Thelma (2024)

A "Going-Back-To-The-Buffet" Situation

or

Is a Bad Mother... (Shut Your Mouth!)

One suspects that I'm the perfect demographic for Thelma*, seeing as I'm on the waning edge of the Boomers and having looked at life from both sides now. One sees mentors and peers and Alphabet-gens in the cast and nods one's head in sage recognition. 

If only theater seats could rock it would be perfect.

 

I've seen movies about scammers and hackers and other denizens of the sight-unseen chicanery of cyber-criminality, which if my google search is correct is 2328 times a day, 8 million in a year. That's a lot of possible stories to tell, but at some point, one becomes numb to the stories as they seem so commonplace these days, whether its victims are corporations, infrastructures, or the most common among us. No one seems safe except those off the grid or those without cards of any kind, I.D. or credit/debit. And out rush to make things so "convenient" seems to have made us more vulnerable, oftentimes, ironically, with our enthusiastic permission.

When was the last time you read the "Terms and Conditions?"

But, I can't recall—except implied for heist movies, government conspiracy films, or spy flicks—of anyone telling the story about a victim of one of these things. But, then...my memory isn't what it used to be. Movies either, for that matter.

Thelma puts a face on the news stories of oldsters being conned out of their legitimately-earned savings and that face is June Squibb's, all 94 years of it, where she finally has a lead-role—and executive produces at the same time, no doubt for back-end compensation (way to go, June!)—playing the title character, who not only is getting "up there", she's reached the top and is looking down. She has a little trouble navigating new technology—she needs the help of her grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger), who has his own issues, but loving gramms isn't one of them—she is a perpetual quilter, is ambulatory, and can take of herself. Not only physically but also in attitude. She plays mah-johngg on the computer and hates wearing that Life-Alert button. Her memory for trivia isn't good, but she's still sharp as a tack—her motivation hasn't dulled at all. She's a little creaky, but when she has a goal...

One day she gets a phone call. It's Daniel. He's been in an accident and he's in jail. He needs $10,000 to get out. She's given an address to a lawyer and she's to mail the money immediately to spring Danny. She calls her daughter Gail (Parker Posey), but she's in a therapy session and lets it go to voice-mail. Thelma can't drive, but gets a cab, gathers the money up and sends it. Gail gets the voice-mail, panics and calls Daniel—he's asleep—calls her husband Alan (Clark Gregg) and everybody tries to call Thelma, goes to her place and are alarmed that she's not there! When everybody manages to get to the same place, they all are relieved that Danny is safe...but, who called Thelma? They come to the realization that she's been scammed, but filing a police report does no good.

There is much discussion of what to do about Thelma—Danny feels responsible, but doesn't think he's good enough to take care of her and Alan and Gail, who are the most helicoptering of parents start to consider whether Thelma should be put in a home. Thelma, however, has one thing on her mind—getting the money back. The kids want to let it go, but not her, and while they're deciding what their next steps are going to be, Thelma decides what she's going to do. She has the address of where she sent the money, and all she needs to do is get some wheels. The kids aren't going to help, so she calls as many friends as she can, only to find that everybody on her contact list is either dead or incapacitated. 

Finally, she calls her friend Ben (the late, great Richard Roundtree) who has an electric scooter and they embark on a journey across L.A. to find her money and get it back. Hilarity...and a substantial dose of what the hurdles the elderly face in this ultra-teched but indifferent world. It could be maudlin, it could be a shallow romp about "those frisky oldsters", but it deftly negotiates those pit-falls and turns into something funnier and a bit more life-affirming. Thelma's kids tend to lean toward caricature, but in the hands of Gregg and Posey, less damage is done toward the proceedings, and Roundtree and Squibb are delightful all the way through.

It's a better-than-you'd-think version of a geriatric heist movie, and, if you see it, stick around for the credits for a little surprise as to its inspiration. It'll bring a smile to your face and a warmth to your heart. And that never gets old.

* No, it's not Selma with a lisp.

Time After Time (1979)

Time After Time (Nicholas Meyer, 1979) He really wanted to direct. 

Nicholas Meyer enjoyed a couple of best-selling books—one of them, "The Seven Percent Solution", had been made into a film for which he supplied the screenplay—and dabbled in screen-writing—he wrote the script for "The Night That Panicked America" about Orson Welles' Hallowe'en broadcast of "The War of the Worlds." But, directing...that was a tough job to get even if you were a lauded writer, screen-writer, and proved you could crack the public's consuming zeitgeist. I mean, who d'you think you are...John Huston?

Meyer had been given fifty-five pages of a novel that a friend was writing and wanted Meyer's opinion—seeing potential in it, he optioned the story which featured 19th century author H.G. Wells going into the future via time machine to pursue Jack the Ripper into the 20th Century. Meyer took that nugget of story, wrote a screenplay and sold it to Orion Pictures with the caveat that he was to direct.

Meyer's "time" had come.

H. G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) is upset about the current times of 1893. He holds a dinner party for some friends (are you getting a sense of deja vu yet?) to show them his recent invention—a time machine, which he intends to use to seek out his vision of "Utopia" by using the device to travel into the future. But, his device isn't so fanciful as the one in his novel; it has a couple of safety features of his own devising to prevent such accidents as might happen when traveling through time...and should one mis-lay their time machine in their travels.

His little dinner party is interrupted, however, by the police who are investigating the Whitechapel murders and its perpetrator, known as "Jack the Ripper." A search is made of Wells' house and two things are discovered: a doctor's bag containing bloody gloves that belong's to Wells' guest, the surgeon John Leslie Stevenson (David Warner); Stevenson has gone missing, and with him Wells' time machine. "Jack" has escaped into the future, and Wells, with no machine, cannot pursue him.*

Ah, but those safety devices that might prevent the time machine from being used by "Morlocks" or something—here's where they come in handy. One of them is a key, or, more specifically, a "non-return key" that, as long as it's in the machine, keeps it in the designated time. Stevenson, not having it, is left in the future as Wells' machine travels back to its original time after a certain period. Pretty handy, that. As is the second device a "vaporizing equalizer," another key, which prevents the traveler from journeying through time without the device.

Wells' time machine returns like a well-fed dog and he ascertains that Stevenson has traveled into the future, specifically November 5th, 1979 and, with keys well in place, he takes the journey in his machine—a safe bet, after all, as it seems to have worked for Stevenson. Wells makes it, finding himself still in his time machine, but which seems to have made its way to 1979 San Francisco (explained because the machine—at the time—is loaned to an S.F. museum for an exhibition on H.G. Wells). Wells starts to become acquainted with 20th century customs like fast fried food, aeroplanes, television, the vagaries of fashion, and "fish-out-of-water" tropes in movies. 

But, he's after Stevenson and his first bit of detective work is to divine where a man of his century would go to exchange money of the 19th century for that of the 20th. There, he meets Bank of London employee Amy Robbins (Mary Steenburgen)—who seems to be getting more of these requests than she's ever seen in her employ. She directs him to where the previous gent asking about the exchange rate for old currency is currently keeping himself.

Wells finds Stevenson and he seems to be adapting quite well to the new age. All Stevenson has to do is turn on his hotel room television and show Wells the carnage going on in the world, telling him "Ninety years ago, I was a freak. Now, I'm an amateur." Wells insists that Stevenson return to their time and face justice, but Stevenson will have none of it, trying to get the "non-return key" from Wells, and, in a struggle that spills out of the hotel and into the streets, Stevenson gets hit by a car. Wells, thinking Stevenson is dead, stops his pursuit.

But, Wells knows nothing of cars or of modern hospitals...or of the implacability of his quarry. Stevenson is quite alive...and up to his old ways. And one of his intended victims is Amy, whom he has rightly deduced led Wells to him. And as Amy and Wells have developed a budding relationship, the stakes become very personal...especially after a short jaunt to prove the viability of his time machine has shown her that (via a future newspaper headline) that she will become one of the Ripper's victims in three days' time.

It seems strange that one could make a charming romance out of a story using one of the most infamous of serial killers, but Meyer's Time After Time manages to do it. That has less to do with the Jack the Ripper plot, but more with the way Meyers makes a romance between McDowell's Wells—who thinks he's ever so sophisticated for a man of his time—and McDowell's Amy—who's decades ahead of his Victorian thinking and is more than casual about it. Meyers has fun with it—he loved taking the Star Trek crew out of their element in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home—and his dexterity keeping the Wells-Robbins scenes frothy are the parts that will delight someone seeing this film for the first time.

It's Meyer's first film directing, but the film has the flair of a much more accomplished director, partly because Meyer seems to have taken his direction from more classic films—it just seems to have the edge of a Billy Wilder, while also retaining his romantic quality. Part of that might be the atmosphere provided by Miklós Rósza, who provides the sort of sophisticated, ardent film score that he had previously produced for Hitchcock...and Wilder and brings the sense of a by-gone era that fits well bridging both the 19th and 20th centuries.

It's a good, literate little film that provides the thrills and wonder of its earlier inspiration—Wells' novel and the George Pal film made of it—while also bringing something new to the party, this time around.

* "Sure, he could," you say. "All he has to do is build another time machine and go" (In this instance, time does wait...) Yes, I counter, he can build it, but to go where—or more correctly, when? He doesn't know where Stevenson/Jack has gone—into the anonymous past or into the unknowable future. So, Meyer's little safety devices are necessary...or else we'd have no movie at all.

The Artist (2011)

Written at the time of the film's release...

Portrait of the Film as a Young Medium
or
Silents is Golden

First off...GREAT sound-design.

(tap, tap, tap...is this mic' on?)

It's easy to be positively giddy over the success that The Artist has enjoyed (ultimately winning the year's best Picture Oscar). I've enjoyed Michel Hazanavicius' previous pairings with Jean Dujardin—the spy-spoof OSS-117 films—even if they were a little uneven, they managed to nail the ambiance of the films they were parodying, while also chortling over their excesses, even while embracing them. 

And Dujardin is a terrific performer, light on his feet and hitting his comedy points with deft left jabs. In the "OSS" films, it was pretty obvious that he was a superb cross-over entertainer, believable when playing it straight (if ever), but also knowing just how far to push things to trip it into comedy. Unlike Peter Sellers, whose agents always seemed to be harboring deep-set inferiority complexes underneath their pompous egotism, Dujardin was always blissfully clueless, truly believing that he was terrific, and that the strings of pratfalls, misfires and collateral damage were just temporary set-backs, no matter how regularly they occurred, followed by a laugh that was too loud and went on far too long.

The Artist has no problems of pace, or of sequences that fall flat. It takes its strengths from the medium it cherishes—the silent films on the cusp of sound, when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak and was somewhat quashed to accommodate the large pieces of equipment that could squeak and rumble and ruin a fluid camera movement, and when expression was King. The world of film was silent and focused on image—I was struck in a sequence that showed a high angle of a motion-picture theater audience watching a film being projected with symphonic accompaniment, that the eye always wandered to what was on screen—it tells its story with the directness of vision of that particular era (okay, some close-ups belie the time and the film dispenses with fog-filters and other tricks employed then) and the clean image of glamour, even to the simplicity of a cold-water flat of an apartment. 

Faces are carefully chosen for contrast and specificity of character, rather than overall performance, and one can only imagine the voices that accompany the expressions—appropriately, dialog cards are used, but sparingly—nothing aural spoils the picture contained within the frame, widening it or presenting the intrusion of a world outside of it, a point that is made quite literally at one point in one very clever sequence. One is clued in early on, when movie star George Valentin (Dujardin) stands behind the movie screen as his film ends and awaits acknowledgment from the crowd.  Haznavacius holds on his image as he waits—there is only silence—until he raises his fist in triumph at the applause we cannot hear, and which is verified only by the enthusiasm of the crowd in the next shot. The rules are set—we have to trust in what we see, not in what we expect to hear. This is not verisimilitude—the illusion of reality imposed by sound and image—this is a heightened and false world of industrialized artifice, concentrated and crystallized in glamorous black and white fiction, flaws be damned.

"...the eye always wandered to what was on screen"

But, it's more than that. Haznavacius isn't satisfied (as Mel Brooks was in his own Silent Movie of 1976) with just making a film without sound. He takes pains to evoke the era in which they were made, choosing the Los Angeles locations of the film extraordinarily carefully, to emphasize the arid spaces and chiaroscuro-deco architecture of the time (one nice sequence of a chance meeting on a studio staircase between Valentin—on his way down—and plucky starlet Peppy Miller—Bérénice Bejo, on her way up—is filmed in the beloved Bradbury Building, as if Fritz Lang or King Vidor had filmed it—straight on—as if to emphasize the ant-like activity of the personnel. And there is a visual grace to the story-telling that evokes the poetry that silent films were capable of in getting their point across without words.

Anything wrong with it? Not really, even the "controversial" use of Bernard Herrmann's "Scene d'amour" from Vertigo is appropriate (far more than it was in 12 Monkeys), with its combination of dramatic urgency and heartbreak, for a sequence it was clearly designed for. There are other films that were released last year with more reach (The Tree of Life) and depth (The Descendents), but The Artist is a great evocation of the joy of cinema, and its possibilities to entertain, even with limited means.

"...when the visual art of story-telling was at its peak"

The Three Lives of the Cat People

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur, 1942) The year after Citizen Kane, RKO Studios declared war on Orson Welles by pressuring the ouster of President George J. Schaefer (whose motto was "Quality Pictures at a Premium Price") and installing Charles Koerner who trumpeted the studio's new philosophy of "entertainment, not genius." In its zeal to create entertainment without genius, the Studio gave a freer reign to one of their house producers, Val Lewton, who created a series of sophisticated horror films on the cheap, among which was Cat People.

The result was entertainment and genius of another kind. Strictly B-movie material, the film nevertheless struck a nerve and did well at the box-office, despite some lackluster dialogue, sub-par performances (particularly by star Simone Simon, whose tortured English was left without extensive dubbing) and overall cheapness (transformed by brilliant cinematography); entering Irena Dubrovna's brownstone, the grand staircase from Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons is there, recycled somewhat inexplicably for the movie. A grandiose stair-way like that sticks out as not belonging, in the same way that Irena (Simon) is odd—foreign, exotic, petite, and nearly incomprehensible—in the generic studio-city the film takes place in.

But it's the ideas and execution behind Cat People that twisted nerves. In as obvious a metaphor as you can have, Irena is a creature that, when sexually aroused, turns into a vicious panther that attacks and kills her partner, the result of her village being invaded and damned by devil worshipers in the distant past. The movie's a strange push-pull of ambiguity and obviousness. The delay of the creature's "appearance" makes Irena suspect, as all we have is her belief in a barbaric folk-tale. When it becomes clear that Irena is what she says she is, the image of her transformed is always suggested by shadow and sound, an off-screen presence that is unmistakable, but not to be seen directly.

The entire movie is a clever delaying tactic that entices and teases with our innate desire to "see the monster." Man (the awkward Kent Smith)-meets-feline. Despite Irena's fears and protestations, they marry, but consumed with her past, Irena refuses to consummate the marriage. This leads to turmoil (and concern in the movie's principals that Irena is..."strange," but not in the way they think). The husband seeks counseling for her, but Irena's shrink becomes attracted to her instead. Ultimately, the husband files for divorce (irreconcilable differences?), Irena's fears proving too much for him. It isn't until near the end, when the rakish psychiatrist tries to have his way with her that the claws come out, and the rogue male is dispatched. Mee-ow.

It just sounds awful and, indeed, some of the acting is. But the story is provocative, setting up a situation where **warning, warning** sex is dangerous, even while the turning away from the act is considered unnatural and...well, as strange as thinking you're going to turn into a panther. Director Tourneur's handling of it by suggestion is awesome. One memorable segment has Irena's rival for her husband's affections (Jane Randolph) trapped in a gym-pool while around her, guttural growls echo, and slinking shadows force her to the middle of the pool. And the director's low-budget suggestion of Irena turning into a cat, is also suggestive of her sinking to the floor to satisfy that randy psychiatrist. Many of those ideas would be recycled with the next life of "Cat People," but the sexuality and cat-transformations would be a lot more explicit. Did that make it better?

Wellllllll.....

Cat People (Paul Schrader, 1982) A strict remake, but not an austere one, writer-director Paul Schrader took the original Cat People and updated it for the up-tight STD'd 80's. The performances are better, but the characters all seem a bit under-written and played. If you've seen the first, you'll see the same idea of a stark concrete zoo set. The same basic plot. The trick jump-shock of the bus is recreated in stereophonic sound and color. You'll even see what looks like a shot-for-shot recreation of the pool sequence, but as an indication of the puerile nature of the update, the figure (Annette O'Toole) trapped in the pool by the suggestive growls is topless this time.

Sure we might appreciate it, but it comes off as crass and cheap, compared to the original. In the same way, Schrader adds some mythological hokum as a prelude and deepened the "cat-curse" to include an incestuous way to break it involving cat-brother and cat-sister (Malcolm McDowell, Nastassja Kinski) getting it on—something alluded to, but isn't seen. Like Schrader's other attempts to make this Cat People more kinkified, it ends up feeling clawless. 

What's the point of having the "curse" if you can't use it for the story? And so it's alluded to, but never presented. Schrader also makes more explicit the cat-transformation making it a were-wolfish change that seems somehow less convincing than the suggestive original. And forgive me, but is it an improvement to have Kinski's cat-person spending the rest of her life in a zoo? Are we meant to be cheered by her apparent captivity, or is it merely the excuse to entertain a sequel?

For all its attempts to "sex it up," the film actually comes across as more conventional than the 40's original. Hard to believe, but the more "sophisticated" 80's remake has less going for it as a thriller, horror film, a Gothic love story, a romance, or even a cautionary tale.

The Curse of the Cat People (Gunther von Fritsch/Robert Wise, 1944) An odd sequel that is better than the original, Curse features the cast from the first but turns it on its tail. Oliver (Kent Smith) and Alice (Jane Randolph) are married and their daughter, Amy (the melancholy little Ann Carter) is troubled—attacking other children viciously and living in a fantasy world with an imaginary friend—who just happens to be Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon)! Is "cat-scratch fever" communicable?

Despite the characters from the first film appearing here, Curse has little to do with Cat People—all the "cat people" are dead and Amy might be haunted by the reminders of her father's first wife (who is never mentioned in the house), so that she imagines Irena. Given the family history, Dad discourages her little flights of fantasy, thinking it could lead to the tragedy of the first film, a tactic that confuses Amy and distrustful of her own family. 

Then, she is glommed onto by a grasping older actress who lives down the street (Julia Dean). You know those older actresses, they can be pretty dramatic and this one favors Amy over her own daughter (Elizabeth Russell). Not a movie about monsters in the shadows, but the ones in our minds. Although one could make a case for it being about possession, it's not a horror film, but instead an atmospheric fantasia about the dark side of childhood imagination and alienation, as potent and strange as The Innocents or Night of the Hunter.

It also marked the directing debut of Robert Wise, who had edited Citizen Kane (and butchered The Magnificent Ambersons) for RKO and would become one of Hollywood's master craftsmen, working in a number of genres and winning Best Picture and Directing Oscars for West Side Story and The Sound of Music.