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!
________________________________________
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.
________________________________________
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. (You have to click through on this one to watch it on YT, sorry.)
These all appear to be available on The Criterion Channel.
________________________________________
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.
________________________________________
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.
Happy Thursday, everyone! It's still in the 90s (low 30s for our Celsius friends) here in Richmond but that's about to break with some thunderstorms today, which is nice. Meanwhile, the Sox continue their downhill slide and I'm slowly getting my office in more order. So let's take a look at this week's subject. I was kind of casting around for what I wanted to talk about this week and it struck me; I went through my shelves and picked out a bunch of my weakenesses at thrift stores: schlock DVDs that I may never watch! So here's five DVDs of ostensible schlock.
_____________________________________
Paul Walker's career outside of the Fast & Furious franchise is littered with this sort of thing (seriously, it's almost hilarious how many movies he did that look as cheap as hell and involve car races). I almost don't even need to watch this because I'm pretty sure I can predict what the hell happens. He's wrongly accused, has to get out of it, there's car chases, bad guys, Paul wins in the end and looks good doing it. This is exactly the kind of "I've never heard of this" schlock that I spend a buck on as a lark.
Vehicle 19 is on Prime with subscription and on Redbox and Pluto with ads. Weirdly, it's not on Tubi, the usual place for this sort of thing.
_____________________________________
Warner Archive is a weirdly fun service that Warner media runs where they don't distribute DVDs for a lot of their deeper catalog titles but they're happy to burn you a decent copy and send it to you. Almost always no special features, but hey it's a nice physical copy. Now this one, again, I'd never heard of and I assume it's in that weird period as Kurt Russell was transitioning from his Disney teen career and heading toward being the most badass John Carpenter leading man he would ever have. Going by the logo, I would guess this is part of the Egyptology craze of the '70s as the King Tut exhibition was touring the US. But going by the name, I really hope this is also part of the Erich von Däniken nonsense scam with his books about ancient aliens (which the more you read, the more obviously racist it becomes because goodness, obviously those people in this primitive countries certainly couldn't figure out how to move rocks). It's such a dumb '70s thing that thankfully has subsided a bit but is still there in parts of those white supremacist doofballs.
Hey, it's all on YouTube!
_____________________________________
Look, whatever else I might think of Quentin Tarantino (and let's be clear, his handling of the stunt work in Kill Bill and how Uma Thurman was in danger was terrible and he's rightly been dragged for it), it's worth noting that he's done a decent amount of work in promoting schlock that hasn't especially been available or widely seen. Case in point, Switchblade Sisters, a cult classic from 1975 about female high school gang members that for fans of exploitation films is apparently way up in the cult canon. I've obviously never seen this one, from Tarantino's short-lived Rolling Thunder DVD label (which amusingly, besides fun schlock, also included the stone-cold romance classic from Wong Kar-Wai, Chungking Express, which was pretty much out of print in the US outside of that DVD before Criterion released their big Wong Kar-Wai set last year).
Interestingly, I know this title much more as the name of film critic and screenwriter April Wolfe's excellent (and sadly no longer) podcast where she and guests looked at genre films from a female perspective. Switchblade Sisters is absolutely a podcast you should check out if the subject interests you at all (I particularly recommend #168 with Mallory O'Meara on Blow The Man Down, or #149 where Isabel Sandoval discusses Double Indemnity).
Switchblade Sisters is currently on AMC+ and Shudder as well as for rent/buy on the usual places.
_____________________________________
I love me a good double pack of schlock! Especially when it has working actors who are going to spend a lot of it just staring off screen at crude effects in a nonsensical plotline. Bonus points if there's at least one Oscar nominee in them and they've never been rated because why bother if it's just going straight to DVD? Even better if, like Supernova, it aired originally on the Hallmark channel for some reason.
That's some quality staring off screen. Supernova is streaming on Freevee (which is apparently the new, deeply stupid name for IMDbTV with ads). Final Days Of Planet Earth doesn't appear to be streaming anywhere.
_____________________________________
Well, that's enough schlock for one week, so let's close out with my recommendation. I've been doing this odd decades project, where I look at Letterboxd for the highest-rated film from 100, 90 and so on years ago and this week I got to 1982 and hoo doggy, Fitzcarraldo is as damn good as you may have heard. There's insanity and opera and actors who obviously want to murder Klaus Kinski and it's pretty damn great. Streaming on Kanopy and also a bunch of ad-supported channels like Roku, Freevee and Tubi (and hey, Shout! Factory) and absolutely worth your time.
Happy Thursday, everyone! Let's jump right in; I've not bought anything new this week so you will have to enjoy what I've been going through what I've been packing for our imminent move.
_____________________________________
So a few years ago, long-time TV writers Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz decided to embark on a weird little project. Why not try and rank all of US television programs and see what came out on top? What resulted was this very interesting book that came out in 2016 and has some fascinating and sometimes deeply personal essays about what the various series meant to them and how they influenced TV at the time and moving forward.
In particular...
Sepinwall writes the entry on The Cosby Show. And it's really one of the most emotional pieces of TV writing I've ever read, about how he was in the middle of introducing his daughter to the show and had to turn it off and have a conversation with his daughter about Bill Cosby and the (at the time new in the news) horrible, monstrous crimes. It's such a sad essay that confronts the crimes as well as talking about Cosby's importance in the history of TV. It's still a difficult cultural conversation that we have to have.
_____________________________________
Speaking of things we all would like to change...Stephen King always had a bit of a bugaboo in his head about Kennedy being killed. Which is completely natural for someone born in 1947, who would have just turned 16 when JFK was murdered in Dallas and then lived through the ensuing decade of silly nonsense of conspiracy theories and fiction about the Mafia, the CIA and a hundred other groups who supposedly killed Kennedy instead of the one person who did.
So why not try a novel about someone who has a one-way ticket back to 1958 and decides, "why shouldn't I I try to save Kennedy and improve the timeline?" But obviously King looked at it and realized, it would never be that simple. And goodness, it's not. There's the worries of making sure Oswald worked alone, trying to not infect the timeline too much and most importantly, not making too many personal connections as you work toward the goal.
Yep, that is where the protagonist fails. And it's really the central core of this novel. It's not so much about JFK as it is about love and remembrance. It has a bittersweet ending to beat all, one that is just so King.
The adaptation of 11/22/63 aired on Hulu and I skipped it because of James Franco, who ran out of chances.
_____________________________________
It's a great novel, but forget that. I want to use it to urge everyone to see the film adaptation. Annihilation was the best movie of 2018 and weirdly dumped in February instead of being promoted as the Oscar-bait it should have been for a whole bevy of categories. For some reason, unlike Alex Garland's previous excellent movie Ex Machina this just didn't get the attention it deserved.
It's a wonderful, sad movie that has fantastic performances from Natalie Portman, Gina Rodriguez, Tessa Thompson and Jennifer Jason Leigh. A movie about aliens and humans and how humans can be aliens to themselves and oh forget it, just go see it. It's currently on Paramount+ and FX Now and for rent and sale on various platforms.
_____________________________________
My recommendation for this week is X, the new horror movie from Ti West. It's all about a bunch of student filmmakers who go to a little farmhouse they're renting from an older couple to make their little movie...without telling them they're making an adult film. And mayhem ensures. Ti West is having a ton of fun riffing on '70s slashers here, especially the middling Texas Chainsaw Massacre that here he makes much better. It's gory, it's a little goofy and it has a ton of nice little performances, especially the lead performance by Mia Goth but also by Brittany Snow as the queen bee of this band of wanna-be porn mavens.
Happy Thursday, everyone! Short one this week as I'm packing and traveling. So let's get to it!
_________________________________________
OK, I admit that this is a movie where I kind of only knew it for that fantastic, slightly odd title. But Elevator to the Gallows (1958) is the film debut of the great director Louis Malle and is apparently very well regarded for his direction, the performance by Jeanne Moreau and a score by Miles Davis (I left that sticker highlighting that on the cover for the moment since it amused me; I got this at Reckless Records in Chicago and I appreciate them noting that for the hardcore music fans). It's not Moreau's debut by any means, but this is apparently the movie that catapulted her into her well-deserved fame.
I love the cold blue/white/black look of this DVD box. It has some really interesting special features, a lot focusing on the score and includes Malle's student film which almost surprisingly includes a Charlie Parker song. (I say almost because a lot of African-American jazz performers did very, very well in post-WWII France, where they weren't facing the absolute nonsense of the US when segregation was more overt than it is now).
And since I'm that kind of shelving nerd, I was amused to see on my shelf this is going to be between The Man Who Fell To Earth and Dazed and Confused on my Criterion shelves. That's good company right there.
Elevator To The Gallows is currently streaming on HBO Max, the Criterion Channel and Plex.
_________________________________________
This week's recommendation is Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, which kind of barely came out in February 2021 and was VOD and limited theatrical at the time. So it took me forever to catch up on it and I was a little skeptical because...I honestly don't know why. Kristen Wiig has been absolutely knocking it out of the park since she left SNL (Welcome to Me, for instance, is an absolute classic, a movie that's about TV and mental health and grief and is absolutely not a movie like Bridesmaids). Her performance on the weird and touching series Last Man On Earth was something I think a lot of people weren't ready for but her scenes in the flashbacks of the plague that sweeps over the Earth was both funny but also tragic as hell. I'm absolutely convinced Wiig, who already has an Oscar nomination for screenplay, is at some point going to get an acting nomination.
ANYWAY!
If you liked Bridesmaids, but thought it was too staid and conventional, this is the movie for you. It's so...weird. It's goofy and odd and puts the pedal to the metal to the point where this legit could be considered an absurdist movie. But it freaking works. The script (by Wiig and co-star Annie Mumulo, who also wrote Bridesmaids together) walks a knives edge where you think it's going to fall off the cliff at some point and just set a foot wrong, but this movie never does. For instance, goofy musician Richard Cheese plays the piano guy at the resort they go to, a joke for like 10% of the audience of the movie, maybe, but it's just perfect for the context of the movie. And then there is how this movie gives Jamie Dornan, who I only know as the plank of wood* in the 50 Shades of Grey movies, a chance to absolutely cut loose and I was seriously thinking while watching this, "can we add him in for best supporting actor?" He is an absolute goofy delight here and a good reminder that if you only know literally anyone from the 50 Shades movies, they may be the worst expression of anyone's skills (this absolutely applies to Dakota Johnson, who is a very skilled comedic actress). I really cannot recommend this movie enough.
*heh
This trailer is not great but does have a reaction shot from Jamie Dornan that is freaking amazing. Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar is currently streaming on Hulu.
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.
_______________________________________
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.
Happy Thursday, everyone! Christmas is almost here, it's 60 today in Chicago and...we just closed on a house. What a freaking weird day. So let's see that fun stuff I've run across this week or I've rediscovered while I'm weeding my shelves before making a cross-country move.
_____________________________________
I'm a life-long White Sox fan and it's interesting being a fan of a team that has a mark on its historical record as being the only team in Major League history that we know threw a World Series. So of course I'm fascinated Joe Jackson, popularly known as Shoeless Joe, a play for the 1917 Sox who probably knew about the plot to throw the series (mostly because their asshole owner, Charles Comiskey, was a huge cheapskate who cheated them out of bonus money at every turn). Even if he knew about the plot, Joe never participated (he went .304 with a .333 OPS in that series and was easily the MVP of the series) but was implicated with all the others and banned from baseball in 1920.
This novel is about a kid from our time who goes back in time to try and save Joe from this shameful fate...and it's oddly sad for a middle-school book. Like how it's about sometimes you can't change history and the future, as much as you might like.
I figured I'd highlight three actors who have played Joe. The first, in the fantasy film Field Of Dreams, is Ray Liotta, who I still think is playing Joe just a little too mean.
Then again, Ty Cobb can stick it.
And then there is D.B. Sweeney in Eight Men Out, which I feel makes the persuasive argument that Joe might have known about the plot but even if he did he definitely didn't participate...but still, he knew and that's bad enough.
______________________________________
Naked is back in the news recently; David Thewlis is doing a show called The Landscapers with Olivia Colman and he just did an interview with The Guardian where he dug into Naked (which I believe is the first Mike Leigh movie I saw) and how it's aged to become more sour than it might have been in 1993.
"It’s almost 30 years since Thewlis’s seminal performance in Naked, Mike Leigh’s recently reissued masterpiece. Verbose, sexually violent, feckless and self-indulgent, his antihero Johnny sparked a lot of discussion about representations of misogyny. Were they intended to titillate and, if so, did this make them misogynistic?
‘Johnny was based on a person I knew who’d been ostracised by my friends’
But, surprisingly, that wasn’t the main critical focus of the film at the time. “When I was doing press for Naked,” says Thewlis, “that was never put to me as an actor. Violence against women just wasn’t what we talked about. Now, how could you not talk about it? Violence against women – and unreported violence against women – is such a talking point. We want to discuss misogyny. We want to discuss the fact that members of our government don’t even know the meaning of the word. I found the film much tougher to watch this time than I did 25 years ago.”
I'm definitely going to take a second look at this movie. I remember being absolutely turned off by at the time, and not in a sexual way, but it's Leigh and Thewlis and deserves a second look.
______________________________________
I can never quite describe the distinction between Afro-Futurism (as some describe their science fiction) and African Futurism (as Nnedi Okorafor describes her work). But it's not up to me to decide or describe. What I am here to do is talk about how Okorafor is one of the best modern speculative fiction authors.
She has a particular talent for using a combination of old societies and newish tech and old traditions and then creating these wonderful woman characters who are thrown into saving the world. This and Who Fears Death and Lagoon and LaGuardia and god, her Binti trilogy about a Himba woman who gets accepted to a prestigious interstellar university only to have a tragic incident change her life forever; she'a a great author who I can't recommend enough.
______________________________________
Hey, do you know what's surprisingly funny? The Seventh Seal. No, seriously. Is it about a guy coming back from the Crusades (an almost preternaturally beautiful Max Von Sydow) to a countryside ravaged by the Bubonic Plague? Absolutely. Are there also a ton of weird dark jokes about the epidemic and the crazed people in countryside, including a guy in a cloak with a scythe who may be literal Death? Also absolutely. This movie is the definition of a movie where people think they know what it is and are mostly wrong.
And really, look at Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. Now there's a movie that gets why Death playing a board game is funny. (It doesn't hurt that William Sadler is so freaking great.)
Happy Thursday, everyone! Winter is ramping up here in Chicago, the Bulls are playing well, the Bears are a disaster and the less said about our NHL team the better. Plus, the MLB owners have decided the best way to deal with a minor labor dispute is to lockout the people who make the product that people pay money for. So, while we all sing labor standards and flip off the 32 ownership groups, let's see what I've found at the thrift stores.
Again, 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.
___________________________________________
A few years ago, a company called Biblioasis decided to try and resurrect an old Christmas tradition, that of telling ghost stories on Christmas Eve. (Hence the line in the old Edward Pola and George Wyle standard, "The Most Wonderful Time Of The World" about telling scary ghost stories.) This is the only one I have of theirs (there's apparently about 12 of them) and it's a handsome little paperback.
Walter De La Mare was a British novelist and poet active through the '50s who was a favorite of many 20th Century authors, apparently people like H. P. Lovecraft, for his children's stories and especially for his run of supernatural works. I'll admit a complete ignorance of his work but this is one I'm going to read this Christmas season along with my annual reread of A Christmas Carol.
___________________________________________
On October 1938, Orson Welles and his Mercury Theater players broadcast a performance of the H. G. Wells novel The War Of The Worlds, which panicked people across the USA and caused minor riots and people heading for the hills as they panicked over supposed alien landings in Grover's Mill, New Jersey. People went nuts hearing the radio broadcast, thinking it was a news story and that we were being invaded! What a great example of how people used to be stupid about media!
Of course, this story is pretty much bullshit. Historical research and contemporary surveys found very little actual panic that wasn't someone trying to drum up a good story (there's a decent amount of speculation that Monday Morning Quarterbacking by newspapers was them pushing back at how radio was supplanting them in the popular media).
So this book, written by the radio play's author Howard Koch, needs to be taken with a dump truck of salt. That said, it contains his extremely entertaining radio script, some damn good photos of the people involved (hey, did you know H G Wells and Orson Welles met in 1940?) and even a section at the end talking about the current state of research about Mars as of 1970.
And besides, I found this book had as a bookmark a cardboard ticket for a Phillies game from June 15, 1973 against the San Francisco Giants. (A game the Phillies lost at home at the old Veterans' Stadium.) U was just over a month old when that game happened and I assume an owner of this book put this ticket in this book and you can't not love that kind of a history in a book.
___________________________________________
So one of the pleasant surprises as a filmgoer this year was that Cruella was not only good even very good a movie that knew what it was about and acted as a very interesting prequel to a minor Disney animated work but it had things to say about parenting and self-identity and the class between bespoke fashion and the oncoming wave of punk and ready-to-wear in London in the '60s or '70s. (The movie plays very fast and loose with the time in the fashion choices and the music, but it works quite well so I'm not complaining.)
But! That is not what I'm here to talk about
Dodie Smith these days is almost certainly best remembered for her novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians, but for my money this is her best book. A tale of an eccentric British family living in a ruined tower of an old estate, who encounter two Americans who've inherited the estate down the road, this is a sumptuous novel of maybe love and two sisters who aren't sure if they want to get out or not (it reminds me very much of Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived In The Castle that way), and trying to figure out if their family structure will even let them keep living there. It's far less tragic than Jackson's novel, but it shares with hers a feeling of sharp little tragedies that you feel all the more as a teen. And hey, there's a quite good movie version with Romola Garai, Bill Nighy, Rose Byrne and Tara Fitzgerald! (And for Buffy fans with taste, Marc Blucas shows up as one of the Americans.)
Cruella is streaming in the USA on Disney+.
I Capture The Castle is streaming free on Prime, Hoopla, Kanopy and with ads on Vudu, Pluto TV, Tunbi and Roku TV.
___________________________________________
Armin Shimmerman is one of those actors who everyone knows from something. Maybe you know him from Star Trek, or from Buffy, or the '80s Beauty and the Beast, or his Shakespearean work (I saw him do a monologue once from Richard III that was one of the most chilling things). But I like that he for a bit was doing a sideline where he was co-writing with a guy named Michael Scott, novels about John Dee after he was kidnapped by an alien and transported to a dystopian late 21st Century. Now this is not the DC character John Dee, ocassionally know as Doctor Destiny. This is a historical figure, the alchemist and supposedly spy for Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth back in the 16th and 17th Centuries. By all accounts highly intelligent and canny, it's fun to see him try on the 21st Century for size and see what he can do with it. (There's a whole weird plot about hostile aliens trying to force an Elon Musk type to develop bad tech to so they can take Earth for their own under galactic law, but that's the least interesting part of the novel.) There's apparently a few more in this series and I should get to them.
___________________________________________
My recommendation for this week is new to Shudder, Le Pactes de Loups (The Brotherhood Of the Wolf) the decidedly weird kung-fu drama set just before the French Revolution as a French nobleman is sent to discover the mysteries of a series of monster attacks. Based on the historical accounts of the supposed beast of Gévaudan, this is such a weird, lovely movie where at any moment Monica Belluci shows up as a brother owner with an agenda of her own, or Mark Dacascos is a Mohawk who kicks ass or there's a giant monster who may be controlled by a band of hill people. It's lovely and fun weirdly stylish and has probably the best use of the slow-mo craze of martial arts movies of that time.
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.
_______________________________________
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.
_______________________________________
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.
_______________________________________
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.
_______________________________________
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.
_______________________________________
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?
_______________________________________
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.
Happy Thursday everyone! We're in the last week of Spooktober, the leaves are falling and it's crispy cold outside, and I've a few interesting things to talk about this week.
________________________________________
I'm always slightly surprised how The Criterion Collection has a taste for schlock, whether for historical value or for a sense of fun. The Blog is a great example, an early release for them (it's numbered 91 and is on my shelf between Chasing Amy and Fiend Without A Face) that highlights how important the movie really is in the history of major B-movies and in many ways introducing audiences to a fresh-faced, absolutely-a-teen Steve McQueen. But also, noting that the movie is a lot of silly fun! This is an independent movie in many of the best ways, made outside of the Hollywood system with a crew that had mostly made religious shorts before and with a cast of East Coasters, many of whom had never been in a film before.
And goodness, those effects. Is it a lot of rear-projection? Absolutely. But does this larger-and-larger blob become legitimately menacing as the movie goes on? 100% There's a scene in a movie theater (and part of the charming menace of this movie is how the blob is contrasted, like above, against the clean-cut consumer whiteness of late '50s America in the movies) that is actually terrifying as the blob threatens and definitely kills at least a few people.
Hey look, Steve McQueen! Totally a teenager*!
The movie isn't perfect. The ending kind of grinds to a halt though it does have some fun with using ice machines to defeat the blob but it doesn't quite land. But I will always recommend it as something worth checking out for the fun and for a window into '50s B-movies.
And then you can do a fun compare-and-contrast with the 1988 version, which has a lot to recommend about it. The effects are absolutely amazing and gross (the body count here is way higher, so be warned) and it has one of the best and most underappreciated women in horror performances by Shawnee Smith, who has been in many things (like a long run on the Ted Danson sitcom Becker) but is simply fantastic here as someone who steps up and kicks absolute ass. Sorry, you also have to deal with Kevin Dillon.
The Blob (1958) is streaming on HBO Max, Criterion Channel, Crackle and Plex.
The Blob (1988) is streaming on Peacock.
*McQueen was born in 1930 and was nearly 28 when he made this movie.
________________________________________
Now here's a TV series I only known from its remake. There were four seasons of the remake of Wallander, starring Kenneth Branagh and initially Tom Hiddleston (more on that later) and airing on BBC. It's a quite fine, dark series that does indeed feel like the best of Nordic Noir. There was a nice visual touch that even though the spoken language of the series was English, all the on-screen language (computer screens, memos and so on) were Swedish. SO finding this collection of the first three episodes of the original, Swedish series was a nice surprise. Obviously in this case the spoken language is Swedish, but I assume it's just as dark as the BBC series. There's apparently 32 episodes in total so I'll swing into this and see if I liked it as much as the Branagh version.
That trailer is, let's be clear, kind of schlocky.
Wallander (BBC) is streaming on HBO Max, Hoopla and BritBox.
2 of the three season of Swedish Wallander are streaming on Hoopla.
________________________________________
Short one this week so I'll just recommend that if you can go to the theater or have access to HBO Max then Dune is worth your time. It's a smart, well-acted adaptation that yes, is 2 1/2 hours long but earns that length for this first half of the first novel, of which we'll see the conclusion in 2023. It's quite good and worth your time if you're interested in deeply weird science fiction.
