Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope you're doing well in this first week of Northern Hemisphere Summer and a few days into Pride.  So let's take a look at my weekly trawl from class to...well, class.  No trash this week, sorry!

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Somehow, I've never seen Kurosawa's final film.  It's apparently one of his most personal ones, based on his own, well, dreams and his interpretation of them in his own personal and fantastic style.  I'm sure this is available in some better edition, but I kind of like that my first copy of this is a very 1999 snap-case.  There's something about the colors of this cover image that make me very much looking forward to finally seeing this.

Sorry, Dreams is not available as part of any streaming package for free, but you can get it for around $1.99 at the usual places.   Also, there is (of course) a Criterion Collection edition.

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Story time!  Back in 2007 I hadn't met my wife yet and was dating someone else, and we decided to see this based on a great Ebert review.  So we have dinner before the movie, run a little late and get there late enough that we have to sit in the front row.  Now, I'm a third row guy all the way; I like being close but not being that close.  And especially when, five minutes into the movie the main character (Jean-Dominique Bauby, played by the great Mathieu Amalric) gets into a car crash, is paralyzed and his left eye is sewn shut.

Oh, did I mention that eye sewing is from the first-person perspective of Bauby?

Let's be clear, like 90% of this movie is from that first-person perspective of Bauby as he learns to communicate again.  And by communicate, I mean blink at a letter board so his nurse (and later transcripters) can write down his thoughts.  What's weird is that this is not miserabilist at all.  Naturally, Bauby has terrible days and nights, but this is a movie about a man trying to be better and it is really, really worth checking out.

The letter board in question.  Note that it's based on French letter frequency so seems a little weird if you know English frequency.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is weirdly unavailable at a lot of the usual places, but it's on the Cinemax apps.  Just pick up the DVD, which you can find for a couple of bucks.

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I felt a little ashamed when I learned, sometime in my 20s, at how recently mixed-raced marriages had been illegal in some states in the United States.  But we have this lovely, exquisitely-acted movie about Mildred and Henry Loving, the married couple in Virginia who stood up their states disgustingly-named miscegenation laws and the Supreme Court finally declared them federally illegal.   And boy, does this movie lean (as it should, because they are so great) on three performances.  Ruth Negga as Mildred, Joel Edgerton as Joel and Nick Kroll as their lawyer, Bernie Cohen.  This movie got a lot of critical attention at the time, not as much Oscar love as it should have and I really hope it gets more attention as time passes.

Also, Ruth Negga (who I knew first from Agents of SHIELD) is Irish and has one of the best accents any of my ancestral relatives could ever hope for.

(Joel Edgerton, by the way, is Australian.)

Loving is available in the usual places for rent and sale but is streaming as part of your Netflix subscription, so get on that.

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Look, I have no idea what this novel is about. I picked it up from a Little Free Library because of the cover by Thomas Ott, a Swiss illustrator who does beautiful, bleak work that in a lot of cases are mini-stories of noir despair.  So let's look at his work!

Creepy as hell, right?

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Hey, a TV series I had never heard about, starring the sadly recently deceased Diana Riggs and the current lead of Midsomer Murders, Neil Dudgeon?  No way I wasn't going to pick this up.  I'm a sucker for British/Commonwealth amateur detective stories so this will probably be for me.  And look, baby David Tennant!  Please enjoy the charming "from a VHS" quality of this promo.