Trawling Through The Thrift Store with Joseph Finn

 Happy New Year, everyone!  As I put this up it's already 2021 in *checks world clock* Baghdad and Moscow, so I hope your year is going great already.  I still have about 9 hours left here in the Chicago area and a Hogmanay dinner to make, so let's dive into what I found this week.  

What do I remember about this?  Mostly that it's a space horror movie, there were plenty of jokes about Venom being a sequel to it and...nope, that's it.  But frankly, this cast means I'm giving it a shot.  I'm a sucker for space horror, even if it might be a straight-up Alien knockoff.  

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Hey, I've seen this one!  My friend Amy Watts is a fan of it and made me watch and this is a sweet, smart little high school movie that's a lot better than you think a Vanessa Hudgens movie would be.  (I have nothing against Hudgens; I'm just not of her generation so mostly think of her as just a Disney Channel actor, which I fully realize is reductive and unfair.)  This movie is a ton of fun and I'm looking forward to watching it again.

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So this is maybe the weirdest thing that Netflix has ever aired, a It's A Wonderful Life knockoff that involves furries, a shop that even for a Hallmark-Christmas-town should have died years ago and Michael Shannon, maybe the scariest person in films, playing the nicest guy in the world.  And then...the odd thing is...this movie kind of works.  It's oddly sweet and funny and gets the holiday spirit.  And then Thomas Lennon shows up as a TV monster hunter and things get really goofy.  It's just plain fun.

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I know absolutely nothing about this.  No, not a damn thing.  But it has Frank Grillo, who along with Scott Adkins is the king of modern low-rent action films (seriously, he elevates the hell out of the Purge sequels and Wheelman is one of the best action movies of the last 5 years).  So hell yes, I grabbed this for them and for Margaret Qualley (who has done some real good work recently in The Nice Guys and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) and Jamie Bell.

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A couple of years back I blazed through Rutherford's London, a multi-family saga of the history of that city from the days of Londinium up through the turn of the 21st Century.  I really, really enjoyed that so when I ran across this about the country of my ancestors, hell yeah I'm going to give this a try.