Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Ah, Thursday.  The weekend is almost here, there's a new MCU series starting tomorrow and if I'm completely insane I could watch all four hours of a new cut of Justice League today.  But instead of that, on this cold and rainy day here in the Chicago area, let's look at the stuff I found this week!

Now, I don't think I've had access to Showtime since the 1980s when my parents first got cable.   (Also, briefly in 2017 so I could watch the third season of Twin Peaks.)  So I've never seen most of Dexter, or Nurse Jackie, or Weeds.  Which is nothing against them, despite how all three by reputation have gone completely off the rails.*

So why did I take a chance on this box set of the first season of Sleeper Cell?  Partially because it's only two seasons overall, only 9 episodes in this first season, so if it's bad I haven't wasted too much time on it.  And hell, Michael Ealy and Oded Fehr are safe bets as leads.  So sure Showtime, I'll take a chance on your show, which appears to have avoided a bunch of the "all American Muslims are potential terrorists" problem of later seasons of 24.

Speaking of Oded Fehr, it amused me to realize that I had literally been watching half of the most recent season of Star Trek: Discovery without realizing where I knew the head of Starfleet from.  Like duh, he was in The Mummy.   Dude aged really, really well.

*TV critic Alan Sepinwall has a newish podcast (Too Long, Didn't Watch It) where he gets a celebrity guest on to watch the first and last episode of a series they've never seen.  The most recent one, where Paul Scheer watched Dexter, is simply classic and Scheer descending into almost a rage at how Dexter ends is really great.

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Why no, I can't justify as to why A) this is my favorite of the Nightmare movies or B) why I didn't already own this.  But I really do think this is one of the weirdest and the funniest of the series (the original is quite much more a horror film, before Freddy essentially becomes the main character).  It's kind of bonkers as the main character (played quite well by Lisa Wilcox) starts absorbing her friends dream powers and ends up fighting Freddy with all of them.  Not to everyone's taste, but filmed by the bonkers Renny Harlin (who also directed things like The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea, which should tell you what you're in for) it's just plain fun.  If you have any interest in documentaries about movies, Never Sleep Again covers all of the Nightmare movies; you don't have to watch the whole thing (it shows up ocassionally on Shudder) but the section on this and how Harlin dealt with losing his original actor (Patricia Arquette was in 3 and was unable to come back due to a pregnancy) and New Line Films cutting the budget halfway through.  It's very interesting stuff.

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Sometimes, you find yourself at a Dollar Tree, pawing through their weird selections of DVDs (many of them movies you have never heard of or Air Bud knockoffs) and you find a gem like this, a fantastic adaption of a graphic memoir by Swedish writer  Coco Moodysson about being a punk girl in 1982 Stockholm.  It's just so much fun and lovely and has one of the most punk performances I've ever seen in the climax of the movie.  My friend Randy made me watch this when we used to do a podcast together and it's one of the best things I discovered through that.  It's currently all over the place on services, like Hoopla and Kanopy (both of which are easy to access through US libraries) or on Tubi with ads, and it's just a wonderful movie very worth your time.

(Hell, I was just going to post that trailer but I ended up watching it again because it is so much fun.)

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And sometimes, you grab one of those things you've never heard of, just because you're intrigued by the idea of Ralph Fiennes starring in a BBC adaptation of an Ivan Turgenev play (A Month In The Country, in this case).  Because hey, Fiennes is a pretty safe bet and I do like the Turgenev novels I've read.  Also, it's apparently in Russian, the actors besides Fiennes are Russian and hell, I'll give that a shot.  (And a small thing, the director was a woman and this will count towards my annual pledge to watch 52 films by women directors.)