!  Still winter here in the US and now it's snowing, but there's only 6 days until spring in the Northern Hemisphere and it will warm up.  So let's get to what I found this week!

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I'm always a little fascinated by how Jean Renoir, fantastic French director through the '70s, was also the son of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, fantastic impressionist painter.  One a master of portraying groups of people forming shifting and contradictory group activities and one a master of using combinations of color and poses to portray people in all sorts of situations.  Back in 2018, I saw a wonderful exhibition focusing on their linked works at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

For instance, this is Pierre-Auguste's painting of Jean around 1900.  (One of the joys of the Art Institute here in Chicago is how the robber barons of Chicago bought Impressionist works for a song when it was still out of style, resulting in it having the greatest collection of it outside of Paris, so I grew up on paintings like this.)

La règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game) came out in 1939 and is the story of a weekend hunting party at a country home in France.  A comedy of manners on the surface, as the movie deepens it turns more and more sour as you see how much these upper class twits are ignoring the gathering storm in Europe.  They're also ignoring what's going on with their servants, who have a much better idea of just how much the shit is about to hit the fan.  If any of this sounds familiar, congratulations, you might have seen Gosford Park, the later Robert Altman movie that takes place at a British country house in the same general time period and tosses in a murder.  

(Not quite the same, but Remains of the Day has a bit of a similar feel and also has Christopher Reeve as a US Congressman who explains very clearly  to his hosts that they're a bunch of appeasers who are keeping their heads in the sand over the NAZI threat).

 La règle du jeu is streaming on Criterion Channel and Kanopy as well as being for rent and sale at the usual outlets and is an absolute must watch.

Gosford Park is available for rent and sale.

The Remains of the Day is on Tubi with ads and available for rent and sale.

And hey, here's a bonus, Jean Renoir as an adult in Hollywood.  Still, that painting is adorable, right?

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I've never quite started a section for them on my bookshelves, but I do have a good weakness for novels (especially mysteries) that take place around bookstores and authors and the like.  For instance, the fun anf nasty Murder at the AMA, where Isaac Asimov killed off a fictional version of Harlan Ellison as a good on his friend (who could be very abrasive to people); Sharyn McCrumb pulled off the same joke with her sci-fi con set Bimbos of the Death Sun.  This appears to be the 5th in a series of bookseller mysteries so yippee, new mystery series to read!

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Now here's a director I'm completely unfamiliar with.  Marcel Pagnol was a director of the same time as Jean Renoir and this loose trilogy of films, two of them based on plays written by Pagnol.  Pagnol is apparently not especially popular these days but I'm always for rediscovering someone who was apparently well-regarded in his day. (And in looking him up, I like that he also had a fun side gig of translating Shakespeare and Virgil into French; his Hamlet is apparently still being performed.)

Marius, Fanny and César are all streaming on the Criterion Channel and available for rent and sale at the usual places.

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I'm a sucker for Little Women and variations on it.  So learning about this variation, involving an African-American family of sisters and set in the Freedman's colony on Roanoke Island off the coast of North Carolin in 1863, is absolute catnip for me.  I'm very curious to see how Bethany Morrow reworks this for a modern YA audience.

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Schlock of the week time!  I so love finding weirdness at the Dollar Tree and hoo boy can it be a source of tossed-off horror terribleness.  Doll Face has exactly one review on Rotten Tomatoes and hoo boy, is it succinct:

"We don't know who wrote or directed Doll Face, but we do know that whoever did, can neither write nor direct a film."  

Frankly, the whole review is a joy.  It's been a while since I've run across a serious piece of trash to enjoy and this looks like exactly my speed.

Doll Face is cheap as hell on Amazon and Vudu.

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This week's recommendation is from yet another French director, Julia Ducournau.  Grave (Raw, 2016) was such a fantastic debut, a movie about coming of agee and college and hazing and oh, also cannibalism.  It was one of the craziest going-in-blind experiences I've ever had in a movie theater.  But now I'm recommending her followup, Titane, which is now on Hulu.  It's not quite as great as Grave but boy howdy does Ducournau still leave nothing off the table.  And fair warning, it's insane, it's foul and has body horror on a Cronenbergian level but it never feels salacious or gazey; it's just weird.  And my god, the performance by Vincent Lindon in this is amazing.  He apparently won the Cesar in 2015 for La Loi du marché (The Measure Of A Man) and I'm 100% going to see that soon.

Warning again: this trailer is NSFW.

Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's the second day of winter here in the Northern Hemisphere, the start of summer down in the Southern, so let's see what odd things I've found hitting the thrift stores.

Now, a programming note.  We're moving down south sometime in the Spring, so I'll be shopping less.  So maybe some more highlights of what I'm weeding and depositing in Little Free Libraries.

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Let's start with one of the oddest novels I've ever encountered.  Dominick Dunne was for many years essentially a cultural correspondent for Vanity Fair; he was the kind of guy who knew people who knew people.  So his decision to write a decidedly weird novel about his covering the OJ Simpson murder trial, one where he was very clear about how we all knew Simpson was guilty but where he was very sympathetic to the Simpson family, is such an interesting thing.  But then he starts intersecting the novel with one of the other strange murder cases of the 1990s....to the point where he's killed by Andrew Cunanan.  It's an odd, melancholy novel that I highly recommend for a weird alternate take on the OJ trial that also delves interestingly deeply into the intersection of that trial and LA celebrity culture.

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I'm pleasantly surprised to find that Fredrick Forsyth is still alive!  He's now 83 and I can totally recommend this, Eye Of The Needle [edit: that's Ken Follett] and The Dogs Of War.  He writes thrillers that are smart and tense and sometimes just a little but weird.  This one is about the smartest assassin in the world, the Jackal, and his assignment to assassinate French President Charles de Gaulle (oddly, I don't remember why; destablizating France, maybe?).  But the whole point of this novel is a bevy of organizations uniting to take down an assassin who none of them is quite sure even exists, much less knows who it is.  It's a fantastic, taught thriller that also has a great 1973 adaptation.  (Please ignore the dull Bruce Willis version.)

Oh hey, Day Of The Jackal is on Criterion Channel right now!  As well as being available for rent and purchase at the usual places.

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Now this was a pleasant find.  I only saw a bit of Tanner '88 back when HBO ran it in 1988, an odd mockumentary of political campaigns that mixed in with the ongoing Presidential campaign of that year as Democrats tried to get in to fix the last 8 terrible years.  It's both satirical and funny and has so many political figures of the time who are getting the joke. (And frankly, glancing at the list of people who show up in this, I was surprised that not one has passed away outside of George HW Bush; Bob Dole is still with us at 98, Gary Hart is around and Kitty and Mike Dukakis are here in their 80s.). 

Hey, it's all streaming on HBO Max!  It's totally worth your time.

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I'm a sucker for The Library Of America books and collections and this is one where weeding I'm reminded that I've never read a bunch of it.  It is very deliberately a '50s collection, so very male and very serious men in serious white coats.  Maybe next week I'll highlight some anthologies I have that are much more diverse and fun.  But still, this has a few high highlights.  Robert Heinlein's Double Star is a weirdly funny novel about an actor hired to be the double for a famous Martian politician.  Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination is a classic about a teleporting man driven by a desire for revenge.  And then there is the stone-cold classic of Richard Matheson's Shrinking Man.  I talked about the movie version a few weeks ago and I'm totally going to re-read that this week.

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Hey look, it's Tony D'Amico!  One of my favorite Simpsons characters, voiced beautifully by Joe Mantegna for many, many years now.  Say, where is the pretzel money?

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Finally, my recommendation of the week.  The Power Of The Dog is Jane Campion's first film in 12 years and it's a magnificent piece of work about brotherhood and guilt and toxic masculinity, with a quartet of actors bouncing against each other that is Benedict Cumberbatch, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemmons.  It's so, so worth your time if you have Netflix.