Thelma Louise

At first, Geena Davis denies that she has an 8-foot chicken roosting in her living room. "Chicken?" she asks, eyes widening into orbs of Lillian Gish innocence. "What chicken?" She pauses, then comes clean. "OK, it's true!" she says with a laugh, and then explains. It's inflatable rubber, she saw it while driving by an antique store and "had to have it. But man, do you have to print that?" Her chin juts out with mock defiance. "Not that I'm embarrassed I have an 8-foot chicken in my house, mind you. " Not that she's embarrassed by much of anything.

Alot of women love Thelma & Louise. It doesn't much matter who they are or where they stand on feminism, white males or housework. They just love it. Judith Shapiro is provost of Bryn Mawr College. Gypsy is a couch dancer at the Fantasy Showbar in Mount Ephraim. Both women like the same things about the film: the part where Geena Davis (as Thelma) holds up the convenience store, and also the ending, where Davis and Susan Sarandon (Louise) decide that the only way out is - out. "If you have a goal in life, go for it!"

There's a great moment in the new movie Thelma & Louise when Thelma, played by Geena Davis, is about to lock a state trooper in the trunk of his cruiser out in the middle of nowhere: "You be sweet to your wife. My husband wasn't sweet to me and look how I turned out," Thelma warns him. The hapless cop is but one of the men who get put away - literally or figuratively - in this darkly comic epic about best friends Thelma and Louise (played with fine, sad bravery by Susan Sarandon)

Susan Sarandon is talking about next month's Oscar nominations, specifically the one she's a shoo-in to get for her performance in the new film Lorenzo's Oil. "So they tell me," she says without a hint of sentiment. But she's not ordering the dress just yet, mind you. "I heard I was a shoo-in for Bull Durham, too, but I didn't even get a nomination," she says with a shrug. She figures maybe one day, though, she'll win one of those gold babies. "Hey," she says laughing, "in this business, if you live long enough, they have to give you one because you've survived.

In Johnny Suede, Brad Pitt wears a hip '50s wardrobe and a pompadour that's literally and figuratively over the top. Although his character exudes cool, he's a rebel without a cause - or a clue. In A River Runs Through It, the actor is in '20s threads, wears a rascally grin and goes fishing for trout with his brother and their preacher dad. Knee- deep in a Montana river, the three men can hardly distinguish between fly- fishing and religion. In the staid Mayfair Regent Hotel, Pitt - wearing a scruffy beard and longish, slicked-back hair wet from the shower - resembles neither the woozy hipster of Tom DiCillo's offbeat Johnny Suede nor the hell-bent, hard-drinking young man of Robert Redford's diligently poetic River.

"Thelma & Louise" is a road movie with a distinctly female twist. I've seen plenty of movies about outlaws on the run, but I can't think of a single picture that includes a scene in which one of the bandits acquires the ability to achieve orgasm. Or one in which the outlaws are so noticeably, well, braless. Just one of the many interesting features of "Thelma & Louise," which (along with "La Femme Nikita") constitutes a fairly persuasive argument for more liberal casting policies in macho-type pictures.

Thelma & Louise, the inspired Ridley Scott road movie that opened last weekend to solid box office and rave reviews, is to the '90s what Easy Rider was to the '60s: an existential romp across two-lane blacktop that embraces key socio-political issues of the day. The themes of Dennis Hopper's 1969 hippie odyssey were bound with the counterculture movement: peace, love, drugs and the freedom to be weird. In Thelma & Louise, the issue is a different sort of freedom - the freedom to be a woman in a man's world.

It sounds like a movie plot: A New Jersey beautician and her girlfriend are accused of killing the beautician's abusive boyfriend, then dumping his body and attempting a coverup. If it sounds like a movie, maybe that's because a similar plot has already been filmed. No, not "Thelma & Louise" - try "Mortal Thoughts," another 1991 flick in which women fought back, with deadly results. While the Alan Rudolph murder mystery never attained the box-office success of "Thelma & Louise," it appears to have more in common with the case of Margaret "Peggy" Kosmin and Tammy Ann Molewicz, the two Medford, N.J., women accused of killing Kosmin's former boyfriend, William Kelly.

A year of sweeping change in Hollywood and a slate of unusually provocative mainstream movies have made this year's Oscar race unusually difficult to figure. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announces the nominees tomorrow, a lot of intriguing questions will be answered. Last year, for instance, was a watershed for women and blacks in American cinema - will the Academy recognize these trends with nominations? No movie created a greater stir than Oliver Stone's "JFK.

A true detective, declares Kathleen Turner in the truly defective V.I. Warshawski, has to go beyond the obvious. And, she might have added, so does a detective movie. It may have seemed to the makers of V.I. Warshawski that they were venturing beyond the obvious by adding to a summer film season that has put gender on the agenda. Just as Thelma & Louise drives through and over the hitherto jealously guarded male turf of the road movie, Turner ventures into the traditionally man's world of jaded machismo and five-alarm burn-out that is the private-eye movie.

Mad Money , the distaff Ocean's Eleven , stars human seesaw Diane Keaton, earthly balance beam Queen Latifah, and the otherworldly whirligig Katie Holmes as a trio of Federal Reserve Bank employees who stage an inside job. None dare call it "stealing. " As the cash they pinch is scheduled for shredding, they prefer to call it "recycling. " A likable and completely dispensable heist film starring two of the deftest comedians working (Keaton and Latifah), the film from Callie Khouri is itself an American retread of the British caper telefilm Hot Money . Khouri, still best known for her Oscar-winning screenplay Thelma & Louise , opens her movie with arresting images.

Cars in movies are like stars in movies. We don't gasp when extraordinary cars do extraordinary things. We cheer when ordinary cars do them. Consider the turbocharged Mitsubishi Spyder in 2 Fast 2 Furious as it zooms from zero to 120 in 10 seconds. Yawn. Now behold the itty-bitty Mini Coopers in The Italian Job as they snake into drainage pipes and subway tunnels. Yowza! A muscle car breaking 100 is like Arnold Schwarzenegger hoisting 200. That's what they're built for. A minuscule car boldly zipping where no vehicle has gone before is like Reese Witherspoon scaling Everest in spike heels.

In Black Hawk Down, the $90 million Sony Pictures reenactment of the battle on the streets of Mogadishu, director Ridley Scott has delivered a challenging new form of war movie that avoids making political statements. With praise from critics and a marketing campaign that plays up the heroism of the young American troops, the harrowingly straightforward depiction of an Army mission gone bad has strong box-office prospects. And it's clear that producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Columbia Pictures smell Academy Award nominations (Scott's work debuted in New York and Los Angeles last month in order to qualify)

The best movie catchphrase of the year - better than Harrison Ford growling "Get off my plane" in Air Force One, better than Mike Myers cooing "Shagadelic, baby" in Austin Powers - is delivered by Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. Unfortunately, it's a three-word declaration of defiant triumph that cannot be printed in this newspaper. Trust me, though - it's a breakthrough moment, wherein Moore's Lt. Jordan O'Neil, the first woman given the chance to train for the elite, eat-dirt Navy SEALs, becomes, in a sense (or a couple of senses, actually)

Having examined the many entries for the official Brad Pitt Movie Quiz, we can now understand why Pitt needed armed weightlifters to keep fans out of his hair during the "Twelve Monkeys" shoot. Fanatical devotees swamped the Daily News with entries that displayed a keen - you might say disturbing - interest in the young career of young Brad. Pitt-o-philes had little trouble with our quiz (winners get a "Legends of the Fall" poster), often augmenting their answers with supplemental Pitt trivia.

"Boys on the Side" combines the sisterly, road-movie solidarity of "Thelma & Louise" with the soapy pathos of "Beaches" in one mighty attempt to create a women's movie colossus for the '90s. The movie takes us on the road with an unwed mother (Drew Barrymore), a lesbian (Whoopi Goldberg) and . . . well, I can't say, but it's Mary-Louise Parker playing a character with a secret that places her (like her pals) near the bottom of Newt Gingrich's list of funding priorities. The story begins as ultra-square white girl Robin (Parker)

The two weeping women apologized for the slaying of William Kelly. Their lawyers called it a desperate act to stop a violent man. The psychiatrist called it a classic battered-woman case. The judge didn't buy it. When it came to be Superior Court Judge Isaiah Steinberg's turn to address the crowded Camden courtroom about the so-called Thelma and Louise killing, he did not mince words. "It was cool and calculated," Steinberg said yesterday - and sentenced Medford hairdresser Peggy Kosmin and her friend Tammy Molewicz to each serve at least eight years of a 25-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter.

She did it. No, she did it. In the end, it didn't really matter. Yesterday, two Medford, N.J., women admitted in court that they planned to kill an abusive ex-lover, but each fingered their ex-pal as the triggerwoman. Their admissions and fingerpointing came during a Camden County court hearing in which the women each pleaded guilty to aggravated manslaughter. Margaret "Peggy" Kosmin, 33, and Tammy Molewicz, 26 - dubbed "Thelma & Louise" after the popular female buddy movie - blamed each other for the shooting death of William Kelly, 31, in December.

William Kelly Jr., a hard-drinking South Philadelphia drifter, was murdered in Medford on Dec. 28. No one disputes that. Not the judge. Not the lawyers. Not even the two defendants. But yesterday, after two lengthy, tearful confessions and a plea bargain that could result in prison terms of as little as four years, one question remained: Who did it? Medford hairdresser Margaret "Peggy" Kosmin and one-time friend Tammy Molewicz pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill Kelly, 31, after they bailed him out of Camden County Jail two days after last Christmas.

Let's agree on one thing real quick. Many men are total jerks. Some of them are are brutish, self-centered, hyper-aggressive total jerks. Naturally, the way things work in our great nation, large numbers of women wish to emulate them. Next time you see somebody driving like a total maniac, it's an even bet there's big hair behind the wheel. Yes, one of the byproducts of gender equity is that young women now drive as idiotically as young men. Progress can be painful. Take last year's dubious heroine, Lorena Bobbit.