Month: June 2022

Struggling to maintain an upper middle class lifestyle with her inventor husband Joel McCrea, Claudette Colbert decides that her only option is to get a divorce in Palm Beach and find a rich man to marry and support them both. On the train to Florida, she manages to make headway on the second part of that plan when she attracts the attention of the wealthy Rudy Vallée. A bold Mary Astor provides the necessary second female for the foursome. It’s filled with amiable, silly fun with an unexpected ending that doubles back to the frantic, bewildering beginning. 

Bud Cort is the titular character, a young man who lives alone in a fallout shelter beneath the Houston Astrodome whose primary goal in life is to take flight. As Bud prepares himself for his mission, Houston experiences a series of strange murders that all have an inexplicable connection to birds. Typical of many Altman films, there is an expansive cast which includes Sally Kellerman, Shelley Duvall, René Auberjonois, and Margaret Hamilton who finally gets her own ruby slippers. It’s all very expansive and rambly with a lot of details to catch and ponder on while still maintaining a general focus on Cort and his objective.

In post-World War IV United States, a teenaged Don Johnson and his dog companion scavenge the desert while fighting for survival. The dog has been genetically engineered for telepathy, which also somehow makes him unable to forage for his own food, so he uses his keen sense of smell to find the rare woman for Johnson to rape in exchange for food. It’s all as gross and strange as it sounds, getting stranger after Johnson follows a conquest to her underground community that harkens back to the day when America was supposedly ‘great’. The descriptions of this film I had read really downplay/don’t even mention the rape and commodification of women aspects otherwise I can’t imagine I would have checked it out. The dog is a great character, a tough survivalist who has little patience of the nonsense of humans except for what they provide him. 

When their colleague Greta Scacchi is found raped and murdered, district attorney Brian Dennehy assigns prosecutor Harrison Ford to the case. Despite his attempts to hide his earlier affair with Scacchi, Ford quickly finds himself the chief suspect in the crime. A pretty decent legal drama, the acting is fairly solid and the tension remains high. There’s a handful of possible suspects to the murder with none of them feeling like blatant red herrings and the mystery isn’t resolved until the very last moments of the film.   

Doctor Richard Johnson invites Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, and Russ Tamblyn to stay at the 90 year old Hill House to investigate reported paranormal activity. The activity grows as the house seems to react to Harris’s presence. The tension and atmosphere created in the film are palpably effective. The women are great in their respective roles, especially in comparison: Bloom smart, cool, and worldly and Harris uncertain and inexperienced. I don’t remember the remake from more than twenty years ago being horrible, this is obviously the superior film, though the casting in that film makes a lot of sense in comparison to this one. 

Based on the video game series of the same name, fortune hunter Mark Wahlberg seeks out Tom Holland, the brother of his former partner who has disappeared, hoping to use him to locate the treasure of the Magellan expedition. As a mindless action film, it’s not bad, though completely forgettable. With the natural agility of a dancer, Tom Holland well carries out the athleticism for his role, but his chemistry with Wahlberg is lacking with Wahlberg mostly phoning it in. The adventure challenges are fairly entertaining and the choice of Antonio Banderas as a bad guy is an interesting one, though he’s not given nearly enough to do.