Consortium of Seven: Year 2

Happy Thursday, everyone!  Back in the thick of the things, I am and wow do I have some good finds this week. ___________________________ Wow. this is a great example of "good movie with a good Blu-Ray edition with my god, what a terrible color cover."  Why do they think a movie for  people who love black & white films and love this movie would be attracted to this cover? Weirdly, the Criterion cover is not especially great either. It's perfectly...OK and isn't colorized.  It's FINE.  Unlike this, and I'll warn you, you don't need to see this, the current blu-ray of The Apartment.   Prepare yourself, because it's just plain bad. OK, here's a palate cleanser, the wonderful Arrow cover from the UK. Some Like It Hot  is available for purchase at the usual places and is streaming at Hoopla and at Pluto TV with ads. _______________________________ Time for a Spike Lee blindspot.  This is a apparently a good take on NCAA recruitment (which is an abs...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Let's see what kind of thrift store nonsense I got up to while the White Sox beat the Cubs and Chicago suffered through a very uncomfortable heat wave. _____________________________ This goes in the category of "WWII-themed movies that I've never seen" and also "wait....he's a child and chooses to never grow up"?  I mean, there's a lot of man-child nonsense in movies and TV.  But this is apparently well regarded and liked and so, as I always say, I will give it a chance.  Maybe one of these days I will do that "winner of the Palme d'Or" watches and this will be part of it. The Tin Drum  is currently streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. ______________________________ Now this is a series I need to go back and revisit.  Sorkin has steadily gone downhill ( Newsroom  was middling and at times terrible WHITE OLDER GUYS KNOW BEST nonsense and his movies have been actively bad, as well as how after he was...

 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! _________________________________ 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. ____________________________________ 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).  ...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I hope your week is going well, you're maybe checking out a movie as the theaters re-open (we quite liked Black Widow , which was a little deeper than I expected about family and survivor's guilt).  So let's all all pull up a chair and we can chat about what I found at the stores this weekend. _____________________________ An update from last week, where I have been informed that Pump Up The Volume , while still not streaming anywhere, is now available on blu-ray from Warner Archive.  So no special features, but apparently a very good transfer.  I can't recommend it enough as an exceedingly 1988 movie. _____________________________ What a weird coincidence finding this piece of 1987.  I just had my first checkup in a while and well, there's a bit of middle-age spread going on and my doctor recommended trying the Mediterranean diet.  And hey, wine and pasta and olive oil and seafood with the occasional red meat?  I'm dow...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Warmer here in Chicago this week, we've had a bit of rain and it's now the worst sports day of the year as I write this.  (The day after the All-Star Game, when no major sports teams in the US have any games.)  But hey, I got to catch up on Black Widow  (which I thought was quite good and as usual Florence Pugh is a damn good actor) and some reading and now, let's catch up on what I've found at the thrift stores this last week. ______________________________ There it is, my find of the week and maybe the month.  Completely unavailable on any streaming service in the US as part of a service or to rent or to buy and completely out of print on DVD (unless you buy weird bootlegs on Amazon).  I was so happy to find this for only $6.  This movie was huge for me back in the '90s for the story and especially for the fantastic soundtrack (both onscreen and on CD).  It's where I first encountered both Leonard Cohen and Concr...

Happy Thursday, everyone.  I've officially been hired full time at a new job, Chicago is over the hump on a heat wave, so let's look at the stuff I found at the thrift stores this week.  (Including a new Goodwill!) _______________________________   I'm at least two seasons behind on the TV series of Outlander , despite being completely caught up on the books since they started coming out in the mid-90s (hell, googling it, this year is the 30th  anniversary of the first novel and wow, I've been reading these books since I was 18).  But I've really appreciated how solid this series has been, both in the humor and the sexiness, while also not ignoring that they can be quite dark at times.  Which means, sadly, that this is a series that does not ignore sexual violence upon and between genders.  But I think this series is not salacious about that, so far, and doesn't use it as something purely for character motivation.  It doesn't hurt that they h...

 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. ______________________________ 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 Cornel...