Thelma was one of this year's Sundance favorites, and it's written and directed by Josh Margolin (his feature film debut) and stars a terrific June Squibb (Nebraska), Fred Hechinger (whom some of you may know from White Lotus, season 1), the inimitable Parker Posey (Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show), and none other than Richard Roundtree (the one, the only Shaft!). 

Squibb plays Thelma, a 93-year old woman who falls for a phone scam and finds all of her savings have been stolen. Determined and undeterred -- and with a little help from her tech-savvy grandson (Hechinger) -- she sets off to find the scammer and get justice, a sort of mission impossible, but this time helmed by an unlikely new kind of action hero sporting white hair and a scooter. The film functions as both a send up of action films and a love letter to them, and the presence of Richard Roundtree, in a sort of tribute to his iconic character of Shaft, is a reminder of the rich history of the action film. Squibb throws herself into the role, even doing most of her own stunts, leading director Margolin to worry a bit for her safety and to note, “I think Tom Cruise would be proud.”  

The stunts are only half the fun, however, as the film also develops the comedy beautifully in any number of laugh-out-loud moments, often using tropes from action films to superb comic effect. The warm relationship between grandma (Squibb) and grandson (Hechinger), too, is tenderly and truthfully portrayed, perhaps in part because the film is based on the real life experiences of the director and his own grandma.  Thelma is nothing short of a good time at the movies and perhaps the perfect film to kick our Pacific Northwest summer into gear. 

Wildcat is the newest film from actor-turned-director Ethan Hawke, and it is also a rich, deeply researched and deeply felt passion project for the Hawke family, as it also stars Hawke’s daughter, Maya Hawke, in a brilliant multi-character role. And while any film lover will find much to admire in the film -- the brilliance of the acting from Hawke, the engaging complexity of the multi-layered narrative -- it’s also perhaps the film fans of writer Flannery O’Connor have been waiting for. It tells the story of O’Connor’s own fascinating life, detailing her religious and philosophical grapplings, her fraught relationship with her mother, and her disabling illness, while also depicting the marvelous, disturbing, and probing fictional stories that O’Connor fans know and love so well.  

The film, as such, is both a biopic and a literary adaptation, weaving O’Connor’s life, her essays, and her stories together, fact and fiction speaking to one another in elegant counterpoint. And it’s the Hawkes’ deep familiarity with O’Connor’s work that proves their justification for such cinematic intermingling of fact and fiction. As the film’s epigraph, a quotation from one of O’Connor’s essays, demonstrates, “I'm always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality.” 

Wildcat is a wonderfully ambitious film, and if every single element doesn’t always land, it nonetheless captures glimpses of O’Connor, the complicated, brilliant person that she was, as well as something of what it’s like to plunge into any of O’Connor’s stories and find a new vision of our reality there. 

Our second and last special event this week is the grand finale of our Summer Camp! Pride Series: Showgirls, Paul Verhoeven’s now-classic film, celebrated by camp-lovers everywhere.  Co-curator Chris E. Vargas will be on hand to give us a fabulous introduction to the film, but for a taste of the unique enticements of Showgirls as a camp film, I’d recommend the essay “Funny, Stupid, Dirty, and Perfect: Why Showgirls May Be the Perfect Camp Movie.” It’s an excellent read: writer Naveen Kumar offers the “8 reasons why the 1995 movie may go down in history as the Platonic ideal of camp” and details why, while the film bombed at the box office and may have ruined Elizabeth Berkley’s, career, “Fans wasted little time reclaiming the movie as a camp favorite, relishing its over-the-top drama and flashy sizzle, [and] Showgirls became a queer touchstone.”  Join us on Thursday at 7:45 pm for the camp-sizzle of a lifetime! 

Finally, one last note: My newsletter will be on hiatus next week and then back on Friday, July 5. A number of us on the Pickford staff will have the distinct pleasure of attending the Independent Film Exhibition Conference in Chicago next week, June 24-28, where we’ll be connecting with staff from independent cinemas and festivals across the nation as well as many others in the independent film world. It should be a wonderful whirlwind of a week, a space for sharing ideas, discussing the challenges of the industry together, and celebrating a mutual love of cinema. 

See you at the movies, friends! 

Melissa