Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Coming to you a little late this week, since I completely biffed on what day it was.  But let's forge ahead and see the bizarre mix of trash and classics that I found this week.

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Look, do I know that much about A. Bertram Chandler (who passed away in 1954)?  Nope.  Did I partially buy this for the cover art?  Sure.  Did I really buy it for that fantastic tagline?  100%.  You almost never see this sort of thing these days in the world of science fiction outside of sad self-published anti-women screeds, but there's a whole run of "what about women, aren't they kind of weird?" books in the field that lasted through the '70s, partially as a reaction to the growing second-wave feminism, partially as a leftover of the supposed golden age of science fiction which was a lot of John W. Campbell-era tales of serious men in serious lab coats with pipes.  But Chandler does still seem to have a reputation these days, albeit for stories and themes that modern sci-fi has left behind.

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I forget exactly how many movies are in the Street Fighter series, including the ones that starred the characters daughters, but I've always been oddly curious about them since they were featured in True Romance, where the main characters meet at a Sonny Chiba revival.  So I'm curious to check out just how cheesily violent these are.  Also, this DVD is old enough that it lists "chapter stops" and "interactive menus" as special features.

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The really classy entry for this week, 1953's Gate Of Hell.  A fantastic movie about a samurai who falls for a married woman and the lengths he will go to for his obsession with her and the court intrigue that ensues.   One of the more beautiful films you'll see, it won the Oscars for Foreign Language and Costume Design and probably should have won for cinematography as well.  (There's a really good essay at Criterion about the look of it.)  A beautiful movie that more people should absolutely see.

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Now onto the absolute trash!  Andy Sidaris was a TV sports director with a bunch of Emmys who decided with his wife to make essentially exploitation films.  I've seen a couple of these and the weird thing is, you might think that these are grody excuses for topless women and explosions and that's part of it, but they're weirdly corny and sweet movies with weird things like undercover agents running a cargo flight company in Hawaii, or a radioactive snake, or a guard henchman who spends a lot of his time while guarding throwing a frisbee around.  The podcast How Did This Get Made? focused on Hard Ticket To Hawaii a few years back and it was a weird pleasant surprise at how much fun this stupid movie is.  For instance, the theme song:

And then what the hell happens here:

They're such entertainingly dumb movies and hey, for $5 I now own all of them.

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Finally, a lovely little novel that for some reason I didn't own a copy of; Linda Holmes is an NPR reporter and podcaster, who wrote this little gem about Evvie, a woman in Maine who falls for a former Major League pitcher who has retired due to a case of the yips.  For anyone not familiar with it, yips is essentially when your athletic skills just go bye by for no reason; for some reason, it seems to affect pitchers the most.  Most famously, it happened to Steve Blass in the '70s and there's a great New Yorker article about it.  But that's not the whole focus of this novel, which is about two good people who have both gone through personal tragedies and are stumbling along in their own way.  Set in Maine, this is a nice alternative if all you know of Maine literature is Stephen King.