The sun came out for 5 minutes

No I haven't seen Challengers yet, and yes I have heard that everyone loves it, but this tweet delights me every time I look at it.

Movie time! I'm delving back into all my Letterboxd lists, be it Technicolor, The Rough Guide to Cult Movies, or Film as a Subversive Art (there is some weird shit on that one), so here are 3 recent ones that stood out.

High Noon (Paramount+)
Technically this is a western but I found it to be more of a master class in building tension. The plot is simple - bad guy gets out of prison and is headed to town for revenge - but the way the narrative unfolds is brilliant. Gary Cooper won an Oscar for his quiet-but-forceful portrayal of a sheriff steeling to face a gang of outlaws. My only quibble is with the casting of Grace Kelly, who could not have been more out of place in this movie if she'd been wearing a Barney costume.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (Prime)
I finally understand why everyone was so mad when Ben Stiller remade this. The nerve! Danny Kaye is just magnificent as a brow-beaten mama's boy whose daydreams of grandeur are hilarious and beautiful. And the fashion! I know America in 1947 was miserable for pretty much everyone but white men but good lord the clothes. This is basically 90 minutes of eye candy.

Logan's Run (Tubi)
Why oh why did I wait 52 years to watch this? I am sad that my younger self lived her life without this movie's images running through her head. If you are in the same boat, run, don't walk, to your television remote and prepare yourself for a film so 1970s in its 1970s-ish-ness that Donna Summer used it to inform her aesthetic (I completely made that up.) This is Camp with a capital C—the acting is ridiculous, the plot holier than the Pope—but you will love every minute of it. At one point, our protagonists have to run through a "love room" to escape the bad guy, which involves navigating a gauntlet of horny naked people clambering all over them. It's magnificent.

I think that's enough for this week, don't you? If you're not in a movie mood, I apologize and give you this list of everything the actor Brian Cox hates.

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