Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope your week is going well (myself, I finally am employed again!)  so let's dig into what I found this last week, from the sublime to the deeply silly.

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Ah, Brave New World.  Still terrifying and prescient decades later even though parts of it have aged quite poorly (the supposed savages being a weird mix of Native American nations, for one).  I've read it several times but I grabbed this because it contains Huxley looking back at this from 27 years later (1958 as opposed to 1931) and feeling a great deal less optimistic (what a surprise). 

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Oh hey, a Peter Weir I've never seen!  For some reason, I always forget Richard Chamberlain is Australian (sue me, I'm just young enough that The Thorn Birds is just kind of a thing I've heard about).  But from what I know about Chamberlain, this feels like the kind of thing that might be up his alley.  And I will always make time for Peter Weir, one of my favorite Australian directors for things like Picnic At Hanging Rock or The Truman Show or Master and Commanders.  A director with a great mastery of tone.

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Have I watched more than maybe 2 episodes of Deadwood?  Nope!  Did I like what I saw maybe a decade ago?  Sure!  Is this even the first season or did I grab it because hey, you find an HBO box set for $5, you grab it.  (And this thing is pretty much a box; it's sturdy as hell like the HBO sets for Rome).  So sure, sometime soon I'll dip into HBOMax and go back to Deadwood and a just insanely good cast.  Seriously, look up there; that's Timothy Olyphant and Brad Dourif and Ian McShane and Robin Weigert and Powers Boothe.  And then Anna Gunn, years before she was one of the best parts of Breaking Bad!  

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Back in the '90s and Aughts, Cartoon Network had a weird amount of fun airing shows that screwed around with old cartoons.  Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law was one of these, taking the eponymous superhero from a deeply stupid era of Hanna Barbera cartoons and making him in a lawyer at a law firm specializing in representing fellow HB characters.  It's deeply silly but also almost surprisingly well done, with weird things like representing Fred Flintstone in an obvious Sopranos homage.   A ton of fun and streaming on HBOMax these days, but I do like my hard copies.

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And now to the deeply silly!  Jean Claude Van Damme and Michael Rooker in a movie where JVCD plays clones pursuing each other?  100% this is the kind of trash I'm here for.