Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone! It's cold and gloomy here outside of Chicago, but maybe we can brighten up the day a bit with some of the things I've found in various places in the last week.  But first, please enjoy the creepiest picture of the week, from the Gap in my town that is closing down and selling off mannequins.  

And now that that nightmare fuel is in your head, let's move on!

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Sure, I have HBOMax* and this is probably on there, but hell yes I jumped on the chance to own on DVD this wonderful miniseries about the Apollo project.  If you've never seen it, it's really great how it does different perspectives depending on the episode; one might be more standard fare about the astronauts, while the next one might delve into the world of the astronaut wives, or another be entirely about the company in New Jersey that was constructing the Lunar Rovers over almost a decade.  It's a fantastic piece of work with a completely killer cast, produced very well by Tom Hanks as a pet project of his (and he cheekily appears later on as an assistant to Georges Méliès, the director of the original silent film Le Voyage Dans la Lun** (A Trip to the Moon)).  It's a ton of fun and inspiring as hell.

*And you might have it as well.  I keep telling anyone who has an AT&T plan for their phone or home internet to check their data plans; if you have unlimited for whatever, HBOMax is almost certainly included already and you just need to figure out how to activate it.

**Which you should absolutely watch if you've never seen it.  It's only about 12 minutes and it's still great.

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Speaking of silent films, I only know this by reputation but I'm very curious to check out this movie version of the old Jewish legend about a rabbi who creates a golem to protect his people from a pogrom.  It's apparently quite good and with any luck this is a decent transfer (movies that have fallen into public domain can be a bit of a crapshoot on DVD).

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Over the last year or so, I've been slowly working my way through the animated theatrical releases put out by the Walt Disney company; I make that distinction so that I can avoid various direct-to-DVD things like the 1 billion Tinker Bell videos I have no interest in.  Tangentially to that, I keep musing at maybe dipping into their live action works.  For instance, I have never seen the 1963 adaptation of this novel I found, but I remember my sisters liking this a lot when it would be on the Disney Channel.  I'm all for a good animal story, after all.

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Ah, Wonder Boys.  Here's one where I have seen the movie, not read the book, but I am definitely a fan of Michael Chabon (his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union are both so, so damn good).  The movie somehow takes the most hoary of male novelist cliches, writing a novel about a male novelist college professor who's sleeping with a colleague or a student, and turns it all on its head, almost leaping sprightly through the story with wonderful Michael Douglas and Frances McDormand performances.  I am absolutely sure the novel is at least half as good.

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I'm the sort of guy who collects Criterion Collection editions of movies (what a surprise, I know), and one of the holy grails of the collection for movies that have gone out of print is John Woo's The Killer.  They put it out very early in their existence (it is literally spine #8, and they are up to #061 as of this week).  It's a damn great, thoughtful action movie about a mob assassin who grows a conscience with a very good lead performance by Chow Yun-Fat.  One day, I will get the Criterion edition of this, but I was still happy to find this; Dragon Dynasty releases don't have the greatest reputation but I'm willing to give this a shot for a buck.