Thelma

Year 18, Day 125 - 5/5/26 - Movie #5,322

BEFORE: Well, after Star Wars Day comes the Revenge of the Fifth, also known as Cinco de Mayo. I had realized a bit too late this would have been a great place to drop in the "Machete" films, since I've got Danny Trejo carrying over from "Zootopia 2" to today's film. (He's uncredited, but the IMDB swears he's in there somewhere. I may have to speed through the film again to double-check.). And sure, I could have fit both "Machete" films in here, except for two things - one being that I don't have enough slots before we have to leave for North Carolina, so I'd have to double-up, and the second thing is that "Machete" is not playing on cable right now, and it's not streaming anywhere either. I could pay for it on Amazon or YouTube, but I think maybe I'll just add it to my someday/maybe list and try to circle back, like maybe when I finally watch the "Spy Kids" movies, which are also on the list but I've got priorities and a back-log. 

OK, so "Machete" is out for now, but last night I watched that other film that supposedly had Danny Trejo in it, and well, now I don't think he's there. At all. Wikipedia says he's in that movie, IMDB says he's in that movie, but both sources could be wrong. I went back and scanned through the whole film at double-speed, and it's a no-go. Sure, I COULD just proceed with that review and tell myself he's there and I just didn't see him, but in my mind, that's the end of the chain. I can't do it, I can't put that out there in the world if I don't believe Danny Trejo is in that movie. What are my options here? I don't want there to be a break, not now, but this puts Mothers Day and the rest of the year in jeopardy...

UPDATE: I'm going to backtrack to "Zootopia 2" and look for another link. There were dozens of people in that film, that means hundreds of other linking opportunities, probably another film on my list could serve as a better connection, all I need it to do is link up with one of the next five movies, and get me to Mothers Day in a similar number of steps. But that's incredibly unlikely, damn near imposs- oh, wait, there's one. I can use June Squibb as a link, watch this movie "Thelma", that gets me to another recent movie that I really, really want to see, and as a bonus, it kind of resolves the outro to my Doc Block, because I had two directions to go, and now I'll only have one. 

That makes the Danny Trejo thing kind of burned toast, it was a minor setback that prevented a major disaster down the road, which I just couldn't see. I'm back on track, and the only loser here is really Kelsey Grammer, I was planning to watch four of his films, but that got cut down to two because of lack of slots, and also those films were NOT available to stream anywhere, and now his tally goes down to zero, because following that road would have contained a break in the chain, I'm sure of it even if the IMDB disagrees with me. And Mr. Trejo, if you're listening, it's time to take "The Big Empty" off of your filmography, because you're just not in that movie.

THE PLOT: When 93-year old Thelma Post gets duped by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson, she sets out on a treacherous quest across the city to reclaim what was taken from her. 

AFTER: I think I'm going to cut this one some slack tonight, because it really came to my rescue when I learned that the Danny Trejo link I had planned just wasn't going to cut it. But THIS is why there are over 600 films on my lists at any given time - in case of emergency, I can break the glass, pull out the scalpel and perform a type of surgery, cutting out the clot and a little bit more of the artery, so I can transplant in another couple of films as a sort of stent to keep things flowing. 

This is roughly the same plot as "The Beekeeper", if you remember that one, where Jason Statham tracked down a scam artist who had cleared his landlord's bank accounts, and he made that person's life hell until he got the money back. Impossible in real life, more than likely, but, you know, it's wish fulfillment time when you watch a movie. Here elderly Thelma doesn't even need Jason Statham's help, she tracks down the phone scammers all on her own. Well, mostly on her own, she needs the help - and the scooter - of her friend Ben, who lives in a retirement village. We used to call them "nursing homes" but that was deemed too pejorative, as not everyone in them needs nursing care, even if some do. Then came "assisted living" which was not quite good enough either, because it stresses the fact that old people need assistance, it even implies that without that assistance they might stop living. So now we have "care homes" and "residential care communities" and "retirement residences". Hey, whatever makes you feel comfortable there. 

My family's elders have a long record of going into such facilities, but also aging out of them, which could be somewhat unheard of. My mother's mother moved in with my family when I was pre-teen, my parents had two rooms added over the garage as a sort of elder apartment, and some nights I slept in the extra bed there to keep an eye on her. After she died my father's mother moved in, she'd been in assisted living because she liked the sense of community, and going to church and playing cards with friends, but she got to a point where she wasn't going out much any more. During COVID my parents moved out of their house and into a residential care community, they were there for two or three years and we'd drive up and visit and bring them dinner on Thanksgiving, but the place changed hands and wasn't offering as much medical care any more, so they moved in with my sister. 

Dementia is another thing I know about, because my mother has lost the ability to remember recent things, though she does remember a lot about the past if you start asking her about it. But with that comes a desire to get out of my sister's house and return to her house in Massachusetts, or more lately she's been saying she needs to get back to HER mother's house in time for dinner. We correct her and remind her that her mother passed away years ago, but five minutes later she starts saying it again. Old people get mentally stuck sometimes and can't move past certain ideas. With any luck that will be my problem someday, if I should live so long, past 80 or so, when I can move into adult care myself, and just mentally lose myself in my memories... But hey, the food is sometimes good and there will be jigsaw puzzles and I can watch all the TV I want, I can also watch every movie again as if it's a new one. Wouldn't it be great to watch "Star Wars" again for the first time? JK.  

Anyway, Thelma spends a lot of time with Daniel, her grandson, she doesn't have too many friends her own age, as most of them are deceased. But she has a few, and whenever she meets another old person in the wild, they have to stop and talk to each other and see if they have any friends in common. But one day she gets a call from Daniel, and he says he's been in a car accident, and he's being questioned by the police because he hit a pregnant woman. The call is interrupted by another one from the police station, demanding bail money and giving her an address to mail it to. Well, there are obvious red flags there, however this is a common enough scam that could be used to get elderly people (or anyone, really) to send money. These days they're even using A.I. voices to duplicate people's real ones, so I'd be wary of any phone conversation or even videos you make on social media, because anyone could take a recording of your voice from your YouTube or TikTok posts and harvest enough words to make an A.I. version that could say ANYTHING to your relatives by phone. Also, any call or e-mail you get from a loved one claiming to have been arrested or involved in an accident with instructions to send money ASAP should be considered suspicious enough to investigate thoroughly. 

NITPICK POINT: Also, even an elderly person should know better than to send a stack of cash through the MAIL - that's been illegal for decades. It would have made more sense here to send a postal money order or certified check, then Thelma would have a receipt for it, in addition to an address to send it to. 

But here, she only has the address, thankfully she remembers that she threw the paper with the address on it away at the post office, and she gets back there before they empty their trash. Then she just needs the scooter from Ben and a gun from her friend Mona's stash, and she's ready to go get her money back. However, she kind of grossly underestimates the time it's going to take to get there on a Rascal scooter, it takes all day and it's getting dark out when she arrives. There were probably more efficient ways to get there, but also older people don't know how to use Uber or Lyft, so that tracks. The address turns out to be just a mail services store, so. a bunch of P.O. boxes, but she's prepared to wait - what else has she got to do? Old people can also get very focused on tasks, her daughter admits that when Thelma sets her mind to something, she won't eat, she won't sleep until the errand is done. 

The clip at the end of the director's grandmother, having a conversation during a drive that mirrors one Thelma had in the movie suggests that there IS (or was) a real-life Thelma, so how much of this story is based on a true incident? Wikipedia tells me that the director's grandmother was the target of a phone scam, but in real life her family intervened before she sent any money. I've seen first-hand how easily old people fall for these things, my old boss got scammed by a fake call from his bank alerting him to some suspicious transactions, they asked him to confirm his identity by giving them his password and PIN, and he was only too eager to comply. It's just that easy - maybe I'm in the wrong business. This is part of why I quit my job of 31 years. 

The scammer here runs an antique business that has fallen on hard times, and he's resorted to stealing money from old people to stay in business. Yeah, that also reminds me why I quit - my boss was deep in debt to people who worked on his most recent film, and I started to get the feeling he was never going to pay them. Also some people interested in collecting his art, he seemed to be stringing them along without ever delivering the art they wanted - also, his asking price for making music videos or commissioned illustrations seemed to rise whenever he needed to pay bills, he didn't have set rates for doing anything, budgets for things were based on how much money he owed the landlord and credit card company at the moment. That's price gouging, and I refused to be part of it. 

Anyway, more power to Thelma, and honestly I don't think I've ever seen a reverse heist pulled off in a movie before, except for "The Beekeeper", as I mentioned before. But other than that, this is totally original and the kind of heartwarming movie we need right now. Let's hear it for the burned toast that made me move this one to the top of the list! 

Directed by Josh Margolin

Also starring Fred Hechinger (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Richard Roundtree (last seen in "Speed Racer"), Parker Posey (last seen in "The Eye"), Clark Gregg (last seen in "G20"), Malcolm McDowell (last seen in "Sr."), Nicole Byer (last heard in "Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken"), Quinn Beswick, Coral Pena (last seen in "Carrie Pilby"), Aidan Fiske, Bunny Levine (last seen in "A Thousand Words"), Ruben Rabasa (last seen in "Jack and Jill"), Hilda Boulware, Chase Kim (last seen in "The Giant Mechanical Man"), Sheila Korsi (last seen in "Fool's Paradise"), Annie O'Donnell (last seen in "Jersey Boys"), Zoe Worth (last seen in "20th Century Women"), David Giuliani (last seen in "Sandy Wexler"), Annie Korzen (last seen in "Stardust Memories"), Ivy Jones, Sandra Lee Gimpel, 

with archive footage of Tom Cruise (last seen in "Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning")

RATING: 6 out of 10 people in line at the post office