Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  The weather slowly gets warmer, the White Sox are in first place and kicking around the Twins, and the Bears actually made a smart draft choice for once by picking Justin Fields.  So let us celebrate these last weeks of spring by looking at what treasure and trash I've found this last week or so.

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I'll freely admit what little I know of the actual history of the Vanderbilt family is from Gloria Vanderbilt's memoir and seeing interviews with Anderson Cooper about his family.  So I ran across this, about Anderson's great-great-great grandfather Cornelius and figured I would give it a shot.  Oh, and I've also been to the Biltmore Estate in the Asheville, North Carolina area and can highly recommend going to it if you're ever around there.  The Blue Mountains section of the Appalachians is one of the most beautiful parts of the USA that I've seen and Biltmore is the rare New Money estate (built by Cornelius' grandson George) that is tasteful and fits the surroundings.  (In fact, part of the original estate would become the nucleus of the magnificent Pisgah National Forest.) Still owned by the Vanderbilt family, a rarity in an age where many of these sort of estates have been sold off because they take a lot of money to upkeep (Biltmore apparently does very well sustaining the upkeep through tourism.) 

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As a fan of Basz Lurhmann's particular brand of calculated excess, I was quite excited to find a recording of his production of La Bohème.  This is from the original 1990 production, filmed in 1993 for Australian television and occasionally shown in the US on PBS.  I haven't seen a production of La Bohème in quite a while, but it's just like Rent, right?  *ducks tomatoes*

Going by descriptions and video clips, it looks like Baz set this one in 1957 Paris, and I'm real curious to see what his take on New Wave Paris is like.

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You know, a Facebook discussion of Titanic made me realize two things:

1. I haven't seen Titanic in quite a while.
2. Titanic in my memory is quite good and the weird backlash against it can take a flying leap.
3. Somehow, I didn't own Titanic.

So, I rectified that the next time I saw it in a Goodwill.  So now I can go back in, look for the Heart of the Ocean and remember that Victor Garber should probably have been nominated for his role as Titanic designer Thomas Andrews.

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Next up in things I feel a need to rewatch, I ran across the second season of the US version of Queer as Folk.  Set in Pittsburgh of the early 2000s (though filmed in Toronto, often hilariously unconvincingly), I'm sure part of this has dated quite badly (terms have changed or been corrected, bisexuality has become more accepted now and I'm almost certain the series never went further in LGBQTIA+ than LG and maybe B) but in my memory the series captured a very particular time in American in terms of perceptions and cultural battles. (for instance, the subject of adoption rights and surrogacy for same-sex couples).  The show could be tawdry as hell, but that was half of the fun as it was also a nice course correction from the gay panic you would find on an episode of Friends (for instance) at the time.

Also, it's from that interesting time when Showtime was really trying to compete with HBO for prestige TV, something they retreated from a little bit outside of Homeland.  (And apparently Ray Donovan stil exists.)

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Now, on to the trash!  I LOVE finding something like this at the thrift store, especially when you pull up the trailer.

Cheap CGI!  Getting blown up by a bazooka!  Having weapons put in your body to blow up your enemies real good!  This is exactly the kind of nonsense I love to find and slap on for a Sunday afternoon with a beer or two.  The moment in this trailer where someone literally says the title and then someone else repeats disbelievingly is just magnificent.  There are so many boring bad movies that you crow when you find something that has the potential to be a fun bad movie.