Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Hello everyone!  How ya doing?  Week treating you OK?  It seems like here in the US we're getting better at vaccine distribution and a lot more people are starting to get their first or only shot (I got the Pfizer on Sunday, and not to get political it's obvious we should have had the National Guard and FEAM running this from the start; they could not have been both nicer and more organized).  But less talk about obtaining vaccines and more talk about what I obtained at the thrift stores!

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I think I've talked about my love for Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man and I also love The Maltese Falcon, but this is one that I simply have never read, despite it being considered somewhat of a basis for Kurosawa's Yojimbo (which in turn inspired A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing; it's a long tail for Hammett and movies based on and inspired by his works).  I absolutely adore Yojimbo, which I think might have Toshiro Mifune's best performance as a ronin who comes to a village split being two warring mobs and figures out how to manipulate them against each other for his own profit.  So I was happy to run across this for finally reading it and for this absolutely fabulous pulp cover from 1968.  (Not a painting, by the way; the back cover credits the photograph to someone known only as Gibboney.)

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Speaking of things I've already talked about, here's another Showtime series I never got to and probably should have by now.  I think Toni Collette is one of the finest actors working right now (seriously, even if you're not into horror, her work in Hereditary is simply amazing).  A show where she gets to play multiple characters?  Sing me up.   I see that it's streaming on Hulu these days, though I imagine it might move over to Paramount+ at some point since this is part of the CBS family, so I might just grind my way through it.  And hey, Brie Larson is in this!

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I've never quite understood the general snark that seems to be attached to M. Night Shyamalan on the Internet*.  Has every one of his movies been a success?  Sure, but no director has a perfect record.  (Well, maybe Kelly Reichardt.)  But wow, I feel like people come for his movies with knives out.  I know this one has a not great reputation, but sure I'll give it a try for Paul Giamatti.  

*This seems to have subsided, but my god were a lot of the snarky "jokes" centered around his name.  Frankly, fuck off with that shit.

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So, a little time capsule here.  Back between my marriages, when I was going to a neighborhood bar once in a while in the Lakeview neighborhood in Chicago, we all became absorbed in Halloween week with a Bravo special titled The 100 Scariest Movie Moments.   Now, a lot of it was what you might except; Psycho and The Exorcist and Misery, but also with a lot of tasteful choices like Les Diaboliques and Blood Simple.  But then, in the 11th spot, they started showing clips from a Japanese movie titled Audition and we all went, "What the hell is THAT?"

Directed by extreme-horror auteur Takashi Miike, this is the story of a widowed Japanese businessman who's not having any luck meeting anyone new, so his best friend persuades him to set up a fake audition for a movie so he can interview potential dates.  Yep, and to the movie's credit this is never played for laughs; it's pretty obvious these guys are creeps.  Naturally...something goes, really, really wrong.  I'll freely admit this movie is not for everyone.  I think it's a masterpiece of tension and revenge, but for a lot of people they won't get past the certain level of gore.  But goodness, it's an appropriate level of gore for a movie with something to say. (And with a simply amazing debut performance by Eihi Shina.)

And hey, someone put up all five episodes of the Bravo series in one large video!  It's quite good.

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I have no idea why, as I went through Roman Catholic schools, I kept getting assigned The Chosen to read.  I would never complain that much, because I think it's a terrific novel full of good writing and very affecting.  So I've gradually been reading more of Potok over the years.  This is the sequel to the lovely My Name Is Asher Lev, a wonderful novel about a Ladover Hasidic boy who discovers he has a talent for art and is unwilling to do art only for the purpose of religion, and his family and community trying to help him use that in a Biblically correct way.  Naturally, he can't quite do that and do the art he's called to do.  In this sequel, it's some years later and for various reasons, he and his wife and children are called back to Brooklyn.  It's a very sweet but also tough novel, where everyone is trying to do the right thing but nobody can agree what it is.  Potok was a rabbi in addition to being an author, and he shows a wonderful ability to show a religious community's problems while also being sympathetic to them.