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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.

Movie review: Cabrini

Angel Studios

My wife took a too-rare weekday off, and we decided to go to the cinema. A good friend of hers had recommended the movie Cabrini, so we went to the Regal Cinema at Northway Mall.

Sister Francesca Cabrini (Cristiana Dell’Anna) from Italy wanted to set up an orphanage in China. After she rangled with the local cardinal, Pope Leo XIII (Giancarlo Giannini) acceded to her desire to expand her mission. But instead of her going east, he said she and her fellow nuns should go west to the United States.

Specifically, she and five other nuns headed to New York City in 1889, to the Five Points section of lower Manhattan, which “gained international notoriety as a densely populated, disease-ridden, crime-infested slum.” It was a ghetto of Italian orphans and the adults who would exploit them.

Yet, Cabrini, who was often quite ill, and her colleagues managed to win over the kids, even the wounded Vittoria (Romana Maggiora Vergano.)

But there were headwinds. The local archbishop Corrigan (David Morse) was cautious, not wanting to undo the church’s balance with the powerful and unsympathetic Mayor Gould (John Lithgow).

What Cabrini ultimately managed to accomplish was comparable with Carnegie or Rockefeller.

Critics

In general, I agree with all the critics, who were 91% positive on Rotten Tomatoes. It’s solid, sincere, believable, and highlights a powerful and impressive woman. Cristiana Dell’Anna was very good. Steven D. Greydanus wrote: “As single-minded as its protagonist, Cabrini drives home in every scene its themes of human dignity—particularly the dignity of women and marginalized groups including immigrants and the poor—and solidarity in the face of prejudice and social injustice.” It’s mostly true.

It’s also a bit staged and affected, often looking drab. The dialogue is too modern; at 142 minutes, the film is at least 15 minutes too long. But still, it’s a thumbs up.

Once again, I must mention how much I hate seeing films at the Regal. The ads started at 11:53 for a purported noon start, but between the legit previews and the straight-out ads, the movie didn’t begin until 12:20.

Angel Studios

Two of the coming attractions were interesting. Like Cabrini, they were developed by Angel Studios, the makers of Cabrini. The filmmakers seem to use a more robust version of crowdsourcing/membership.

One preview was for Sight (May), “starring Greg Kinnear and Terry Chen, [which] follows the true story of Dr. Ming Wang, a Chinese immigrant who defies all odds to become a world-renowned eye surgeon. Drawing upon the grit and determination he gained from a turbulent uprising in his youth, Dr. Wang sets out to restore the sight of a blind orphan.

Also, Possum Trot (July 4) is “the true story of Bishop and First Lady Donna Martin, and their tiny Bennett Chapel church, in the town of Possum Trot in the woods of East Texas. Twenty-two families linked arms and courageously adopted seventy-seven of the most difficult-to-place children in the local foster care system, igniting a national movement for vulnerable children that continues today.” One of the executive directors is Letitia Wright, one of the stars of The Black Panther movies.

More Angel

Future films include Homestead -“Amid chaos, ex-Green Beret joins prepper compound; love grows, truths arise, and a community unites;” Bonhoeffer – “When a pacifist is called to a political act that could change the course of history, how will a man of honor respond?” and David – This animated musical is based on the biblical story of a giant slayer that inspired a nation.”

A previous movie, Sound of Freedom, is “based on the gripping true story of a man’s mission to rescue children from the world’s darkest corners. This action-packed drama shines a light on the harrowing reality of sex trafficking and the valiant efforts of those who work tirelessly to combat it.” The critics were lukewarm (57% positive), but the audience was 99% favorable. It played at Regal in August of 2023, but I did not see it.

Movie review- Bob Marley: One Love

Landmark

Let it be known that the last movie my wife and I saw at the Spectrum 8 Theatre under its agreement with Landmark Theaters was Bob Marley: One Love on Thursday, February 22, at 4 pm. The theater was crowded, including a woman with five children in our row.

I had heard a lot about the making of the film. Kingsley Ben-Adir was on CBS Mornings; the show and the movie are under the Paramount Global umbrella. The six-foot British actor explained his surprise to be cast to play the musician who was six inches shorter. He had to learn how to play guitar, but most importantly, approximate the patois of the Jamaican legend.

Unfortunately, the movie was a largely by-the-numbers biopic. The review at RogerEbert.com is a fair representation. For instance, the script is described as “a horrendous, unshaped stream of events rendered with the subtlety of bullet points.”

Less of an issue was that I couldn’t understand the dialogue occasionally. It could have used subtitles in places.

Family ties

One hoped for more. Bob’s son Ziggy promised us at the beginning of the film an “authentic depiction.” Bob’s widow, Rita, is an executive producer. Another of Bob’s sons, Stephen, was involved musically.

And yet…

The music resonated more than any recent film I’ve attended. Many of the tunes I knew. I particularly loved hearing War and the early hit Simmer Down. Also, if you were unfamiliar with Bob Marley, this would be a basic primer.

This may explain why the Rotten Tomatoes score was 43% positive with the critics but 92% positive with fans. As critic Neal Pollack noted: “This movie isn’t great, but it’s just enough. When you have a built-in audience willing to forgive a multitude of cinematic sins, every little thing about it is gonna be all right.”

For the record

My wife gave me a $100 Landmark gift card for Valentine’s Day. But she bought me TWO, one of which she was going to give me for my birthday in March.

There are a relatively small number of Landmark Theatres; AZ-1, CA-9, CO-4, DC-2, FL-1, GA-1, IL-2, IN-2, MD-2, MA-1, MN-1, MO-1, NJ -1, PA-1, TX-1, WA-1.. Spectrum 8 was the ONLY one in all of New York State. We will unlikely see a film in Cambridge, MA, or Philadelphia.

The films playing at the Spectrum 8 on its last day of being a Landmark Theatre were:

2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films – Animation, one showing. I saw it at the theater.

2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films – Live-action, one showing. I probably would have seen it, given more time.

Bob Marley: One Love, Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green. Two showings. I saw it at the theater.

Madame Web, Directed by S.J. Clarkson. Two showings. As this article suggests, audiences, including me, suffer from superhero fatigue.

Lisa Frankenstein, Directed by Zelda Williams. Two showings. I saw the trailer; I’m not interested.

Argylle, Directed by Matthew Vaughn. Two showings. I saw the trailer; I’m not interested.

The Teachers’ Lounge, Directed by İlker Çatak. One showing. I saw it at the theater.

American Fiction, Directed by Cord Jefferson. Two showings. I saw it at the theater.

The Zone Of Interest, Directed by Jonathan Glazer. Two showings. I saw it at the theater.

Origin, Directed by Ava DuVernay. One showing. I probably would have seen it, given more time.