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Movie review: Thelma

families are complicated

My wife and I saw the new movie Thelma at the Spectrum 8 Theatre in Albany on a Thursday afternoon. This is the first starring role for nonagenarian Jane Squibb, who I first remember seeing in the 2013 film Nebraska, for which she was rightly nominated for an Oscar.

The story was written by director Josh Margolin, who based the story on his own mother, also named Thelma. IRL, some folks tried to scam Margolin’s mom with a fake call from her “grandson” who was in “trouble,” but she didn’t fall for it.

The cinematic Thelma adores her 24-year-old grandson Daniel (Fred Hechinger), and the feeling is mutual, as he gives her help with her computer, and she offers him confidence. A phony telephone ploy takes her in. Once she realizes that Daniel is all right, she plans to get her money back.

This is complicated by Daniel’s parents, Thelma’s daughter Gail (Parker Posey), and Alan (Clark Gregg, who you may recognize from oodles of Marvel movies). They believe the older woman is experiencing cognitive decline since being widowed a couple of years earlier and may need to move into assisted living.

Our protagonist is having none of this. She borrows a vehicle from her old friend Ben (the late Richard Roundtree), who somewhat reluctantly comes along for the adventure.

Review

There were only ten people in the theater, none of them under 50, I surmise. There were laugh-out-loud segments, and not just by my measure. One particular action cliche is particularly funny.

A lot of truth is here about listening to what older people say, especially about their own lives. Daniel’s parents learn things about their son’s skill set.

Josh Margolis has already won some minor awards, including at the Desertscape International Film Festival, where he was the 2024 festival award winner for Best Action Movie. Seriously.

Professional reviewers at Rotten Tomatoes were 99% positive. Kylie Bolter of the Chicago notes: “This action-comedy leaves room for plenty of nuance about aging and autonomy.” The audience score was 83% positive, with the most common complaint being that it was “boring.” No. Just no.

Movie review: Inside Out 2

perceptive

For Father’s Day, my wife, daughter, and I went to a matinee of the new Pixar film Inside Out 2 at the Spectrum Theatre. This marks one of the few times I’ve gone to a movie on the opening weekend. My family saw the original film in 2015 and I was a big fan.

Things are going swimmingly for the now-13-year-old Riley, who is playing hockey with her two besties. Then they attend a specialized camp at the same time she hits PUBERTY. Her existing emotions don’t realize the significance until Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), Paul Walter Hauser (Embarrassment), and especially Anxiety (Maya Hawke) arrive, turning the OG emotions’ well-oiled machine upside down.

I enjoyed it a lot. Moreover, only recently having been the parent of a teenager, it rang true. It was also quite funny, especially the appearance of a fifth emotion, and two other characters who show up.

More than that, I note that Pixar took great care in getting the emotions correct by using consultants in the field. From TIME: “Dr. Dacher Keltner is a Stanford grad, Berkeley professor, and co-director of the Greater Good Science Centre, with a sweet side gig as part of the Inside Out consulting team, alongside psychologists Paul Ekman and Lisa Damour.”

Reviews

The critics, who were 91% positive, tended to complain that it wasn’t as good as the original. In this camp are a few who thought it was too much of an educational endeavor. I think that was precisely the point, helping teens and their parents negotiate new terrain without being preachy.

I get the feeling that some of these folks have forgotten how difficult puberty is, and it’s certainly more so than when they (and I) were growing up. Sequels are more difficult beasts, but I thought it was very impressive.

This piece from Variety is spot on. “‘Inside Out 2’ is a transporting fable about the desire to fit in, to be validated by the Cool Culture that is, more and more, our collective seal of approval and success. And while the movie is an enchanting animated ride of the spirit…, it may also be the most perceptive tale of the conundrums of early adolescence since ‘Eighth Grade,’” another movie I enjoyed.

“The film isn’t always as uproariously funny as the first ‘Inside Out,’ because it lacks that primal surprise factor. Yet it’s full of moments of delicious effrontery. “

Recommended. And it did boffo box office.

Rebel Without A Cause; SIX

Divorced, beheaded, survived

I haven’t attended enough cultural/entertainment events for my tastes of late. While I did go to the reopening of the Spectrum Theatre on April 24, I haven’t been able to get there since, and I want to soon.

I saw Rebel Without A Cause, the first James Dean movie I ever viewed. Experienced with a 21st-century lens, Jim Stark (Dean) seems less a rebel than, in the words of ScreenRant, “a troubled youth struggling to find his place in a society he sees as hypocritical and devoid of meaning.”

Indeed, it is the high school clique that almost immediately scorns him without much provocation who are at least as broken as he. The knife fight between Jim and Buzz (Corey Allen), a few years before West Side Story, is said to reflect the “social pressures of male teenagers.”

Surely, Jim is frustrated by his ineffectual father Frank (Jim Backus), who allows Jim’s mother Carol (Ann Doran) to uproot the family at the first sign of difficulty.

Control

Jim’s one male friend, Plato (Sal Mineo), is a real outsider, abandoned by his parents, needing “to assert some control over a world in which he feels powerless and invisible.”

Jim’s classmate Judy (Natalie Wood, later in West Side Story) evolves from her disregard for Jim as her classmates did, while missing her old relationship with her father (William Hopper from Perry Mason), to Jim and Judy becoming surrogate parents to Plato.

Indie Wire makes the case that Plato is the first gay teenager on film while avoiding getting stopped by the restrictive Hays Code

It’s an interesting slice of life, with Ray (Edward Platt from Get Smart), the cop specializing in dealing with youth a sympathetic character. Even if it is “overwrought and cloyingly melodramatic,” I still appreciated the chance to see it on the big screen.

Famously, the three leads all died too soon. In a gallery of Lost Photos From a Legendary Hollywood Archive, Dean is captured just a month before he died in a car crash at the age of 24 on 9/30/55, even before the film premiered. Natalie Wood drowned at sea in 1981 at the age of 43. And Sal Mineo was murdered in 1976 at the age of 37.

Divorced, beheaded, died…

SIX, which my wife, daughter, and I saw at Proctors Theatre in Schenectady I don’t think is that compelling a book. I had listened to the music beforehand. But for what it is, it does the thing extremely well. It was an 80-minute rock show with a sextet of Henry VIII’s queens.

The Times Union review by Katherine Kiess is about right. “Styled as a ‘Renaissance Idol’ belt-off…they compete in a glamor-coated trauma Olympics to see whose marriage was the worst.”

You can tell it was a rock show because they namechecked “Schenectady!” a half dozen times before the “LED wall panels and cathedral windows that become everything from a church confessional to a dating app screen.”

The four-piece band, the Ladies In Waiting, cooked. And the singers were excellent. So it’s perhaps not great theater but, as the Los Angeles Times noted, it is “unapologetically revisionist. That’s why it’s successful.” And entertaining enough.

Sister Marcia should do a movie blog

Ritz

It occurred to me that sister Marcia should do a movie blog. I love watching movies, but she devours them. And often the old ones, many of which I still haven’t seen, but she has viewed multiple times. And she’s very conversant about them.

We remember seeing West Side Story with our mom and sister Leslie. It must have been in a second-run theater because she’d have been too young to see the film in 1961. Still, I recall that the ticket taker was concerned that the violence would be too much for her. This was before the movie ratings were implemented in 1968. And maybe it was too “adult” for her, but she loved it.

As kids, we would occasionally get taken to the drive-in, often the one near the airport after the one on Upper Front Street closed in 1963. I don’t remember any of the films except The Dirty Dozen, and that is only because former NFL great Jim Brown was in it. Marcia likely remembers a lot more of them.

Trauma

She occasionally reminds me of when I was mean to her. I was supposed to take her to the Ritz Theater, a second-run cinema on Clinton Street. This was so traumatic that she remembers exactly where we were, in the shortcut from Gaines Street to Oak Street. Reportedly, I asked her what movie we going to see, and if she couldn’t identify it, I wouldn’t take her. She got very upset. Her memory is such that this story is probably true.

The Strand and the Riviera were theaters on Chenango Street in downtown Binghamton. Our mother used to work first at McLean’s Department Store, then at Columbia Gas, both of which were nearby. I imagine we saw a bunch of non-animated Disney fare or safe comedies such as With Six You Get Eggroll.

When I visited my family in Charlotte, NC in the 1970s and 1980s, I’d see movies with my mom Rocky, Star Trek IV, and Dreamgirls – it’s so weird that I remember these without prompts – and I imagine Marcia attended these as well.

But she has embraced Turner Classic Movies and various other platforms over the years. If I need a recommendation for a film in a particular genre, I know who to ask.

Happy birthday, sister Marcia.

Spectrum movie theatres are back!

mint brownies

Since I publicly mourned its closing on February 24, I’m happy – nah, ECSTATIC! – that the Spectrum movie theatres are back!

Per the press release: “Spectrum 8 Theaters first opened in 1983 by two couples who previously had owned and operated an independent movie theater, the Third Street Theatre, in Rensselaer.” I used to attend the Third Street. “For decades, the Spectrum has been synonymous with independent, upscale programming of avant-garde, foreign, independent, and widely-released features.”

Scene One Entertainment and its CEO Joe Masher is promising to “restore the selections that made the Spectrum’s concession stand a treasure: locally-sourced cakes, pastries, cookies, gluten-free delights, real butter on fresh, hot popcorn, and mint brownies.” Many of these elements disappearted during Landmark’s seven-year operation at 290 Delaware Avenue.

“The old new Spectrum” has installed an exhibit titled ‘Looking Back, Heading Forward’ featuring 12 local artists with a nod to the past and to the future showing portraits and people gathering together around the arts.

The theater is now “hiring for all positions here at the Spectrum. Be part of the comeback story in Albany’s Delaware Avenue neighborhood.” A very small part of me is tempted, but no.

My first film…

I’m enough of a geek that I feel as though I should go to the grand reopening. I’ve seen Amelie, Cinema, March of the Penguins, and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, all at the Spectrum. I also watched The Wizard of Oz at the Spectrum in 2022, and even if you’ve seen it on television, I’m recommending that you view it on the big screen.

And I saw Polyester at the Third Street Cinema! They will be offering the ODORAMA CARDS, which you obviously need.

Still, I’m going to opt for a film I’ve never seen, which meanseither The Bodyguard or Rebel Without A Cause. Having seen NONE of Jamres Dean’s films in a cinema, I’ll probably opt for Rebel.

I still don’t kno what “regular” film I will see. The rrailers have often helped me to decide, and except for Covil War, I don’t know much about the current films.

Musical

My wife and I saw the Spring Awakening at Cohoes Music Hall on Saturday. As this review in Nippertown notes, it is excellent. You should know that it deals with mature and intense themes.

It’s playing one more Thursday through Sunday. A member of the cast and one of the musicians attend our church, and another musician sold us our house back in 2000; I knew about the actor but not the musicians beforehand.

We saw a production of this musical back in 2010. while the set in the new profduction wasn’t as snazzy, I thought this production flowed better than the earlier one.