Happy Thursday everyone! And happy first day of spring or fall for those who celebrate the solstice and depending on your hemisphere. Baseball is winding down, football of both kinds are happening, it's getting cooler or warmer as we start the Spooky Season and ramp up on the horror movies and fall decorations here. So let's look what we've found lately.
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Full credit to my wife Christina for this find, a simply lovely (and heavy) spirits decanter. It's labeled as Bohemian glass, made in Czechoslovakia (so pre-1992 or so) and is perfect on our sideboard. I'll probably use it for whiskey or a nice Kentucky bourbon like 1792. (And to crow about Christina, she found this for amazingly cheap; decanters like this are pricey as heck.)
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I'm wasn't sure if Netflix put this out on DVD (they did and you should check it out) but I totally snapped up this awards screener. Sometimes, you run across a screener in the thrift store and it has a selection of episodes, usually those that are being nominated for specific awards, but this is absolutely all the episodes. And man, as a huge fan of Shirley Jackson, this is a wonderful and weird playing around of her novel The Haunting of Hill House, previously adapted in the Robert Wise-directed The Haunting, one of the most unsettling horror films I've ever seen. This one is much more of a haunting (heh) family drama as we bounce back and forth from when the family stayed in the house for a summer and things steadily went more and more wrong and their trying to grapple with it 20 years later after a family tragedy. I firmly believe this may be one of the single best things Netflix has ever aired, a family horror movie that understands sibling and parental relationships and how they can be both wonderful and insane. Mike Flanagan has built up a whole crew of interesting actors, including his wife Kate Siegel, and I fully recommend checking out his interesting filmography like Ouija: Origin of Evil (avoid the first one), Hush and especially Doctor Sleep, which is a The Shining sequel that's like 15 times better than you might expect.
CW: this trailer is really unsettling.
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On to something much cheerier! The Man From U.N.C.L.E is something I literally have never seen, but let's be frank, there was no way I was passing up a tie-in novel with that title. I mean...c'mon, The Radioactive Camel Affair? That's a stellar title.
Robert Vaughn on the right there is a guy who I kind of know from a little bit of everything over his long career. But on the left there, the fabulous Scottish actor David McCallum, that's a guy I know from different ends of his career (he's still around but seemingly semi-retired). I know him as one of the escape planners in The Great Escape and decades later as Duckie on NCIS. Kind of a fun career there (and NCIS over the years has had some fun with bringing up his early careers, like saying that Duckie when he was young looked like Illya Kuryakin, his character on U.N.C.LE.)
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My recommendation of the week? Heck, check out the 2015 movie of The Man From U.N.C.L.E; it's a lot of fun and lets Henry Cavill, for one thing, show off that he can be quite funny and they really missed the boat by making him always play a morose Superman instead of the Boy Scout with a heart of gold.
Sadly not included in any streaming package at the moment but you can rent it for $4 pretty much anywhere.
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