Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Here outside of Chicago we're coming out of being snowbound and looking at some more today (and then a severe freeze) but I've had the chance to find some new treats this week.  We have classy works involving Julie Delpy, a classic spy thriller, Disney's love of monkeys in their movies and then a Nicolas Cage thriller with the weirdest cast.

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Weirdly, a trilogy where I've only seen the middle one, which is probably the first time I ever saw Julie Delpy.  The three films, directed by the late Krzysztof Kieślowski, reflect the three ideals of the French motto "liberty, equality, fraternity;" not having seen the other two, I was happy to grab this because White is simply fantastic, a revenge film where a wronged husband is trying to achieve equality with his ex-wife by bringing her down to his level.  It's sad and stunning; Delpy is wonderful in it and this is really Zbigniew Zamachowski's show as the husband, hangdog and dogged in his quest.   Remembering how great that is makes me really look forward to the other two, which star Juliette Binoche and Irène Jacob.

And if you ever want to encounter Irène Jacob in another Krzysztof Kieślowski classic, check out La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Veronique), which is pretty damn great.

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My other Julie Delpy for the week is a bit of a weird appearance in Richard Linklater's Waking Life.  It's a bizarre, walking and waking dream of a movie made by filming actors and then rotoscoping art at various levels of bizarreness and realism over the filmed images.  It's hallucinatory, interesting as hell and very much worth seeing.  Delpy shows up here as a reprise of her character from Before Sunrise with co-star Ethan Hawke, as they have a post-coital conversation that fits into the weird themes of this movie (this was before the first sequel, Before Sunset).  It's a fun little appearance in a good, weird movie.

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One of these days, I need to really dig into the entire filmography of Sydney Pollack.  He had a damn good career and somehow I never got to this one before.   It's taut, at times scary as hell, and has some real good performances (for people like me who missed his heyday and you might know him only as Uncle Ben, it's really worth digging into older work by Cliff Robertson, like how he won an Oscar for Charly).  It does have one bad, very '70s bit with a hostage falling for and having sex with her captor, which is unfortunate.  But overall, it's damn good and as usual the late Max Von Sydow is just perfect.

And really, one of my thrift store white whales is the peacoat Redford wears in this movie.  It's fantastic.

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One of these days, I'm going to dig into and write about the history of the movie industry and their obsession with monkeys and primates.  There's SO many.  The Bonzo movies with Ronald Reagan, Ed with Matt LeBlanc, all of the Tarzan movies, it's a whole weird thing.  So of course I grabbed this crazy-looking Disney film I'd never even heard of.  Like, what the heck is going on with the cover?  Are the monkeys on strike?  (And yes, I know these are chimps, not monkeys.)  This looks kind of insane. (The really insane part, considering how protective Disney is of their properties?  The whole movie is on YouTube.)

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I will bet you $5 that Samuel L. Jackson is in this movie for under 10 minutes.  And look, David Caruso isn't the greatest actor, but I kind of like him in a cheap-looking thriller like this (which oddly also has Helen Hunt, Michael Rappaport and Stanley Tucci).  But enough of this movie, check out David Caruso in Session 9.  Now that's a great movie, a deeply disturbing horror film about guys cleaning out an old asylum (and filmed in the old Danvers State Hospital in Massachusetts, an inspiration for Lovecraft's Arkham Asylum and then of course Arkham in the Batman universe).  It's unsettling as hell and Caruso is legitimately very good and sad in it as this week of cleanup work gets weirder and weirder.