Consortium of Seven: Year 4

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Best of luck to everyone who got hit by Idalia this week.  We get a very small edge of it here in Virginia (and it's part of the reason it's only 70 today).  So let's look as a distraction at what I've found recently. ____________________________________________________ I keep pushing 2018's  A Simple Favor  at people; it's a smart, funny little weird thriller from writer-director Paul Feig that has a really fun cast led by Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively.  If you liked Knives Out  at all, this is for you.  It's just weird enough (Linda Cardellini shows up in a small role that's a great use of her) and it also looks amazing (there should have been a Best Costume nomination for it). Seriously, the looks in this movie are amazing.  Plus, a fantastic soundtrack of French pop songs. A Simple Favor  is streaming on Prime, Fubo and MGM+. ____________________________________________________ The classy stuff this ...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  Still in the 90s here in Richmond but hopefully we'll get some rain soon because frankly, our garden could use it.  But hey, school is starting for kids, the cooler weather is coming so let's see what I found recently! ______________________________________________ My Dinner With Andre  is one of those movies that I know by reputation and yet, somehow, I've never actually seen.  So hey, this was an easy pickup for me.  I know Malle mostly for  Au Revoir Les Enfants , his 1987 masterpiece about how he was at boarding school during WWII where the priest running it,  Père Jacques, was harboring Jewish children from the Gestapo.  It's a wonderful and harrowing piece of work that has stuck in my head forever.   My Dinner With Andre  is currently on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. ______________________________________________ On a much sillier level, long before the CW had what came to be know as ...

Happy Thursday, everyone!  The HVAC is finally fixed in our house (sleeping in high humidity in the '80s sucks) and we've been home from our Ohio/Michigan trip, so let's look at some of the acquisitions I found at thrift stores. ________________________________________________ I've always been a huge fan of Madeline L'Engle's Murray Family novels, starting with A Wrinkle In Time .  I have another edition of this around somewhere, but I needed to grab this for this fantastic cover that shows a cherubim named  Proginoskes that is their to help Meg and her brother Charles Wallace deal with an evil that is infecting people around them through their mitochondria.  (Trust me, it makes sense in the novel.). This isn't my favorite of the various Murray novels, but it's an important one for how Meg is growing up.   Amusingly, this edition has ads in the back for various S.E. Hinton novels and The Chocolate War , which are appropriate for the same age group as rea...

 Happy Thursday everyone!  Hot and steamy here in Richmond but at least the wildfire smoke has cleared a bit.  I'm calling an audible on I Feel (Un)Seen this week, since I simply didn't have time to watch  The Invisible Man vs. The Human Fly (we'll get to that next week), we're just gonna look at some recent thrift store finds. ____________________________________________ I kind of dip in and out of American Horror Story  seasons.  The last one I watched in full was Apocalypse , a great use of some of the previous seasons; this one was the season before and I don't think ties into Apocalypse  at all, though of course it has a lot of the same actors like Sarah Paulson and Evan Peters.  (How AHS re-uses actors is really a lot of fun as they get to play in different modes across different stories.) So this is a new season to me and outside of it being about a cult, I don't think I even know what it's about, which is nice. All seasons of American Hor...

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  I'm buried in work today so these are going to be shorter entries but I have a good amount to talk about. __________________________________________ Someone at Criterion has a real love for Japanese cinema and samurai/ronin pictures.  Director Hideo Gosha is someone I'm less than familiar with but I think maybe this weekend I'll dig into both Three Outlaw Samurai  and the other one I own, Sword of the Beast, both of which appear to be about outlaw samurais, so it might be interesting to compare and contrast on the different movies.   I always love how Japanese trailers of the time open with these big blasts of music over the studio trailer.  Three Outlaw Samurai is currently only on the Criterion Channel for streaming. __________________________________________ We're members of the completely excellent Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, but sadly I missed their recent exhibition on The Guitar In American Art.  But I did pick...

 Happy Thursday everyone!  It's been raining most of the week here in Richmond but we're off to Virginia Beach for the weekend so hopefully it'll be a little nicer (I've never been to Virginia Beach and I'm looking forward to it).  But in the meanwhile, let's look at what I've found lately at the stores! _______________________________________________ About a year and a half ago, podcasters John Hodgman and Elliot Kalan did a limited series recapping the 1976 BBC adaption of Robert Graves' 1934 novel about the Roman emperor Claudius and his rise to power, I, Claudius .  I'm a fan of both of their usual comedy podcasts ( Judge John Hodgman  and The Flop House , respectively) so gave it a listen but realized about 10 minutes into the first episode that I've somehow never actually watched I, Claudius !  My interest in Romans is mostly about the Republic, so I think I just never got around to it (and god knows how available it was after the initial P...