Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

Happy Middle Of May, everyone.  We only have two weeks until summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, so let's enjoy it until it gets hot and hurricane seasons starts (or Tony La Russa goes completely nuts and declares that batters should never swing at 2-1 because of some old-school unwritten rules nonsense and sorry, I have to rant about my White Sox, an excellent modern team, being led by a steroids-enabling relic who hasnt managed in a decade).

But anyway.

From the classy to the sublime to the schlock, here we go!

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A lot of good writers have transitioned from the Internet to print work.  It's not a surprise at all that Jenny Lawson, a fantastic Texan writer about her own mental issues (also, the time she bought a giant metal chicken and used it to comedically torment her husband Victor, a story that I CANNOT believe is 10 years old this year) blurbs this because..I mean, damn.

Allie Brosh is brutally honest and funny and makes you cry about her struggles with her life.  I am not even angry that this is the second time I've bought this wonderful graphic memoir about childhood and cake stealing and insane dogs and thinking your neighbor might be a spy.  Seriously, I now have two copies and if anyone wants me to send my spare, let me know.  Because this book is freaking amazing and smart and also so damn funny at times while you're also crying.

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OK, I'll freely admit that I have not seen a ton of Wong Kar-Wai movies.  Should I have moved on from In The Mood Of Love and  The Grandmaster and checked out his earlier work?  Very much so.  So I was quite happy to run across this from 1994, a historical epic that has Tony Leung (who you Marvel fans are really going to need to catch up on after Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings).  Kar-Wai is always worth watching so I am very curious to see what he does here with a more historical epic.

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Ah, now we get into nostalgia.  A movie that for me was my introduction to Michelle Pfieffer and (the very sadly late) Rutger Hauer and such a young Matthew Broderick (who I'm pretty sure I had already seen in WarGames).   It's such an...odd movie.  Richard Donner directing a medieval fantasy of a kid escaping a prison and encountering a disgraces knight who is a wolf at knight while his love is a hawk by day, cursed by a bishop, played by John Wood.

Who played Dr. Stephen Falken in WarGames, opposite Matthew Broderick.  Sue me, that amuses me.

Anyhoo, this is a movie I love a lot, even though it has a terrible synth score from someone in the Alan Parsons Project (maybe Alan Parsons) that just does not fit the movie at all).  It's funny, it's brave, it's just a little bit sexy...and damn, I love that I am of that age as an American that this and Blade Runner are my exposures to Rutger Hauer.  You can do a lot worse than that.

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We're almost to the schlock level of the week!  Not quite yet though because this I want to stop on briefly; Scary Movie is fairly fun, a bit of Wayans family fluff, but it amuses me that the star of the movie, Anna Faris (and the one person from this that would go on to a career) is fourth in the credits behind some guy, Carmen Electra and Shannon Elizabeth.  So let's all move past that and watch Anna Faris.  CW: the Miramax logo and an even then dated bullet-time joke.  But geez, Faris is selling this.

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NOW we're into the schlock!    A movie led by Luke Perry!  Gil Bellows appears!  Absolute nonsense movie descriptions!  And, of course, the pride of sub-1990 CGI. And.  AND.  All of Supernova is available on YouTube because nobody cares and because, maybe it opens up on this fabulous title card.

Which transitions, 30 seconds later after highlighting that Peter Fonda is in this movie for maybe 5 minutes, to this:

OK then!