1180 Thelma & Louise

[swo17]

Thelma & Louise



Two women, a turquoise Thunderbird, the ride of a lifetime. With this pop-culture landmark, screenwriter Callie Khouri and action auteur Ridley Scott rewrote the rules of the road movie, telling the story of two best friends who find themselves transformed into accidental fugitives during a weekend getaway gone wrong—leading them on a high-speed Southwest odyssey as they elude police and discover freedom on their own terms. Propelled by irresistible performances from Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis (plus Brad Pitt in a sexy, star-making turn)—and nominated for six Academy Awards, winning one for Khouri—the exhilaratingly cathartic Thelma & Louise stands as cinema's ultimate ode to ride-or-die female friendship.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, supervised by director Ridley Scott, with 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
• One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and two Blu-rays with the film and special features
• Two audio commentaries, featuring Scott, screenwriter Callie Khouri, and actors Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon
• New interviews with Scott and Khouri
• Documentary featuring Davis, Khouri, Sarandon, Scott, actors Michael Madsen, Christopher McDonald, and Stephen Tobolowsky, and other members of the cast and crew
• Boy and Bicycle (1965), Scott's first short film
• Original theatrical featurette
• Storyboards and deleted and extended scenes, including an extended ending with director's commentary
• Music video for Glenn Frey's "Part of Me, Part of You," from the film's soundtrack
• Trailers
• English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
• PLUS: Essays by critics Jessica Kiang and Rachel Syme and journalist Rebecca Traister

[zedz]

It's a shame that all the extras are corporate, not critical, ones, so there's no risk of anybody mentioning Messidor, let alone doing a fascinating compare and contrast of very American and very Swiss takes on the same story.

[beamish14]

It's a shame that all the extras are corporate, not critical, ones, so there's no risk of anybody mentioning Messidor, let alone doing a fascinating compare and contrast of very American and very Swiss takes on the same story.

God, I’d love to see Alain Tanner on DVD. It’s sad how his critical renown really dissipated over the years, and there are few recent appraisals of his work

Boy and Bicycle has been on so many different discs. See it once for the pretty cinematography and basically forget it. It would actually have been cool to get a sampling of Scott’s commercials in HD

[aox]

Messidor

I had not heard of this. How similar is it? Didn't Scott lift this?

I like T&L. It's fun typical Scott fare from that period but like so many other high-profile movies from that period the musical choices/score really bog it down for me.

[beamish14]

Messidor

I had not heard of this. How similar is it? Didn't Scott lift this?

I like T&L. It's fun typical Scott fare from that period but like so many other high-profile movies from that period the musical choices/score really bog it down for me.

I doubt that Callie Khouri or Scott have ever seen Messidor, but it does explore some similar themes pertaining to close platonic bonds between female friends. Absolutely incredible location shooting in the Swiss Alps

[Michael Kerpan]

Messidor is one Tanner film I really wanted to see that I never managed to find on DVD.

[MichaelB]

It would actually have been cool to get a sampling of Scott’s commercials in HD

Speaking from experience, stuff like this can be a rights clearance nightmare, mainly because the client owns it outright and they have different priorities from those of video labels. In particular, they're can sometimes not be especially enthusiastic about long-defunct ad campaigns being revived.

[beamish14]

It would actually have been cool to get a sampling of Scott’s commercials in HD

Speaking from experience, stuff like this can be a rights clearance nightmare, mainly because the client owns it outright and they have different priorities from those of video labels. In particular, they're can sometimes not be especially enthusiastic about long-defunct ad campaigns being revived.

Oh, I can imagine the problems with utilizing this supposedly “free” publicity

Messidor is one Tanner film I really wanted to see that I never managed to find on DVD.

The majority of his 70’s/80’s output was stuck with New Yorker Films for years. I’ve only seen it from a VHS-to-DVD transfer

A film that is somewhat closer to Thelma than Messidor is Michael Winterbottom/Frank Cottrell Boyce’s low-budget but very accomplished Butterfly Kiss, which does factor in a sexual component between the leads

[colinr0380]

I don't seem to remember Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise cutting herself and wearing chains through elaborate self-done nipple piercings as a form of religious mortification in quite the same way that Amanda Plummer does in Butterfly Kiss! Although Thelma & Louise is arguably the catalyst for the huge explosion in 90s road movies in general and would leave a big shadow over all of the on the run on the road crime films that came after it (though I think it fits in just as much as being a cliff-jumping terminal end point of the consequence-free 'sisters doing it for themselves' trend of Steel Magnolias and Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle-Stop Cafe).

Butterfly Kiss to me is much more in the trend of the serial killer road movie films that came a few years afterwards: Natural Born Killers and Kalifornia being the biggies (plus Dust Devil!) and Butterfly Kiss being the more UK based one that exchanges grand American vistas for more depressingly mundane motorway service stations. Speaking of motorway service stations, that's what makes Butterfly Kiss work well in a double bill with Antonia Bird's crime film Face, since one of its key scenes (which seems like a clear homage to the scene in Michael Mann's Thief) is a restaurant conversation that takes place in one! I could imagine one film taking place one motorway junction up from the other!

For UK-specific context, there was a mini-road movie boom around 1992-1995 or so in the UK, mostly driven by BBC Films and seemingly based on the twin 1991 trends of Thelma & Louise and Silence of the Lambs. So you got films like Butterfly Kiss or the Helen Mirren and George Costigan starring The Hawk doing the on the road serial killer thing, along with Martin Clunes' sole attempt at transferring his television stardom from the BBC's Men Behaving Badly series into features in Staggered (the fact that there's only a German-dubbed trailer for that on YouTube speaks for itself as to how successful that was! Although it was better than Lenny Henry's excruciating attempt at an American accent in True Identity the year before. Nice to see the late Sylvia Syms in the cast though! And its 'I've been stripped naked and left in the wilds of Scotland the night before my wedding and have to do a mad dash across the country to make it to the church on time' premise is kind of doing a riff on Four Weddings (as a more working class version of that idea) and the John Cleese Clockwise film from 1985 too, in which the main character there is driven progressively more insane by the obstacles thrown in the way of his simple journey to a conference). Face, coming in 1997, is near to the end of that trend and in its heist gone awry plot (and the flashy casting of Damon Albarn from Blur as the big marquee guest star prominent on all of the posters only to immediately kill his character off in the actual film! I wonder if that got a few audience members demanding refunds from the ticket office for misleading adverstising!) is sort of bridging the transition away from road movies and into the Lock, Stock laddish gangster film that would occupy the cinema for the rest of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s.

[beamish14]

I don't seem to remember Susan Sarandon in Thelma & Louise cutting herself and wearing chains through elaborate self-done nipple piercings as a form of religious mortification in quite the same way that Amanda Plummer does in Butterfly Kiss! Although Thelma & Louise is arguably the catalyst for the huge explosion in 90s road movies in general that includes all the on the run on the road crime films that came after it.

Butterfly Kiss to me is much more in the trend of the serial killer road movie films that came a few years afterwards: Natural Born Killers and Kalifornia being the biggies (plus Dust Devil!) and Butterfly Kiss being the more UK based one that exchanges grand American vistas for more depressingly mundane motorway service stations. Speaking of motorway service stations, that's what makes Butterfly Kiss work well in a double bill with Antonia Bird's crime film Face, since one of its key scenes (which seems like a clear homage to the scene in Michael Mann's Thief) is a restaurant conversation that takes place in one!

You’re absolutely right. Actually, now that I think about it, Joseph Strick’s Road Movie (1974) might be a kind of middle ground between Thelma and Butterfly Kiss, with its plot about a woman pushed to her brink while navigating a Middle America hellscape as a “lot lizard” who solicits lonely truckers

[colinr0380]

That reminds me that in terms of 70s road movie films that when I eventually saw the Wim Wenders-produced Radio On it felt as if it ironically anticipated Thelma & Louise's ending in its particularly peculiarly British way in its own climax:

Spoiler for Radio On and the ending of Thelma & Louise, if neededShow

I suppose we could think of the car as signifying England, going nowhere in particular and always about to break down. Which makes the final scene in the quarry telling. Is the protagonist planning to commit a glorious vehicular suicide, which is thwarted when the car (i.e. England) stalls at the edge of the drop? Does the way that having even the possibility of an adolescent ‘screw you’ martyr-ish Easy Rider-esque ending removed from him by the utter unreliability of the car (i.e. England) jolt him back into abandoning it and hitching a ride on the last train going nowhere?

I suppose it makes sense. With Thelma and Louise Ridley Scott had to travel to America to actually drive a car off the edge of a cliff in a transcendent moment of celebratory suicide. In Radio On the more likely outcome is that life humdrumly meanders along and is not worth making a big production over since nothing matters, or lasts…

(Does that mean that Sting was in the Brad Pitt-equivalent role in Radio On? )

[therewillbeblus]

Sting's presence is one of only two elements I even remember about Radio On, a rare unfortunate miss from Fun City Editions

[beamish14]

Sting's presence is one of only two elements I even remember about Radio On, a rare unfortunate miss from Fun City Editions

Hey, celebrity chef Paul Hollywood from the Great British Bake-Off appears in it as a teenager eating a hot dog!

[therewillbeblus]

Don't tempt me to see this thing again. It might just push me to drive right off a cliff

[omegadirective]

What a great cover!

[MichaelB]

I must catch up with Radio On at some point; I've had the BFI edition on Blu-ray for ages, and it's a pretty major milestone in late-Seventies independent British film production.

Although I'm not expecting much of a resemblance to Thelma & Louise.

[Randall Maysin Again]

This all probably goes without saying, but I always hated this movie, although for some reason I used to own it on dvd (lol). You can say that Callie Khouri can tell a story alright, and that Ridley Scott is a very...able? dexterous? director, but that wouldn't account for how this movie is always a jarringly lame, smelly mix of tones--dreadful corn-pone "humor", weird, warped gender vindictiveness (leaving aside the initial encounter that starts it all)--that works for me only in a rather sickening fashion, and Ridley Scott's technique doesn't make things any better. I dunno I always found the way he handles a camera to be sort of innately chintzy and stupid, and the cinematography here has dreadful cheddar cheese tones that I found kinda tacky and gross. Sure there's lots of ability on display in all departments, but the only thing I genuinely enjoyed was the two lead performances. Goodbye, terrible movie!

[colinr0380]

I must catch up with Radio On at some point; I've had the BFI edition on Blu-ray for ages, and it's a pretty major milestone in late-Seventies independent British film production.

Although I'm not expecting much of a resemblance to Thelma & Louise.

Radio On is actually really interesting to compare and contrast against a film like Thelma & Louise, although of course I doubt Scott had it in mind when he made his film! And Radio On is the antithesis of Ridley Scott's film in a number of key ways! That film is best seen as an outgrowth of the Wim Wenders road movies but with the irony that you just cannot do the epically mythical American tales that Wenders is (and would more directly become from the 80s onwards) obsessed with in a country the size of Britain. Because you fall off the edge if you drive too far! (Or end up stalled on the edge, doing a frustratedly half-hearted anti-Thelma & Louise!). As with the other road movie that Wenders had an influence on from afar rather than directly, the forum's notorious bête noire Border Radio, there is an inherent irony in there of the whole notion of playing at grandly American road movie tropes in a environment where they may not exactly apply. Whilst Thelma & Louise, not for better or worse but just by way of contrast, is those tropes 'played straight'. Perhaps too straight! Though that perhaps makes Thelma & Louise the modern day equivalents of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid! (And the Brad Pitt encounter the equivalent of the interlude with Katharine Ross?)

That irony itself makes Radio On feel rather Ballardian even before it directly alludes to Ballard through playing "Always Crashing In The Same Car" whilst driving past the traffic island that was the setting for Ballard's "modern Robinson Crusoe" novel Concrete Island, and the later scene of passionlessly going through the motions of playacting a romantic relationship in a car dealership. Of course Chris Petit would later tackle Ballard and roads even more directly with London Orbital.

However in exchange for myth and the romance of the freedom of the open road (the aspects that Thelma & Louise is most focusing on) instead Radio On is full of allusions to current events (the AWOL from Northern Ireland soldier encounter; the "Free Astrid Proll!" graffiti), literature and music to work your factory job by, all of which keep bringing the attempting to remain aloof to humanity main character into sociocultural contact with all those he meets on his journey, whether he wants to be involved or not! And most telling in the philosophical difference between the films is that where the transcendent suicide climaxes Ridley Scott's film (which we never see the inevitable literal downer outcome from) instead Radio On involves the brother having killed himself at the start of the film leaving the remaining estranged brother with a bequeathed mix tape to play whilst meandering aimlessly to his Bristol flat to see the scene of the crime itself, vaguely work out why his brother did what he did and then leave again unsatisfied.

(Though of course the best later companion film to Radio On is Morvern Callar, which really feels like it is influenced by the earlier film)

[therewillbeblus]

That film is best seen as an outgrowth of the Wim Wenders road movies but with the irony that you just cannot do the epically mythical American tales that Wenders is obsessed with in a country the size of Britain. Because you fall off the edge if you drive too far!

This is a really interesting reading, and appropriately succinct for such a(n intentionally?) vapid film. I appreciate that it essentially takes the blueprint of Kings of the Road, which I think is Wenders' masterpiece, and drains it of any romanticism found in the details of the banal excursion to reveal the emptiness that follows one wherever they go - though I'm not sure that makes it a good movie! It does, however, allow the film to fit in with the thematic tissue of Fun City Editions' label temperament, which I've long believed to have an underlying connective ethos unexplored.

[colinr0380]

I would say that it is something that makes me very curious to see that short film Boy and Bicycle when I get this release, to see what kind of approach an early Ridley Scott 'meandering road movie' takes to its UK setting!

To get back to Thelma & Louise, with this film and Bad Timing (and I seem to remember his character in Clockers! Though I would need to revisit that one to be more confident) Harvey Keitel became the master of that weirdly specific character role niche of playing a police investigator who complicitly understands and empathises with all of the motivations of the people he is chasing down (perhaps too much so to remain an effective officer of the law!), but is unable to translate that into actually effectively defusing a situation, instead just reduced to watching on impotently from the sidelines!

[swo17]

The short is also on BFI's release of Loving Memory

[zedz]

Messidor is the same basic plot as this film: two women meet up and go on the run together, flipping over to the wrong side of the law after standing up to a sexual assault. The big difference is that a road movie in Switzerland is claustrophobic, circular and clearly doomed, whereas one in the US plays into a long history of heroic rebel narratives.

I find it hard to believe nobody involved in this film was aware of Tanner’s. It wasn’t a particularly obscure film in the 1980s, and the plot overlap is substantial.

[Michael Kerpan]

I certainly remember HEARING about Messidor when it was new -- even if I never managed to see it.

[colinr0380]

Hearing zedz's account of Messidor (but having never seen that film) makes me wonder if it could have had any influence on Baise Moi also?

[flyonthewall2983]

Wonder if Ridley Scott talks in his new interview about Adrian Biddle, who was the DP on the Apple commercial as well as Aliens and The Princess Bride (making this the 2nd Criterion for him as well, posthumously). Scott is hit or miss with me but when he hits it is usually solid, as it was in this instance as it was a major hit at the box office.