Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope your baseball team is doing well, whatever Olympians you're rooting for are having success and you're having at least some time to yourself with a good back whether in an AC-cooled room or by the pool.  Now on to this week's nonsense!

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Diving into older books about the US Civil War can be a dicey proposition, what with an older breed of historians who focused more on battles and bloodshed rather than the causes (slavery) and long-term impact of the treasons and liberation of millions of people in the United States.  But this does still have good reviews and apparently is still pretty well regarded, so I'll give it a shot.

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So, up until a few years ago the Boston Strangler was something I simply didn't know much about besides that it was the name of a serial killer in Boston back in the day (keep in mind the murders took place a decade before I was born).   But a few years ago, a podcast titled Stranglers came out that was a deep dive into the subject that I found riveting.  A lot of true-crime podcasts I find shallow and trite and full of armchair detectives who a lot of the time sound like all of their research is a Wiki article and maybe some headlines.  But this one is obviously made and researched and interviewed by professionals who know what they're doing and have compassion toward their subject.  Do they also have a potential bombshell of a conclusion to keep you listening?  Absolutely.   But this is never lurid even when it's describing some very horrible crimes.  I don't know if I can recommend this book just yet but I can absolutely recommend the podcast.

CW: the trailer for the movie based on the book is pretty rough, showing sexual assault.  

The Boston Strangler is available for rent and purchase at all the usual places.

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Ah, George R. R. Martin, who has a whole career outside of Game Of Thrones that most people simply don't know about. Like how he wrote on the Linda Hamilton fantasy series Beauty and the Beast.  Or his one-off novels like this that I grabbed only partially for that hilariously goth cover.  I've got the fevre, and the only prescription is more weird use of blood on this cover.

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Sure, I already own a copy of this.   But I couldn't resist getting another just for this fantastic design.  It's a great use of iconography to illustrate a point.  Similarly, there's an early paperback edition that also uses the Rising Sun.

One of these days, I need to check out the Amazon Prime adaptation of this novel, which apparently goes to some very weird places.

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I kind of wonder how much people remember the Martin Guerre story.  It's a fascinating one, where a woman welcomes back her husband from some war in medieval France, only to have another man show up and claim to also be the husband.  A trial ensues and a husband is declared, though who knows if it was the right one?  This book would be the basis for a quite well-regarded 1982 movie starring Gérard Depardieu.  I've seen it a few times and it's fantastic.

Then there's a 1993 movie titled Sommersby that updates the setting to the US Civil War (hey, it's back!) and stars Richard Gere and Jodie Foster.  I've never seen this one and frankly, I'm fine.  It just looks so gauzy, like they took the candlelight filming of Barry Lyndon and also smeared some vaseline on the lenses.

Finally, a 2013 adaptation became the first film to come out of East Timor.  Titled A Guerra da Beatriz (Beatriz's War), it's a Tetum- and Indonesian-language take set during Indonesian invasion of East Timor.  I'll admit, I'm really curious about this one.

The Return of Martin Guerre is streaming on Tubi and Kanopy.

Sommersby is available for rent and purchase.

A Guerra da Beatriz is not streaming anywhere in the US and it seems like you have to mail order the DVD.

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Finally, time for my Recommendation Of The Week!  Starting back in the '80s, actor and director Soleil Moon-Frye began keeping recordings of all kinds.  She would videotape like crazy, make cassette recordings, do what would we call now video essays and so on.  She's now compiled it into a movie, Kid 90, that's about growing up in the public eye as a child of the '90s.  And hoo boy, I was not expecting to be affected so much by this.  It's a document of her struggles with substances and body issues and having an insane level of public scrutiny (frankly, Moon-Frye might have gotten a little lucky by not being a teen actor in the age of social media, but it was bad enough).  Interspersed with new interviews with people she was friends with back then, like Balthazar Getty or Brian Austin Green, it's a really good and intimate piece of work that reminded me a lot of me and my friends who got out of the '90s and those who didn't.  

Kid 90 is streaming on Hulu.