Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I'm sorry I'm late this week but quite frankly work and also having our backyard get completely revamped with a patio and plants and sod has been a whole thing this week.   But hey, I do have a couple of new finds this week!

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Ben Wheatley is a pretty singular British director.  His movies can be odd and weird (but he can also do comedy; I think Free Fire is an excellent action comedy).  I've still somehow never seen A Field In England, his take on the English Civil War of the 17th century.  So I was happy to run across this, a surprisingly special-feature-packed disc for it.  The English Civil War is an interesting little religious conflict over how the country (and the occupied other countries like Ireland and Scotland) should be governed and this looks like Wheatley is doing an odd take on it where the word psychedelic keeps getting tossed around in reviews.

A Field In England is streaming in a weird huge variety of places; you can find it at Hulu, AMC+, Shudder, Roku, Kaonpy and many others.

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OK, this is something I didn't even know existed.  Adapted from the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta Mikado (the creation of which is also a Criterion release, the very entertaining Topsy-Turvy) this is a 1939 Technicolor movie by musician and director Victor Schertizinger.  These days, he's probably best known for his compositions, like "I Remember You," a song I always love for the Björk cover, among many others.  (The Skid Row song is not a cover of this.)

But he was a quite good comedic director as well, directing the first two Bob Hope and Bing Crosby Road To... movies.  Sadly, he died quite young in 1941 at the age of 53 of a heart attack.  He had a decent directing career overall that I knew of before but somehow never knew he did a version of The Mikado.

100%, there's gonna be a lot of yellowface in this and I will never defend that and I hope this disc addresses that, as it should.

The Mikado is streaming on the Criterion Channel.