Trawling through the Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Fall is finally greatly afoot, it's raining here in the Chicago area and I'm starting this column a little late because my goodness, we got hooked on Star Trek: Discovery (seriously, this is an impressive prequel, though I guess Enterprise is a prequel to it but then outside of the Mirror Universe stuff I don't remember much of Enterprise).  I voted the other day, I hope everyone is or has voted and may your good candidates win.  Now on to the stuff I've found this week!

Coen Brothers fans, the hardcore ones, are an interesting lot and I seriously think Intolerable Cruelty might be one of the more divisive ones for them.  Some of them think it ranks down with The Ladykillers, some of them are indifferent and then there's the folks like me who rank it fairly high with The Hudsucker Proxy as the Coens having fun with the forms of the 1930s and '40s screwball comedies with their screwy situations and crackerjack dialogue and badass romantic protagonists.  I haven't seen this for a while, and I am looking forward to seeing what might be one of the funniest nasty comedies they did, a dark comedy honed to a knifes edge.

Epitaph of a Small Winner (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas), on the other hand, is a completely new one for me.  Machado de Assis is an author completely unfamiliar to me and I'm admittedly terrible when it comes to Brazilian literature.  This apparently is quite well regarded (Harold Bloom, and I have thoughts on his taste, was apparently a big fan of de Assis) so I will give this a shot.

It's not wrong to regard the 1990s at the Oscars as very much an era of "make a Holocaust movie, win an Oscar"...but every time I look at the movies that did win an Oscar that is in that genre, damn, it's a pretty good list of films.  And this one, damn, I was so happy to run across this DVD.  Based on the book by the late Miep Gies, the last of the employees of Otto Frank who chose to risk their lives by hiding the family and others in the attic of the factory, this is a fantastic remembrance of the Anne Frank story from outside of the hiding place and filling in what was going on as someone almost quietly resisting the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam.  It's a damn good documentary and also led to a lovely Oscar acceptance speech at which Miep Gies was in attendance and came up for the speech.

Alpha Dog!  Which has...Justin Timberlake with tattoos?  I remember absolutely nothing outside of this, am going to give it another chance, and it makes me laugh that it has Bruce Willis credited as the Bruce Willis of Lucky Number Slevin, which is the first time anyone has thought of this movie since it came out, and that includes Bruce Willis.  But seriously, this cast is one of those bonkers ones.

Weirdly, Big Love is the other item I picked up that stars Chloë Sevigny, after Alpha Dog.  Now, this one I have never seen, but I'm kind of curious about it.  We're just coming out of the era of Peak TV that focused on some very, very great stories about Sad White Men (Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad and so on) and this is the one series out of those that I simply haven't seen.  So I feel like I kind of want to give this a shot, see if it's worth continuing and so on.  I mean jesus, that cast; Bill Paxton left us far too soon, there's Harry Dean Stanton and then Tripplehorn, Sevigny and Goodwin are just a great trio to reckon with.  For all I know, this might be a disappointment like the eternal seasons of Weeds, and no one seems to talk about this series anymore, but it's worth a shot.  Plus, I got it for a buck.  On the other hand, this trailer (which appears to be for Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) almost hilariously sucks.