Thelma Adams: Novelist, Critic, Oscar Expert

Thelma Adams, Oscars, Playdate, Marie Claire, Movie Reviews, Interviews, New Releases, New York Film Critics, Celebrities, Personal Essays, Parenting, Commentary, Women, Women\'s Issues, Motherhood

MENUMENU
  • HOME
  • BOOKS
    • The Last Woman Standing
    • Playdate
    • Bittersweet Brooklyn
  • WRITINGS
  • MEDIA
  • EVENTS
  • BLOG
  • ABOUT
  • CONTACT

How the Berlin Film Festival Sent a Message to Cannes, Venice on Film Parity

May 17, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

The future of film is female: a photo snapped in February at the Berlinale’s climax, when the Juliette Binoche-led international jury met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, may be the most important film photo of 2019 — or even the decade. The image is a signpost of where we want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. And that it’s attainable.

As Americans become mired on how to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of #MeToo and Trump, on the way to 50/50 in 2020, the Berlinale jury showed what the future could look like with a female jury president — and a female government leader. Embrace the change — the Berlinale showed us how (and stepped ahead of rivals Cannes and Venice in so doing).

“The picture clearly captures a life-highlight moment for all of us who were there [hopefully the chancellor as well],” says Rajendra Roy, Berlin jury member and MoMA’s chief curator of film. “[But] the real significance lies in what was discussed in the nearly 90-minute meeting that followed. Mrs. Merkel had serious, and extremely poignant, questions about the state of the industry, the rise of streaming platforms [one in particular, but she wanted to understand the differences between them] and the cultural importance of the theatrical experience,” Roy says.

“To be totally honest, we were more star-struck than she was [or let on] and we came away feeling like we had engaged in a conversation that would lead to concrete regulatory and financial measures.”

Jury member and Los Angeles Times (and former Variety) film critic Justin Chang says: “It meant a great deal that Chancellor Merkel took the time to sit down with us and discuss everything from the film industry to climate change; in doing so, she asserted the importance of the arts in public life and the value that artists bring to the conversation.”

The photograph, with its female majority, men of color and LGBTQ inclusion, reflects cultural creators, curators and journalists engaged in an ongoing dialogue that’s coming to fruition.

“Despite the conservative backlash, there’s been a sea change in who gets to choose and who gets to tell their stories,” says Beth Barrett, Seattle Intl. film festival’s artistic director.

The photo validates and advances an inclusive worldview. “To see that engagement between the jury and Merkel, who is the leader of the free world … she’s not a super artistic chancellor and yet she appreciates the role of arts and culture in the world and how it betters the country and its communities,” Barrett says.

“Having Juliette Binoche as the jury chair, she’s able to lead the discussions in a way that is collaboratively combative. There’s no antagonism and yet at the same time each one of these people is going to have their opinions heard, respected and discussed. That’s huge when talking about the history of women and men of color in groups.”

These historically marginalized voices are assuming leadership roles and showing how the game can be changed, one jury at a time, one festival at a time. “To be on that Berlinale jury, on that level of international A-level festival, is a statement about how you are perceived within the industry. It’s also a responsibility: you’re able to take on that role of being able to choose: to push someone forward or push forward the status quo,” she adds.

Liliana Rodriguez, artistic director of the Palm Springs Intl. Film Festival, responded to the photograph with its composition of women at the forefront, and a sense both playful and serious that these empowered artists are forward-looking and seizing the moment: “I’m reassured and hopeful that we as a society are moving in a direction where women and people of color casually occupy these spaces that have historically been occupied by white men. I’m hopeful one day these will be the norm. For now, this feels revolutionary.

“Despite the nightly news real change is possible,” Rodriguez says, “It just takes time.”

Chang concludes, “While it would be amusing to compare the responsibilities of running a film festival jury and leading the free world, I don’t think the symbolic importance of a meeting between two brilliantly accomplished women — Chancellor Merkel and Juliette Binoche, our jury president — was lost on any of us. Maybe it was a happy coincidence; maybe it was an astonishing snapshot of what progress can look like.

“Certainly it was a reminder that the Berlinale has done as much as any major film festival to advance the cause of gender parity, as evidenced by the fact that seven of the 16 films in our competition pool were directed by women. I’m reminded that so much of the discourse on movies, especially on movies being made outside the confines of the Hollywood studios, begins at film festivals, and so it’s natural that inclusion must begin there as well — among filmmakers, decision-makers and journalists.”

As evidenced by this single photograph, the strides made by the Berlinale offer a signpost of where many in the industry want to be as women in film and as a film community at large. Not only is it attainable, it sends a message to Cannes and Venice: this is the bold collaborative future of film.

[[this article first appeared in Variety]]

Filed Under: Movies & TV, Uncategorized

Movie Review: ‘The Chaperone’

April 18, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


For Downton Abbey fans, The Chaperone represents a respectable reunion on this side of the pond among 1920s middle-class Yanks. Downton creator Julian Fellowes, 69, adapted the script from Laura Moriarty’s bestseller for director Michael Engler, who will helm the upcoming Downton Abbey movie. The drama tracks schoolgirl Louise Brooks’ first trip from parochial Kansas City to wild Manhattan, seeking fame as a dancer and, ultimately, finding it as a silent movie star. But, while the perky Haley Lu Richardson, 24, twirls through the pretty period drama, bobs her hair and tipples despite the era’s Prohibition, it’s Downton’s Cora Crawley, Elizabeth McGovern, 57, who gets the star treatment. She gives one of her best performances as the repressed, corseted and unhappily married chaperone, Norma.

This is a rare season of movies struggling to depict the belated self-acceptance of ordinary over-50 mothers — from Mary Kay Place’s Diane to Julianne Moore’s Gloria Bell. Add Norma to that category, as a New York-born, Midwestern-raised orphan who did all the right things: loved her adopted rural parents, married the first man who asked and moved from their farmstead to his bedstead without ever posing that central American question: What am I going to be when I grow up?

Norma assumes the path of least resistance as a wife, a mother and a neighbor who tries to keep on the right side of the community’s virulent gossip mill. Having let others make her life choices for so long, through the birth and maturation of two stalwart sons, when her nest becomes empty and she’s betrayed by her lawyer husband (an empathetic Campbell Scott, 57), she’s unmoored.

For entertainment news, advice and more, get AARP’s monthly Lifestyle newsletter.

So when she overhears that local girl Brooks won’t be allowed to attend a New York dance academy without proper accompaniment, she jumps at the chance. As someone who’s never leapt before, she surprises herself by leaving her husband behind, and looking ahead to carve her own identity in a search for her birth mother while Brooks attends class.

That trip to Manhattan, and Norma’s proximity to the rebellious Brooks, becomes a catalyst for seismic personal change. She both waits to exhale (ultimately dropping her corset) and gets her groove, if not back, then for the first time.

McGovern, who also produced, drove this passion project. Aware of how few complicated roles exist for mature women, and empowered by Downton’s popularity, she’s made an exquisite if slight movie where it’s history’s forgotten character, not the ingénue, that makes headlines, who carries the narrative and wins the day. McGovern is lovely as a fading, self-effacing beauty who always serves herself last. Yet, it’s in the moments when she snaps — at her feckless husband, or the spoiled Brooks — that she reveals the ever-present tension that exists in a woman whose politeness has eased her way in society but has also numbed her to her essential desires. Norma’s slow rise to self-empowerment is every bit as radical as that of Brooks — and hugely satisfying for audiences hungering to see real women, not superheroes, carrying the plot.

[[This review first appeared on AARP.com]]

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV

Movie Review: ‘Diane’

April 5, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Mary Kay Place, 71, gets the role of a lifetime in Diane, the engine of New York Film Festival director Kent Jones’ character-driven, Martin Scorsese-produced study of a woman who has become a supporting player in her own existence. It’s a bold choice in contemporary American films, to put a postmenopausal woman on the verge of a polite nervous breakdown at a downbeat drama’s center. Because Place, best known as the single businesswoman desperate to conceive in The Big Chill, has such a warm and genuine touch, Diane’s story is one of late-day awakening rather than one long stretch of kvetch.

The script meanders through a series of modestly dramatic events as Diane drives her battered sedan from one errand to the next through frigid, rural wooded Massachusetts. The roughest comes when she visits her only son, Brian (Jake Lacy). She totes his laundry to his chilly crash pad. When he shambles out of the bedroom, he’s equally unkempt and resents his mother’s “helpful” intrusion.

Brian’s an addict, and she scans him with her gimlet eye, trying to assess if he’s using again or just tired. It’s so hard to be a mother helpless to heal her once-beautiful child. It’s clear, through script and direction, that this is a dance they’ve been doing for ages, long after Brian should have taken control of his own life. “Take a shower and get cleaned up,” she nags in frustration. The ruts in their relationship — the hopes and disappointments of a mother who has seen her beloved son relapse, and who sees before her both the boy and the cracked man he has become — are heartbreakingly rendered.

Add another wrinkle to Diane’s face.

[Click here to see my AARP interview: ‘Mary Kay Place Gets Her First Lead Role’]

The do-gooder continues on her circuit: delivering casseroles to neighbors experiencing rough times, heading to the soup kitchen to ladle stew for the less fortunate, and visiting her terminally ill cousin Donna (the incandescent Deirdre O’Connell, 67) at the hospital. The pair radiate a long, comfortable kinship that transcends blood.

Diane and Donna have spent their lives sitting across from each other, playing cards, kibitzing and advising — and avoiding addressing a personal betrayal perpetrated by Diane that continues to gnaw at her. Diane is good — warm, caring, community-spirited. But she’s not as good as she might have been if she hadn’t made one big mistake she has regretted all of her life.

Watching Donna wane, along with their close-knit family’s elders, Diane belatedly realizes that all the consoling of others will not heal what’s cracked within her. Diane gets trashed at a bar for locals. She boogies down and, seemingly, rekindles the spark that she has lost, the joy in the moment. It has been a long time since she has loved herself, if she ever did, and there’s a glimmer of hope. There’s still time for Diane to star in the movie of her life.

[This review originally appear on AARP]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: aarp, Aging, best actress, Diane, Kent Jones, Martin Scorsese, Movie, movie reviews, Tribeca Film Festival

Inside Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson’s Bromance in ‘The Highwaymen’

March 28, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment

I never envisioned Kevin Costner and Woody Harrelson as the stuff of bromance, two great tastes that go great together like chocolate and peanut butter or rum and coke. But, in Netflix’s new movie The Highwaymen that premiered at SXSW over the weekend, and will begin to stream on March 29th, the manly movie stars get bromantic as retired Texas Rangers Frank Hamer and Maney Gault who tick off the miles together in a cherry vintage sedan in pursuit of lover law-breakers Bonnie and Clyde.

The Highwaymen rides in on a well-worn track – as the miles increase on the odometer, the friendship takes shape and the men sitting side-by-side discover through a mutual goal that they have more in common than they might have believed during the opening credits. The road bromance has long been a Hollywood staple – and it appears ageless. (And is good for maturing talent: Costner is 64; Harrelson is 57).

The genre doubles the star power of a movie to give it a four-fisted box office boost, or expand the audience reach like a marketing Venn diagram. One recent example is Green Book, which took a critical beating on its way to its crowd-pleasing Best Picture Oscar by serving up Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali packed together in a 1962 Cadillac deVille driving through the hostile South.

Among my favorite vintage road-mances are Bob Hope and Bing Crosby in Road to Morocco and many other roads traveled, Robert Redford and Paul Newman relying on literal horsepower in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and the pairing of grumpy bounty hunter Robert DeNiro and prissy mob accountant Charles Grodin putting each other through hilarious hell on a transcontinental train ride in Midnight Run.

Or take Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who famously despised each other off-screen, making sweet movie music together in Hollywood or Bust – a movie where Federico Fellini’s sex goddess Anita Ekberg was only a blip between the two male leads.

Great on-screen chemistry between two men is the same genie in a bottle that characterizes a romantic spark. The arc is often one of mutual estrangement if not outright dislike or distrust, followed by a series of trials that test and ultimately strengthen the pair’s bond, and then an acknowledgement that there’s mutual dependence if not outright affection.

Unlike romance, this connection is rarely sealed by a kiss but by a grudging gesture, as it is on the side of that dusty long Texas road at the end of The Highwaymen (no need for spoilers here). Mush is for chick flicks.

And, in the case of The Highwayman, so is direct eye contact. Keep your eyes on the road, dude.

The chemistry works for Costner and Harrelson because in many ways they are actors of contrasting talents.

Still square-jawed handsome if a little stockier, Costner has built a career largely, though not entirely, on leading men parts like Hamer – personified as G-man Eliot Ness in The Untouchables on the hunt for Al Capone, or as the loyal defender at Whitney Houston’s side in The Bodyguard.

Costner is the epitome of the stoic American leading man in the Gary Cooper/Gregory Peck vein, born to play the pack’s strong-but-silent alpha dog. And age has not dimmed this, even if the opportunities are fewer and far between. (Maybe Netflix will fix that).

On the other hand, Harrelson is the more volatile and unpredictable – a character actor who also plays lead. He has a penchant for drunks and thieves in movies like The Glass Castle and Natural Born Killers. But in his moving role as the embattled and terminally ill sheriff in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri he displays his talent as a powerful ensemble player capable of flying his most intimate feelings in front of the camera.

Because, in this crime drama, they both play older-and-wiser-and-slower characters, there’s an appealing mellowness to their interactions. Harrelson’s Gault is not the full-on crazy of the actor’s earlier career. And yet he’s still the gunpowder to Costner’s flint, the less stable element. His character’s volatility and emotional accessibility ultimately humanizes the stick-up-his-ass aspect to Costner’s Hamer.

That imbalance, that interaction, enables the bromantic chemistry. One doesn’t require music welling up, or a swooping crane shot, to see that these men connect, really connect. And, because they’re manly men with pistols on their hips, love means never having to explain yourself.

One element that separates bromance from romance: the protagonists need never ask that dreaded questions: How do you really feel? In this case, they just nod, spit and drive off in the same direction.

[This column first appeared on RealClearLife.com]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: Bonnie and Clyde, bromance, Buddy Movies, Kevin Costner, Movies, Netflix, SXSW, Texas Rangers, The Highwaymen, Western, Woody Harrelson

Movie Review: ‘The Highwaymen’

March 27, 2019 By Thelma Leave a Comment


The Highwaymen is as dry and flat as the Texas plains where it’s set — and that’s a compliment. This is high-quality, straight-shooting filmmaking from John Lee Hancock (The Blind Side). His loping retelling of the Bonnie and Clyde legend focuses on the Texas Rangers who turned the young bank robbers into Swiss cheese in 1934 after an intense interstate man-and-woman hunt.

With Kevin Costner, 64, as retired Ranger Frank Hamer tapping his old partner Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson, 57) to boldly, if creakily, go where the FBI has failed to catch the larcenous lovers, the star wattage is high even when the tension is turned to very slow burn.

Age hasn’t dimmed Costner’s leading-man charisma. As a lawman of few words with an itch for justice, he carries the movie as if it were as light as the handkerchief he keeps using to dab the sweat from his lips. Sure, the skin is a little looser under his chin, and when he chases a young ginger boy carrying messages for the outlaws, he can’t jump the fence between them because his belly is in the way — but that only means he has to rely on his wits a bit more.

While Costner has, over his career’s course, largely played the good guy (and Hamer is certainly a variant of his Eliot Ness in The Untouchables), Harrelson is the switch hitter. From TV’s Cheers to Natural Born Killers to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Harrelson has the range to be heroic and dangerous — sometimes in the same scene. Harrelson’s lesser-known gift as an actor is his generosity. In The Highwaymen, his shambling, perfectly calibrated counterbalance to Costner’s stoicism adds layers and richness to their interactions.

Texas is as much of a character as Hamer and Gault. The vintage autos and two-toned spectator shoes are as exquisitely rendered as any in Downton Abbey. And the car chases on unpaved roads — particularly one in which Clyde Barrow (Edward Bossert) leaves the Rangers in a cloud of dust — are sharply rendered and exciting.

Making strong but small support are Kim Dickens, 53, as Hamer’s wealthy wife and Kathy Bates, 70, as Gov. Miriam “Ma” Ferguson. As the outlaws, diminutive Emily Brobst and Bossert only have a glimpsed presence, cameos in their own crime saga. Ironically, in flipping the script on Arthur Penn’s classic 1967 beauty-and-blood fest Bonnie and Clyde, which paired Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway as the legendary Romeo and Juliet of outlaws, Hancock’s movie all but erases the feminine presence that made that deadly duo both infamous and celebrated.

The love story here is purely man-o a man-o, between undemonstrative lawmen Hamer and Gault as etched by the symbiotic and uniquely satisfying performances of Costner and Harrelson.

[This review originally appeared on AARP]

Filed Under: Movies & TV Tagged With: aarp, Bonnie and Clyde, Kevin Costner, movie review, Netflix, SXSW, Texas, The Highwaymen, True Crime, Western, Woody Harrelson

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • …
  • 79
  • Next Page »

Copyright © 2023 · Dynamik-Gen On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in