Posted on February 1, 2012 at 3:58 pm
Many thanks to Thelma Adams for including me in her critics roundtable discussion of this year’s Best Actress Oscar nominees. I found the debate fascinating!
Posted on November 29, 2011 at 3:30 pm
Three new films feature nude scenes with three young actresses not thought of as bombshells or sex symbols. Kristen Stewart shows a bit of PG-13-rated skin in the latest”Twilight” movie, but in the R-rated “Melancholia” and the NC-17-rated “Shame” Kirsten Dunst and Carey Mulligan show full frontal nudity. The scenes where they appear naked are not intended to be erotic but to make a statement about character and the storyline. On Reel Women, critic Thelma Adams and some of her female colleagues discuss the meaning of nude scenes in the context of the films and as a career move. Adams is perceptive and insightful:
Why does Mulligan, an Oscar nominee for An Education, feel compelled to take it off, all off? Partially, it would seem, to shed that chilly BBC debutante image: Look, it’s a Bennet sister out of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice without the empire-waist period gown to hide behind!
But nudity is only brave, really brave, in context. There has to be a characterization that stands or falls, has a reason for being, outside of the nudity….
Revealing nudity, or concealing it, works best if it’s integral to the story. Nothing seems faker than a moment of soft-lit Playboy nudity in an otherwise gritty, realistic movie. Nakedness should peel back pretense, not encourage it. And it shouldn’t throw the audience, gaping, out of the narrative. That’s the case for both Dunst and Stewart in their respective films, but not for Mulligan.
Posted on November 19, 2011 at 3:13 pm
Movie critic Thelma Adams, the author of the Oprah-endorsed novel Playdate
Posted on June 7, 2011 at 3:52 pm
US Magazine critic Thelma Adams has a blog post about one of the most common questions I get asked: where are the parents in movies about kids? She quotes my comments:
Nell Minow, the Movie Mom, told me “This is the second-most frequent question I get asked by parents (first is: I am so careful with my kids, but what do I do when they go over to someone else’s house?)”
The answer, Minow continued, referencing Tom and Huck, Pippi Longstocking, and David Copperfield, et. al., is that “if the parents are there, the child can’t have an adventure. They’d be saying, ‘You can’t go on the yellow brick road today — you have homework, and you need a sweater!’ The satisfying fantasy of the story is that the child is able to do what the child in the audience would like to feel he can do — to master the scary adult world.”
She still doesn’t like it though, and wonders how many more parts there would be for mature actresses if the movies allowed more of their young characters to have moms. And privately, we agreed that even though we loved “Finding Nemo,” the beginning is wrenching.
Posted on March 13, 2011 at 8:00 am
I was delighted to see US movie critic Thelma Adams go after “Mars Needs Moms” for the retro sexism of its plot. As she notes in a comment following my review, she wrote on her blog about the weirdness of a movie for kids in 2011 about a planet where the females have no feelings, the children are raised by robots whose feelings are extracted from earth mothers (selected for their willingness to be disciplinarians), and the males are “dumb as a bag of rocks,” incapable of even the most rudimentary comprehension or achievement.
She says:
ere’s the takeaway: the working mothers of Mars have lost their ability as women to love and nurture. They have to import an earth breeder to take care of that one chip necessary to continue the race. And the poor oppressed men, who live in substandard conditions, without a vote, without power, have been totally squelched to the detriment of Martian society.
The answer, my friends, is blowing in the hot air: The reinstitution of the nuclear family – happy mommy, happy daddy, happy baby of either sex — and the annihilation of the cranky crone. If sci fi plots allow their creators to work out real-life issues, then here we see a bunch of angry Hollywood males crying out against their feelings of emasculation with nostalgia for a reinstatement of the nuclear fifties family. Hmmm.
The weirdest part is that it just doesn’t make any sense. Forget the part about how Martian babies are produced by popping out of the ground, without any involvement by parents of any gender. How exactly does this planet work? The shrewish female leader is a totalitarian who thinks she can protect herself and the other females from feelings. So, why program the robots with the memories and views of an earth mother who may be stern but is also affectionate and supportive? What is it that all these working females do, other than march around? I am surprised that the few good reviews this movie got emphasize its lessons about family; I’m glad Milo learns to appreciate his mother, but it would have been nice to show her as capable of more than sending him to bed without television and being willing to sacrifice herself to save his life.
