Trawling Through The Thrift Stores With Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Winter has started in the Northern Hemisphere, it's chilly here outside of Chicago and I've a whole raft of new thrift store finds to go on about.

Paul Robeson is a performer and activist who I know more by reputation and Show Boat than anything else, so this was a fun find.  It's apparently originally a BBC program, only about 58 minutes, so I'll knock this off over the weekend.  (And directed by one Rachel Harmer, so it will count for my annual 52 Films By Women.)

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Like many people, I've only seen the perfectly fine movie that was adapted from this collection of three short novels, so I'm curious to see if I'll like this a bit more.  Harrison is another one I know more by reputation than anything else; I had to look him up to see if he was still around (he is not, having passed away in 2016).  He wrote a ton of western USA fiction but also had his odd hand in various film scripts.  For one thing, he cok-wrote the Jack Nicholson movie Wolf, which I just found bizarre as hell.  Also adapted from this collection?  The Tony Scott-direct Revenge, a completely and justifiably forgotten Kevin Costner thriller.  But really, when I think of Jim Harrison and Legends of the Fall, I immediately think of one thing: how this movie is a perfect example of that long period where movies tried to position Brad Pitt as a boring leading man because he's beautiful, except for the small problem that he's a far more interesting supporting character actor.   I'd rather watch him in True Romance (hey, Tony Scott again) or Ocean's 11 than one of these pretty-boy movies like Legends or Meet Joe Black.  I mean jeez, I know he's an Okie but saddling him with that hair is a crime.

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Look, I know I have interests that I wear on my sleeve.   I love musicals.  I love horror movies.  I love movies about camps.   So when, a few years ago, I found out there was a horror movie set at a musical-theater summer camp, I could not have rushed out to have seen Stage Fright any faster.  And yet, somehow, I've never actually owned it at home.  So when I saw this at a Dollar Tree last weekend, I immediately grabbed it.  This movie is fun, it's just scary enough, the songs are good (oh YEAH, there are actual songs in this musical), it has a really fun riff on the novel of Phantom of the Opera (also, jokes on pompous theater kids who are either enamored or correctly disdainful of the Andrew lloyd Webber musical) and then there's Meat Loaf as the head of the camp.  My god, this movie is a joy for horror fans, always looking for that next rush.  Allie MacDonald in the lead is a real find (she hasn't done a ton of stuff since this but I do need to catch up on What/If, a Netflix series with Jane Levy that I should check out).

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Say, when was the last time you actually read The Chocolate War, the novel set at an all-guys Catholic school in the '70s?  Or maybe saw the movie from the '80s?  Because I didn't read it until a few years ago and man, it is dark.  It's for people who find A Separate Peace way too cheery.    So why am I going to subject myself to the previously unknown sequel we see here?  Because damn it, Cormier knows how to write and as someone who went to a then all-guys Catholic high school, he knew what the hell he was writing about.  

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Look, I know this got savaged in the reviews when it came out last year.  But I'm an absolute sucker for Dennis LeHane, who also wrote Gone Baby Gone, Shutter Island and The Drop, among many other things.  And hey, I have no idea why Affleck decided he wanted to adopt the middle book in a trilogy.  Maybe he just wanted to wear that white suit and tool around Miami in the '20s.   But I think he's a solid enough director that I'm still going to give this a shot.  Also, hey, Chris Cooper is in this and I feel like I haven't seen him in anything for a while.