Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday!  The days are getting longer, this weekend is the Superb Owl and maybe spring is on the way.  So let's see what fun stuff I've found recently.

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Guillermo del Toro has such an odd, interesting career.  He's done comic book movies (Blade II and the Hellboy movies), a kaiju film (the very fun Pacific Rim), gothic horror (Crimson Peak),,,but I do love his odd couple of movies set during the Spanish Civil War.  The Devil's Backbone is a brilliant piece of work set at a boys boarding school during that war with a possible ghost, a deadly pool and a bomb that can go off at any time.

And then there is Pan's Labyrinth.  Del Toro works so, so well with fantastic elements and this movie about a daughter and mother who have taken a sort of shelter with a Spanish general (wonderfully played in all his cruelty by Sergi López). It's a both lovely and horrifying film about war and family.  It's a little girl who is trying to survive a war with a mother who is doing her best to survive and then...and then there are these creatures she finds.  And who may be her salvation.

Pan's Labyrinth is available for rent and purchase at the usual streaming places.

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Ah, the first time I noticed the great Oscar Isaac.  Drive is ostensibly not about him, but is about Ryan Gosling's very quiet and reserved character who drives for the local mobs (especially for a weirdly scary Albert Brooks).  But Isaac keeps looming over it, as a just-out-of-jail partner to Carey Mulligan who absolutely sees that Gosling is interesting in Mulligan and is so confident about his relationship that he barely feels the need to say anything.  Isaac since this has done a lot of good genre work, like Force Awakens and Annihilation and Ex Machina) but I do enjoy when he does some gritty crime work like this.  (I can absolutely recommend, for instance, the excellent HBO mini series Show Me A Hero, about the public housing fight in Yonkers NJ in the '70s).

Drive is available on Tubi with ads and rent/purchase at the usual places.

Show Me A Hero is on HBO Max and Cinemax Go for subscribers and one Apple TV and Amazon for purchase.  (And really, if you can check it out.  It may have Catherine Keener's best performance.)

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Schlock time!   The Exorcist is a great movie about a mother terrified how her daughter is ill and she and their doctors cannot figure out why (there is a scene in this with a spinal tap that is maybe the scariest medical scene I've seen in a movie).  The possession parts of the movie are almost besides the point for how terrifying the movie is about a mother who is so, so scared for her daughter.

Then there is The Exorcist II, which is simply kind of dull and weird as they use a goofy device on Linda Blair's head to...bring forth dreams?  Summon Satan again?  Maybe try and make the movie interesting?  In any aspect, it doesn't work.

And now, 17 years after the original, we get to The Exorcist III. Which I might keep for October and my annual horror watches, because by all accounts this movie is entertainingly bonkers.Directed by William Peter Beatty, author of the original novel of The Exorcist, and I'm always intrigued when an author of a novel takes a more direct hand on a movie sequel,  It doesn't happen that much but when it does it can be...weird.

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My pick of the week is 2020's Crip Cramp: An American Revolution.  Running on Netflix, this is an excellent documentary about Camp Jened, a New Jersey camp for teens with disabilities that ran from the '50s through the '70s and was a fulcrum for a lot of people who became important in the civil rights movement that resulted in theAmericans with Disabilities Act of 1990.  It's a fascinating documentary that is both infuriating in what these people had to go through while also uplifting and at times quite funny.  After all, they were teens and they went through the usual teen dramas with how there were camp dramas and romances and tiffs.  

But god, this is worth seeing for the ADA stuff.  It's 32 years old now and parts of it feel so established that we forget how new it actually is.

Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's snowy as heck here in Chicago, MLB is still in a lockout and the Landover NFL team has chosen a new team name that is both lame and is part of the NFL's weird fetish for the US military.  Rants over, let's talk about my finds of the week!

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Brian DePalma is kind of a difficult director for me.  Many people have said over the years that he's aped the works of Alfred Hitchcock and I'd be as annoyed as anyone else at that if well, it's not completely untrue.  DePalma has his own style, but it's so clearly influence by Hitchcock.  But is that a bad thing?  Certainly not, if you are going to specialize in thrillers you can do far worse as an influence.  

What I do have a serious problem with DePalma is that he can be weird about woman in his movies.  Body Double, I firmly believe, is a sexist movie.  Carrie can be very good at times but I think misses a decent amount of the points that Tabitha King brought to Stephen's novel.  And geez, Femme Fatale. There's a move that wastes Rebecca Romjin on male gaze nonsense.

But Blow Out is one where DePalma gets it right.  Nancy Allen plays, for once in a DePalma movie, a well-rounded and interesting character in a fantastic thriller plot about a possible assassination captured on audio tape that may or may not exist.  (It's directly based on Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up, about a photographer who may have accidentally captured a murder on film.)  With Allen, John Travolta and John Lithgow, this is a really taut thriller that is very worth your time.

Blow Out is available for purchase and rental at the usual places.

And hey, check out Blow-Up!  It's stylish and creepy and fun.  It's in the Criterion Collection and currently is also available for sale and rent at the usual places.

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Jeff Greenfield is a halfway decent political commentator, even if he's still stuck in the "both sides have good points" that hasn't been true since about 1970.  But he's also at times a very funny and acerbic fiction writer and this is a novel I've always quite loved.  Two days after a Presidential general election, the Republican whose won...dies.  (In a stupid accident based on a badly designed campaign stop.). Now, ask yourself...who is going to be President?

No, seriously, who is going to be President?  This is after the general election but months before the electors meet to actually elect the President.  Is it the winning Vice President?  Can the RNC simply meet to nominate the VP winner to the Presidential slot?  Does the second-place Democrat candidate have any place in this?  It's a weird, weird, blind spot in the Constitution and Greenfield has some wicked fun playing with the idea.

Because naturally, everything goes nuts.  This came out in 1995, when the Internet was barely a thing, but Greenfield even then knew it was enough of a thing that it would come into play along with the big ones of the time, like talk radio shows and cable news and letter columns.  I can only imagine this scenario in a world of Twitter and Facebook and TikTok; Greenfield is very good at both the humor and the horror of the situation.  (Also, this is a reminder I need to check out his books on alternate histories of the USA, a subject I find fascinating.)

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Time for schlock!

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters.  Really, if that title doesn't get you a little intrigued for how this could be fantastic junk, I don't know what I can tell you.  Jeremy Rennet and Gemma Arterton are having a ton of fun as the titular siblings, now grown up and dedicating themselves to, well, witch hunting.    It's so...wonderfully dumb in all the right ways. Crossbows and witches and shotguns and for some reason a diabetes subplot, I love this sort of silliness.  (Really, if you ever saw the grim slog that was Van Helsing, this is what that movie should have aspired to be.)

Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters is streaming on Hulu, Paramount+ and the various Epix platforms as well as being available for rent and sale.

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My recommendation of the week is, kind of unsurprisingly, Peacemaker on HBOMax.  I caught up over the weekend and goodness, this is a show that knows what it is and is reveling in it's actiony disgustingness, both in the violence and in how Peacemaker is a pretty awful person who might actually be trying to be better.  It's funny, it's gross, the music choices from James Gunn are kind of amazing (there's an actual discussion of Hanoi Rocks that had me cackling) and it's a very, very fun cast.

And seriously, these credits. These are credits I will never skip.

(Fun story about the song here; it's from a Finnish glam-metal group named Wig Wam, and they literally were dropped from their representation a few days before Peacemaker premiered due to COVID making it impossible for anyone to tour. Now they have a song that's charting in the US, new representation and the possibility of playing over here for the first time.  They have a fun, "we're doing music that was passe a decade before we even formed" sound.)

Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  When you read this, Christmas for the Western churches is two days away, the Solstice is just past and baseball is coming back....well, someday.  Lockouts suck and the owners suck.  So, while I go back and forth on packing to visit my house in Richmond (why yes, we bought a house; that sentence terrifies me too) let's look at some good thrift store finds.

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There's been a weird rise in novels and movies set around people contemplating the end of the world and how they would deal with it.  I mean...it's an interesting concept; if you knew for certain that the world would end, how would you react?  Would you go balls-out nutty?  Gather around with the family?  Curl up in a ball for a few months until the inevitable end?  Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World takes a comedic look at this, but it's also sneakily emotional take as well.  Steve Carell and Keira Knightley might seem like an odd combination, but they bring a weird morose comedic energy that I think works well.

Besides, it has a scene with Gillian Jacobs where they stop at a TGIF that has gone into full-one party mode as everyone parties to the end and it's a hoot but also, just slightly, Lord of the Flies.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World is for rent and purchase at the usual places and streaming on HBOMax.

Two recommendations for other works about the end of the world as people wait for it:

Ben Winters is an underappreciated science-fiction author and his trilogy about a policeman determined to finish the job before a meteor wipes out the Western Hemisphere is really worth your time.

Last Night is a Canadian movie about the same subject, except in this case we don't know what the apocalypse is.  It's all very vague why but we know the end is coming.  Don McKellar's first directing job, it mostly follows Sandra Oh as she gets ready for the end and ending herself before then, which is of course dark as hell but this is all handled in an interestingly gentle way.  I always think of how the movie keeps cutting back to David Cronenberg playing a gas company guy in his office, calling every customer on his list about how their service is about to end and precisely crossing their name off his list.  It's an odd, interesting movie with a good heart.

And it's one of those interesting movies that is on YouTube for free!  I love the weird genre of essentially abandoned movies that live on YT because the rights holders don't seem to care that much.

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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.