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

“Gravity” Lost in Hollywood Space

September 15, 2013 By Thelma 237 Comments

Bullock: Ground Control Where the Hell is Major Tom?

Bullock: Ground Control Where the Hell is Major Tom?


Hope for the best, don’t expect the worst. It’s my movie criticism mantra, but as the lights darkened at the Princess of Wales Theater for “Gravity’s” Canadian gala, already hailed as a masterpiece following a Venice Film Festival Premiere, it wasn’t just the fact that I was way up in the rafters wearing 3-D glasses over my already thick specs that was making me queasy. Early on, watching the oh, wow, visuals and the echoey emptiness of what it must be like to be doing routine maintenance in space (I so wanted “Pink Floyd”), I became bothered by narrative claustrophobia. Can one smell bullshit in space?

Despite all the gravity of Alfonso Cuaron’s 3-D space chamber opera, the story, co-written with his son, Jonas, reveals holes as gaping as those on any space station station ripped by the debris of an accidental explosion beyond the earth’s atmosphere.

In brief: Sandra Bullock plays Dr. Ryan Stone, a testy medical engineer pursuing research in space. George Clooney is Matt Kowalksy, the cheery professional astronaut on, yes, his last run. When space junk from a Russian mishap destroys their mission, their Harvard-educated brown-skinned colleague, their satellite, their station, and that of the Russians and, possibly, the Chinese, the pair struggle for survival, often tethered by a white umbilical cord.

The problem begins, but doesn’t entirely end, with Bullock’s character. She is nervous and brittle: but who isn’t? Okay, Clooney’s Galahad in a spacesuit isn’t. He wisecracks and story-tells and Cloonies to give “Gravity” its much-needed warmth and comic relief.

Dr. Stone (sinking like a ….) is just not a woman (or even a man) that could have passed the rigorous training process that NASA inflicts on its candidates. I don’t know the statistics, but even among the thousands or tens of thousands that want to become an astronaut (include me not!), less than one hundred achieve that vaunted status. Life is hard, becoming an astronaut nearly impossible.

When we first encounter Stone and Kowalsky while she repairs some failure like a nearly hired tech from the Geek Squad and he marks time, their dialog speaks of people who hardly know each other, not members of a small elite team that have trained, lived, flown and, likely, vomited together. They could be on a bus, polite strangers, two people at a wedding, one on the bride’s side, one on the groom’s.

Disaster, inevitably, strikes. Dr. Stone freaks out, spinning, spinning, spinning, hyperventilating and banging against satellite and space station and colleague corpse. Like a tumbled stone, she gradually reveals the tragic nugget of her neurosis. All anybody who knows NASA can say is “next candidate, please!” She would never have made the cut. So her arc from a professional woman emotionally untethered from her own life, that ultimately fights to survive and get her feet back on the ground, is baloney. Or space baloney, on sale at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in shiny packages.

The set-up resembles “Open Water” in space. The nifty little seventy-nine-minute 2004 thriller written and directed by Chris Kentis about a cute scuba-diving couple accidentally left behind by the tour boat in shark-infested waters. Adrift, the pair go from hoping for rescue, to fending off sharks, hypothermia and exhaustion, all the while treading spiritual and emotional water.

Yes, it’s a trick, a movie incredibly intense because we are in the water with this man and woman as they struggle to survive, and every strength and weakness of their romantic bond, and personal character, reveals itself as they swim in the ocean’s fatal flush. They should be back at the harbor drinking Mojitos. They’re not. They never will be.

At the Princess of Wales screening, Canadian Astronaut Chris Hadfield attended and tweeted the next day: “Good morning! Gravity was fun last night. Fantastic visuals, relentless, Sandra Bullock was great. I’d fly with her.” Well, who wouldn’t fly with Bullock? She’s such a good sport. But, really, never in a million missions would Commander Hadfield place his life, or that of his crew, in her incapable hands.

I respect Hadfield’s gallantry, and “fantastic visuals” rings true. The visuals are fantastic. It’s also a safe reaction to another Hollywood fairy tale that fails to understand the incredible craft and skill of having “The Right Stuff.” However finely wrought, however mind-blowing the seventeen-minute takes, the revolution in 3-D technology, the movie misunderstands the incredible craft, physical stamina and mental acuity of those who go into space.

That’s not to say astronaut’s can’t and don’t crack. But when they do, they break in a control-freak, OCD way. Take the astronaut-turned-stalker Naval Captain Lisa Nowak. She flew on the Space Shuttle Discovery in 2006. The following year, she was arrested in Orlando for attempted kidnapping after pursuing a romantic rival from Texas to Florida, allegedly wearing disposable diapers so that she would not have to stop during the 900-mile car trip. Maybe you’ve seen the “Rocket Man” episode of TV’s “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”

Nowak might have been a crazy stalker, but she had wanted to become an astronaut since she was six. And she massively trained for her opportunity to leave earth’s gravity in a souped-up tin can, logging 1,500-plus hours on thirty different aircraft, and multiple spacewalks during her 13 days on the shuttle. But the brittle but buff Dr. Ryan, with her panicky refrain that she repeatedly crashed her simulated escape pod during training, would never have made it out of the parking lot and onto the flight deck.

Filed Under: Criticism, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Alfonso Cuaron, best actress, best picture, George Clooney, Lisa Nowak, Open Water, Oscars2014, Sandra Bullock

Adams on Reel Women: ‘Prometheus’ pregnant with horror

July 17, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Speaking of scary — here’s an “Adams on Reel Women” post from last summer:

Over the years, there have been some truly scary pregnancy horror movies — Mia Farrow awakening to the fact that she’s pregnant with the devil’s spawn in Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” Samantha Eggar’s mother of mutants in David Cronenberg’s grossly disturbing “The Brood,” and, of course, “Aliens 3,” when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley discovers that, yes, sir, that’s an alien baby in her tummy. Pregnancy horror is the ultimate in haunted house frights: Evil lurks within the walls of the womb, and there really is no safe exit. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Essay, Movies & TV Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Aliens, Childbirth, Michael Fassbender, Noomi Rapace, Prometheus, Ridley Scott, Rosemary's Baby, Scary Movies, Yahoo! Movies

Adams On Reel Women: Rachel Weisz on wives gone wild, ‘The Deep Blue Sea,’ and ‘Anna Karenina’

January 6, 2013 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Golden Globe Nominee Rachel WeiszThere’s a purity to the English actress Rachel Weisz, as she glides from playing a doctor in the popcorn thriller “The Bourne Legacy” to a love-besotted wife in the intellectual romance “The Deep Blue Sea.” In the latter film, she plays Hester Collyer, a postwar English aristocrat who risks everything for an affair with the charming but vapid pilot Freddie Page (“Thor’s” Tom Hiddleston). Weisz delivers an Oscar-worthy performance that merits a second look. Adapted from the Terence Rattigan play and directed by Terence Davies, “The Deep Blue Sea” is one of the best films of 2012 that you probably haven’t seen: It grossed $1.1 million domestically, while “The Bourne Legacy” hauled in $275 million worldwide.

One difference between the two movies: In the big-budget “Bourne” Weisz is the chief damsel in distress; in “TDBS” she’s the lead, and her character’s story drives the plot. The posh Hester has married an older man for love and social position and then gets blown sideways when she meets a man in uniform who unleashes her libido. There’s a thematic parallel to “Anna Karenina,” another historical fiction about a women who exits a stifling marriage through infidelity and suffers the consequences.

Weisz, who married Daniel Craig last year, was sitting over breakfast in a boho East Village cafe with me as she reflected on Hester’s parallels with Keira Knightley’s Karenina. In both movies, the husband isn’t demonized to justify the wife’s action. In “TDBS,” Sir William Collyer (Simon Russell Beale) clearly wants the best for Hester despite her infidelity. “Yes,” agreed Weisz, “he’s a nice guy. He’s a sweetheart. When I read it, I’d imagined a really evil, horrible, nasty husband.” [Read more…]

Filed Under: Celebrity, Essay, Movies & TV, Oscar Race Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Awards, Golden Globes, infidelity, Interview, NYFCC, Rachel Weisz, The Deep Blue Sea, Yahoo! Movies

Adams on Reel Women: ‘Snow White & the Huntsman’ — it isn’t pretty!

June 10, 2012 By Thelma Leave a Comment

Beauty Queen Charlize (by Universal Pictures)


Beauty is a bitch. That’s always animated the Snow White story: Vanity and jealousy drive the evil stepmother queen to slip Snow White that poisoned apple. Now, along comes “Snow White and the Huntsman,” which is all about teasing out the backstory of these Grimm characters and asking, “Why?”

Why is it so important to know who’s the fairest of them all, a question the magic mirror never answers. For Queen Ravenna, played with Joan Crawford relish by Oscar winner Charlize Theron, the answer is an exposé of Hollywood’s obsession with feminine beauty and aging, and chasing after the next unwrinkled new young thing (whether that’s Kristen Stewart or Elizabeth Olsen or Rooney Mara).

Statuesque blonde Theron, 36, tears into the beauty theme, a variation on past roles. She won her Oscar for playing a repulsive serial killer in “Monster”; last year, she courted another as the morally ugly husband stalker in “Young Adult.” In “Snow White and the Huntsman,” we see Queen Ravenna in her full glory on her wedding day as she glances back over her shoulder and a cascade of golden waves at the young girl who will grow up to be her archrival. The queen has closed the deal with the king, Snow White’s widowed father, in 24 hours on looks alone. Beauty is her power. It’s also her obsession — and her weakness. The parallel is clear: As an A-list star, Theron’s superlative beauty is her commodity, but she’s always looking over her shoulder at the next girl, and the next.

[Related: A mom’s eye view of ‘Snow White and the Huntsman’]

What extremes will Queen Ravenna go to in order to maintain her primacy? It’s a high-maintenance business. The scenes in which she ages rapidly are riveting, showing the wrinkles curdle her flesh as she morphs into that crone who in fairy-tale books offers up the poisoned apple to Snow White (played here by Kristen Stewart). When the queen begins to sag, and bags form under her eyes, she grabs a young beauty from the dungeon and sucks out her soul like a McDonald’s shake. Ravenna’s youthful glow returns.

The movie goes one step further by expressing the anger that Ravenna feels about this cruel joke: beauty and aging. On her wedding night, she flings her wrath at her royal groom [spoiler alert], blaming him for the evil she is about to do because men are so in thrall to surface beauty. (Why can’t they just love me for me?) Then she neatly skewers him with a dagger. Sexism made her do it.

Queen Ravenna has a soul sister in Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) on HBO’s “Game of Thrones.” Cersei is gorgeous on the outside and corrupt within (she’s had three kids with her own brother, Jaime Lannister). In this season’s penultimate episode, Cersei drunkenly counsels her son’s dewy fiancée, Sansa Stark, that being beautiful isn’t powerful in itself; a woman has to use her beauty like a weapon in the ongoing war for dominance. To paraphrase the wicked yet compelling queen: In times of war, women have to use what’s between their legs.

In “Game of Thrones,” as in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” female anger at male sexism is an undercurrent of the beauty discussion. Cersei vents that her father taught her brother Jaime how to fight with a sword, while all she learned was to smile and curtsy and dance. He learned how to kill; she learned how to seduce. When Dad dispatched Jaime to war and adventure, he married Cersei off to a stranger, traded like a horse for a family alliance. Cersei seethes — and, like Ravenna, she’s so compelling when she’s angry!

Both “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Game of Thrones” examine the beauty myth and the extreme lengths that aging stunners will go to to maintain their gifts and their control of power by sexual conquest. In addition, as the queens attempt to squelch or absorb their younger rivals, they demonstrate the difficulty of sisterhood across generations. “You are lucky to never know what it is to grow old!” Queen Ravenna cries to Stewart’s Snow White — as she tries to see that the younger woman will never live to cash a Social Security check. And so don’t expect an alliance between Queen Ravenna and Snow White or Cersei Lannister and Sansa Stark — major-league feminine beauty is a cruel taskmaster and rarely a team sport.

This column originally appeared on Yahoo! Movies.

Filed Under: Celebrity, Essay, Movies & TV Tagged With: Adams on Reel Women, Cersei, Charlize Theron, Game of Thrones, Kristen Stewart, Lena Headey, Liam Hemsworth, Snow White and the Huntsman, Women's Issues, Yahoo! Movies

Copyright © 2022 · Dynamik-Gen On Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in