{"id":3182,"date":"2024-11-08T06:05:00","date_gmt":"2024-11-08T14:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/?p=3182"},"modified":"2024-11-08T06:05:00","modified_gmt":"2024-11-08T14:05:00","slug":"my-turn-as-a-film-critic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/2024\/11\/08\/my-turn-as-a-film-critic\/","title":{"rendered":"My Turn as a Film Critic"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This past weekend, in order to dodge the barrage of endlessly repetitive political commercials, Bill and I rented a movie.  It\u2019s called Thelma<\/em>, and it\u2019s nothing at all like that much earlier film Thelma and Louise<\/em>.  In this one, the only actual car chase takes place on a three-wheeled, two passenger cart. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wait, let me guess.  You haven\u2019t even heard of Thelma<\/em>?  I\u2019m not surprised.  I had wanted to see the movie in a theater, but it came and went in the blink of an eye, and I never got a chance.  It was buried under a rash of summertime dystopian superhero nonsense\u2014in other words movies filled with not much dialogue but loaded with ear-splitting rounds of automatic gunfire.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s some gunfire in Thelma, <\/em>too\u2014five shots total from an antique revolver! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So why did the movie come and go in such a hurry?  For one thing, it\u2019s a movie about an old lady\u2014a ninety-four year old lady\u2014actually played by a ninety-four year old actress, June Squibb, in her first-ever starring role.  Wait, you\u2019ve never heard of June Squibb?  Turns out she\u2019s been an actress for a very long time.  Her first appearance on Broadway was in the original stage production of Gypsy<\/em> in 1959!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look at her list of credits, you\u2019ll see she\u2019s been in lots of movies over the years\u2014movies you\u2019ve probably seen\u2014but you don\u2019t remember her, right?  That\u2019s because she was always in the background.  Kathy Bates\u2019s character in the new Matlock <\/em>series, is right. Older women are invisible\u2014most especially to Hollywood screenwriters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But back to Thelma<\/em>.  The story is about an old woman who is scammed out of $10,000 by a kid masquerading as her grandson and claiming he needs the money to get out of jail.  Thelma, with the help of her tech-savvy grandson, sets out to get her money back no matter what!  (By the way, these kinds of grandson scams happen.  Don\u2019t fall for one of them without knowing for sure your grandson IS involved!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From my point of view, it didn\u2019t hurt that the grandson was a tall, lanky, tech-savvy kid with red hair and a short red beard.  All of that reminded me of my grandson, Colt, who during the Den of Iniquity <\/em>ordeal by podcasts, saved me from missing an interview by helping me locate the required search engine, Chrome, on my computer.  I was looking for it in the C\u2019s form Chrome when I should have been looking in the G\u2019s for Google Chrome.  Who knew?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The movie\u2019s pacing and especially the soundtrack are on the money, and the characters are believable.  Thelma walks like an old lady because she is<\/em> an old lady. The film acknowledges the fact that, at some point, when you fall you really can\u2019t get up\u2014without something or someone to help you.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sound-tract captures the absolute silence left in a home when a beloved spouse is no longer present as well as the reality that, for many people, the first sound they hear each day, is the beep in their ears when they turn on their hearing aids.  But most of all, the story shows the incredible value of those longterm friendships, ones that come complete with a lifetime\u2019s worth of precious memories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One scene that really tickled me, was the one that featured Thelma\u2019s first hair-raising test-drive of that three-wheeled cart. Years ago, my best friend\u2019s widowed mother, coincidentally also named Thelma, moved from Arizona to Florida to live with her daughter.  On her first trip to a grocery store, Thelma decided to take a ride on one of the available carts. She was able to start it just fine, but stopping was another issue entirely.  She ended up taking out an entire end-cap of canned goods, and I believe she was permanently banned from using carts from that moment on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what I liked most about the movie was the enduring connections between Thelma and the people around her, most especially the one between her and her grandson.  That one really spoke to me, and I have an idea it\u2019ll speak to many of my readers as well. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past weekend, in order to dodge the barrage of endlessly repetitive political commercials, Bill and I rented a movie.  It\u2019s called Thelma, and it\u2019s nothing at all like that much earlier film Thelma and Louise.  In this one, the only actual car chase takes place on a three-wheeled, two passenger cart.  Wait, let me guess.  You […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[81],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants-and-raves"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-Pk","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3182"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3183,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3182\/revisions\/3183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}