Trawling Through The Thrift Stores With Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday!  The leaves are falling, the snow is coming and no one responsible is going anywhere for Thanksgiving, sadly.  (Seriously people, stay home, wear a mask if you have to go out and care for your fellow humans.  Don't be one of those COVID-denying jerks.)

Look, did I grab this from a Little Free Library mostly for the fantastic cover from 1972?  Absolutely.  Do I kind of want to read a little more Crichton, since I've only read Coma and I for a long time thought that was him, but is actually by Robin Cook?  (I mean, I read part of Crichton's stupid diatribe against the well-established truth of anthropogenic climate change, but that's terrible fiction and I want to read some of his good fiction.)  Crichton to me has a bit of a fascinating career path, similar to Scott Turow in how he was a practicing doctor (where Turow was a lawyer) who wrote novels based on their respective professions (hence why Crichton ended up as one of the creators of ER, mentioned in last weeks column.)  So this novel, about a man infected in a psychological experiment with a controlling computer, might be something I can get into.

And again, that is a kick-ass cover from one Paul Bacon.  Bacon died in 2015 at the age of 91 and was a titan of his profession, as seen by other examples of his work below. 

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I don't think I can count the number of times I've seen P.T. "I'm not the Resident Evil guy" Anderson's Boogie Nights.  It's ridiculously rewatchable, the cast is working on an insane level (Mark Wahlberg has done some other good work, but this is him firing on all cylinders), it looks amazing in catching the feel of the late '70s through early '80s of LA, but an LA that's kind of dingy and in the Valley.  It's a portrait of an industry in transition from porn's brief flirtation with respectability (as seedy as it was underneath) to the era of quicky VHS productions.  So why did I buy it again?  Because this is one of New Line's special editions, with their lovely cardboard cases and inserts.  Much as I love blu-rays, the drawback of them is their tiny footprint that doesn't lead to a nice foldout like this has.  I just love the solid feel of a good cardboard case that you slide the foldout at to get at the discs.  (Besides, this is Anderson's preferred release of the movie and I'll trust his taste on it.)

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I've started to become obsessed with watching the movies of Alain Delon, who recently turned 85 and has a career that I'm annoyed with myself that I took a while to get into.  Le Samouraï is a straight-up classic of French New-Wave coolness and despair that influenced director as disparate as John Woo and Jim Jarmusch, and a lot of that is because of Delon's fantastic cool performance.   So when I saw this at the recent B&N Criterion sale, I snagged it because A) Delon and B) this is the first filmed adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley novels, the most famous adaptation being the fantastic Matt Damon-starring The Talented Mr. Ripley.  I've seen a bunch of those adaptations (I'm quite fond of the odd Ripley's Game, starring John Malkovich as a Ripley who is decades after the events of Talented) but this is one I've never seen and I can't wait to dig into it soon.  

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Oh look, another cardboard sleeve situation!  Now, this is a movie that might have aged terribly.  It was kind of interestingly staged at the time, got a lot of flack for having made-up language (a lot more than it deserved; Mean Girls has just as much made-up slang, for instance) and also had a weird choice discussion around it (like....she made a choice, her choice, that's the damn point). I'm hoping it remains as good as it was back then (JK Simmons and Allison Janney, for instance, just stealing the movie and people completely slept on how great Jennifer Garner is in this).

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Sue me, I'm a sucker for packaging.  I've never seen the series Fringe, which I know science-fiction fans loved quite a lot.   For me, it was that weird thing that I should check out eventually for John Noble (who I knew from Sleepy Hollow and Lord of the Rings).  But hey, I ran across this and...it has a lenticular cover.  I'm not made of stone, people!  So I made a little video of how it looks because c'mon, it's cool.